Vision and Chopin

Benjamin Zander is a man whose utmost passion is classical music. Yet his profession is to not make a sound. As a conductor of orchestras he doesn't play a single note. Yet he taught me something very profound about leadership. He said, "He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful." This idea is me as student council president. The very next sentence he says is just as awesome. "I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people." These two sentences fit my job description so well. This is what I have been trying to do. At some conscious level I've always known that my job was to enable the council members. To give them power. I think I'm succeeding. Last week Jessica said something that made me grin from ear to ear. She said that one of the strengths of council, one of the things that we do well, is to think outside of the box. That we are not so locked into how things have been done that we can't do something new. This has been a vision of mine for the feel of council from the very beginning. I knew that the things I did and said would have a great impact on the environment of the council. I intentionally did things to try and create an atmosphere of thinking creatively, taking risks, and doing new things. According to Jessica, I succeeded. 

It's not over yet though. We're only in the middle of the music and the conductor cannot just step down because his musicians are performing wonderfully. Despite my successes with council, I can still share vision. I have let that lapse while helping others with details of their various projects. I need to do better at being a one-buttocked leader who is thinking about the long line. I can do better. I haven't yet looked for the light in the council members' eyes to see if I'm doing my job right. Each note fits into the long line. Each council member and each project also fits into the long line. It's my job to help you see it, understand it, and enjoy it. It is a possibility I can live into.

Things are amazing

Neil Pasricha did a good job of reminding me just how awesome my life is at this very moment. Honestly, today has been a pretty down day for me. Things with our old landlord aren't progressing. The situation from the end of July is still unresolved despite all our efforts and entirely due to the landlord's belligerence and escalation. It feels as if we are back at square one with no one to help us. Which is probably true now that the constables office is no longer involved. Watching this talk helped remind me of two things in particular. One, life is made up of so many little awesome things. Clean socks everyday is a little thing that brings me happiness. It is simple, but still wonderful and brings a smile to my face. There are so many of those things around me at this very moment. Blue ink ballpoint pens that click and leather journals, access to nearly any song that I want to listen to (which still amazes me at least once a week. It was torture as a little kid in love with music trying to get through to the radio station to request a song and hoping that they would play it), cold water in my fridge and a clean cup to drink it from. After taking a moment to reflect on these small things that bring joy, I think about the other amazing things that make up my world around me. A touchpad phone and tablet. Truly awesome that I live in an age when that technology exists and is affordable to the consumer and not just the insanely rich. I got my phone for a penny. This was/is awesome. I am in a great school and will be graduating in a month. Which is incredibly scary, but also amazing. Then we get on to the big things that are awesome like my wife, my family, and the many good friends that I have. Add in democracy and the gospel and my life is epicly awesome. (Is there a correct way to spell epic in an adverb form?)
The second thing I was reminded of is probably the most important one. I have a choice. I can choose to be miserable or I can choose to move forward. God has given us agency and the control of ourselves. Our choice is the great focal point of our happiness. If we choose to be happy we can become happy. I like that Neil said we should still grieve because that is important. Yet we can move forward and be happy. We have 100 years or less in this life and man was made so that he might have joy. Let's not choose otherwise.

The Dangerous Assumption of Personal Infallibility

What happens when we allow ourselves the possibility of being wrong? Why is it that we have such a hard time acknowledging our own fallibility? Kathryn Schulz said in her TED talk that we are conditioned to believe that the way to be successful is to never be wrong and that if we are wrong it means there is something wrong with us. Getting things wrong is fundamental to our humanity. So honestly admit to the possibility that you could be wrong about something right now.

I think that when we admit to this possibility it pushes us to find out. We seek more information. It leads us to discover, create, learn, and become better. It is much easier to accept wrongness and deal with it when I discover it through my own seeking rather than having it shoved in my face by life.

At one point, Kathryn said that it can be dangerous to trust too much in the feeling of being on the correct side. We feel like we are on solid ground right up until we realize that we are wrong. I agree with her that we need a more reliable guide than our own self-assuredness. Yet, she never mentioned what that more reliable guide should be. What should be our guide? There are three guides that are incredibly reliable when used together. There is revelation from God, both personally and through the scriptures/prophets, our own faculties for reason and emotion, and also empirical evidence in the world. I try to use all of these in the correct balance. I must open myself to them though and admit that I might be wrong. It is easy to rely too heavily on our own faculties and block out or disregard the other methods of getting knowledge. I ahve to realize that it’s okay to say “Maybe I’m wrong.” Things might not work out how I imagine, but that doesn’t mean I should try. Something else might happen and that’s okay.

We fail so that we can succeed

Have you ever been so afraid of failing at something that you never bothered to try? Why do we let fear of failure stop us from trying? What will happen if we fail? How will we feel if we don't try? What will happen if we succeed? Is the reward worthwhile? Can we afford to avoid failure? What is life if we only attempt those things at which we know we will succeed? What is success without failure?

These are the questions filling my mind after re-watching JK Rowling's talk on the fringe benefits of failure. I am particularly interested in the question about whether or not we can afford to avoid failure. Rowling talks about the benefits that she received as part of failure, one of which being the stripping away of the inessential. Failure was so uncomfortable and unpleasant it forced her to succeed. It seemed that she could not let failure be the end of the road for her. Success was the end and if she failed than she wasn't done working yet. My successes are more rewarding after having to work hard and overcome the obstacles. I can get the same grade in two classes, get the same grade on two tests, but it is the one which was more difficult for me that gives me the most joy at the end.

I am reminded of a quote from Batman Begins. "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up." Why do we fail? So that we can succeed. Almost always our failure will show us a weakness that can be strengthened or some way to improve upon our plan, our product, or ourself. The things that we can and should learn from our failures will be invaluable to our successes. We can learn them no other way. The things learned from failure will also be invaluable to us personally as a way to come to know ourselves and understand our humanity.

Getting Started with Sinek and Sivers

It was during the Summer that I first started watching TED talks and this talk by Simon Sinek is one of the first and most influential that I saw. It caused a major paradigm shift for me and began to change how I worked with people and led people. His phrase “people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it” has shaped the way I approach problems and ideas. Shortly after watching this and learning about the Golden Circle I had a chance to put it into practice. I began developing the idea of using social media, specifically Twitter, within the College Council. I knew that as I was going through this idea I had to articulate why I was doing it and why I was using Twitter instead of Facebook. I started with the what in this case and had to work out the why to see if the what was worth attempting. There was opposition that helped me refine my why/how/what. Once I finally got to the point where I was presenting this idea to the other members I intentionally focused on telling them the why first. This made all the difference. Their reaction was very positive. There was such a difference in their reaction to the Twitter proposal compared with the reaction of our council advisor simply because I started with the why. Focusing on the why also helps me as a leader be open to other ideas. The ‘what’ that I come up with may not be the best one, but that’s okay. It is the why that really matters. The why is the most important part. The why has true impact on people, society, and the world. The what is a mostly vehicle for the why. Derek Sivers: How to start a movement
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action

+TED

This year for the Humanities College Student Council we are primarlily using TED talks as our curriculum instead of some textbook or book on leadership. This was a joint decision Cathryn and I each sort of arrived at independently of each other yet at the same time. I started watching TED talks this Summer and really loved thm. They inspired so many ideas in me and expanded my horizon. As part of our TED curriculum we are to create a personal leadership development blog where we can share our own thoughts on the TED talks and what we are doing in the council. This blog is for our own thoughts and the only limitaion/guideline is that they should be about 150 words in length.