Overview of Chapter 1 of “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth” by John C. Maxwell

Posted: September 5, 2016 in Quintessential Leader Basics
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Striving to become a quintessential leader and growing spiritually, mentally, and emotionally into the character, integrity, and knowledge that being a quintessential leader requires is not optional for us.

15 Invaluable Laws of Growth - John C. MaxwellThe 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth by John C. Maxwell offers some very practical insights into both the mechanics of growth and the obstacles that we must overcome that hinder us or stop us from growing.

In this series of posts, I will be summarizing the main points of each chapter – each chapter covers a particular law of growth – in hopes that each of us will be more consciously aware of our need to grow, as well as the things that can stand in the way of our growth as we strive to become quintessential leaders in all areas of our lives.

Chapter 1 covers the Law of Intentionality. 

Too often we live our lives focused on increased activity – doing more – assuming that growth automatically be a by-product, instead of living our lives focused on growth and improvement in who we are, what we are, and what we think, say, and do.

This chapter addresses the need for us to intend to grow first and lists the growth gap traps – the erroneous believes we have that keep us from growing – that we must overcome (not all will apply to everyone, but these certainly cover the gambit):

  1. The Assumption Gap – we assume that spiritual, mental, and emotional growth is automatic and will simply happen with time. This is untrue. To bridge this gap, each of us must take personal responsibility for our own growth, including taking the actions necessary to begin growing and to continue to grow for the rest of our lives.
  2. The Knowledge Gap – we don’t know where we need to grow or how to do it. To bridge this gap, we must first do a thorough analysis of where we are today, where we should be and/or need to be, and where we want to be when everything’s said and done. My suggestion is to write things down during this self-analysis because it helps with focus and it also gives us a concrete reference point to start from. Then we begin to, with purpose and deliberation, take continual steps forward, finding the best resources we can to take rights steps in the right direction, toward our goal, increasing not only our knowledge, but our ability to apply that knowledge, as we grow and improve along the way.
  3. The Timing Gap – we use this to put off undertaking growth and improvement by either saying we don’t have the time to do it now or by delaying it to a later time (tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, when this or that event happens, etc.). There is no time like right now while you’re reading this and I’m writing it for us to commit to and undertake intentional growth and improvement. There is a undeniable correlation between delayed action and a diminished sense of urgency and immediacy that will set in with us and keep us exactly where we’ve always been if we do not take action now.
  4. The Mistake Gap – we don’t take action toward growth and improvement because we’re afraid of making mistakes. Growth, by its very nature, is messy and mistakes are part of the learning process. Because growth includes a willingness to take risks (doing things we haven’t done before or trying to do things better – and, therefore, differently – than we have before), mistakes are inevitable along the way. Mistakes serve two very valuable purposes in our lives. They both teach us to consider things from every angle (to think critically) and they clarify what does work and what doesn’t work.
  5. The Perfection Gap – we can’t start growing until we find the best and most fail-safe way to do it. Waiting for the perfect way will find us at the end of our lives having achieved nothing in terms of growth and improvement. The only way to learn what the best way to grow and improve involves is to actually begin and utilize the tools and resources we have to gain the knowledge and ability to continue to move forward.
  6. The Inspiration Gap – we don’t “feel like” doing it or we are waiting for inspiration to begin to grow. Life consists of many things that we may not feel like doing or we’re not inspired to do, but to live, we have to do them anyway. Growth, however, should be something we so strongly desire that we push forward in it by just doing it, whether we feel like it (sometimes we won’t) or whether we’re inspired (sometimes we won’t be).
  7. The Comparison Gap – we compare ourselves to other people and use them both as a measure and a reason not to undertake growth. When we compare ourselves to other people, we will find plenty of reasons not to undertake growth. Often, we end up comparing apples to oranges in these peer comparisons and we use the faulty conclusions we draw to undermine our own growth process. Each of us is a unique creation, with different abilities, strengths, and talents. We may often find an area where we need to grow that is comparable to climbing Mt. Everest for us, but it may be an area that somebody else has no trouble growing in (or it’s not even a problem area). To start drawing comparisons between ourselves and that other person will inevitably throw up a strong deterrent to us taking the first step toward growth that we need to take.
  8. The Expectation Gap – we expect growth to be faster and easier than it actually is. The reality is that growth is long and hard work. It takes dedicated time and concentrated, diligent effort. It is often at the point where expectation meets reality that we are most tempted to – and many people do – quit altogether. Instead, we must just keep putting one foot in front of the other, even if we’re at the point that just doing that requires all the energy and effort we have. Each step forward moves us closer to the goal.

So how do we begin the process of intentionally growing?

There are four areas we need to consider:

  1. Ask ourselves the right questions
    1. Where am I?
    2. Where do I need and want to be?
    3. What direction to I need to take?
    4. What limits am I placing on my growth and how do I remove them?
  2. Do it now
  3. Face the fear factors
    1. Fear of failure
    2. Fear of trading security for the unknown
    3. Fear of what other people will think and say
    4. Fear out outgrowing people (this often happens)
  4. Change from accidental growth to intentional growth

Comparison of accidental growth to intentional growth

As quintessential leaders, intentional, purposeful, actionable growth and improvement must be taking place in our lives continually and the results of our ever-moving progress forward must be evident at all times and in every part of our lives.

How are we doing?

Book Review of “The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century” by David Reynolds

Posted: August 10, 2016 in Book Reviews
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The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth CenturyThe Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although the author’s style is dense – by that I mean lots of information packed into a tight, but multilevel structure that requires a certain kind of deep, concentrated reading/comprehension ability that I believe has tragically been completely lost except to all but a few of us in this technology-driven (entangled) age when our attention/comprehension spans have been diminished to mere skimming, at best, and no-context, 5-second, twisted, spun, and completely made-up out of thin air sound bites, at worst – this is an incredible and comprehensive look at the global legacy of World War I on the 20th century and, in fact, here today in the 21st century. Read the rest of this entry »

Book Review of “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America” by John M. Barry

Posted: July 27, 2016 in Book Reviews, Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership
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Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed AmericaRising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After unprecedented continuous and heavy rain storms from the summer of 1926 through the spring of 1927 along the Mississippi River, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 became the worst and most destructive river flood in the history of the United States, with 27,000 square miles along the river overwhelmed and buried by water at depths up to 30 feet.

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America doesn’t just document this historic natural disaster. Instead it comprehensively looks at all the factors, many of them more than a century in the making, that coalesced over time to create not only this disaster, but the response to it, and the way it dramatically changed life, especially in the lower Mississippi, from the Mississippi Delta to the swamp country below New Orleans, forever.

This book is gripping and grabs you into the story, not only of the Mississippi River, but of America: its geography, its people, its society, its military, its power enclaves in business, government, life and the deep and fatal flaws of each of those that, ultimately led to this disaster and its aftermath.

For people like me, with a strong scientific bent, the numbers, the physics, the math, the structure, and the detailed solutions for harnessing the destructive power of the river are enthralling, but they are presented in a way that anyone can easily understand, especially when the flaws in thinking because of ignorance and/or laziness crop up along the way.

There are no heroes in this story, only mere limited humans. Some were downright villainous: self-absorbed, narcissistic, mean, hate-filled, murderous, deceitful, and motivated simply by pride, vanity, and greed. Others were products of their environments and experiences, believing they were altruistic, good, and devoted to the greater good, while in fact when push came to shove, the darkness of their hearts revealed itself as well.

Even the one man who knew the Mississippi River better than anyone else (and probably still stands alone in that intimate knowledge of the river) and had the engineering genius to know how to properly harness its power for good and did everything within his power to make that happen, James Eads, had flaws of character that emerged under pressure.

It’s often been said that we will never know how strong we are until we are surrounded by and confronted in every space of our lives with the impossible.

I believe – in fact, I know from experience for certain – that we will never know or understand how truly weak we are – where the hidden deep and destructive flaws of our hearts, our souls, our minds, and, indeed, our very nature and character are – until we are inundated at every turn with the impossible.

It is at this point where we have the opportunity to choose: to fully and humbly commit and endeavor to completely change and replace the very broken, the fatally flawed, and the intrinsic dastardly wrongs that permeate the human heart or to fully and proudly embrace them and feed and grow them to their fullest extent.

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, at its core, is about the choices of America, its people as a whole, its society, its government, and, in fact, every single individual in the face of these weaknesses.

The choices disappoint. The weaknesses have continued to grow and to even more deeply become interwoven in the America – its people, its government, its society, and every single individual (including you and including me, if we have the courage and the honesty to admit it) – of 2016.

There is no concern or care for each other anywhere in the fabric of America and its organizations and institutions. Everything is about greed, power, and money. We destroy each other at every turn and in every nook and cranny of our society for our own benefit and for our own profit. We oppress. We steal. We lie. We cheat. We deceive. We hate. We destroy.

And we wrap all up in a pretty paper with a bow and sing our praises and exalt ourselves as we run the victory laps of our destructiveness and proclaim our honor and glory without end, when instead we should be ashamed of ourselves and doing something to wash away our sins.

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America is as current in its indictment of us as a nation, as a government, as a society, and as individuals as the century it covers that culminated in the preventable, but humanly inevitable, Great Mississippi flood of 1927.

The lessons here are instructive if we’re willing to learn them.

For those of us striving to be quintessential leaders, we must learn them and we must change as a result.

Otherwise, we have no claim at all to being quintessential or being leaders. We, instead are just pretenders, merely giving lip service to something that we know nothing about and want nothing to do with because doing it is infinitely harder – and requires so much more, and more than we are willing to give – than simply talking about it.

Are we merely talking a good game or are we doing the hard work?

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Book Review of “The Age of American Unreason” by Susan Jacoby

Posted: July 19, 2016 in Quintessential Leader Book Reviews
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The Age of American UnreasonThe Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although I find the author, at times, aggressively and assertively pushing the same extremist edges that this book exposes and denounces in American society today, in general, I agree with the basic premise and areas in which she exposes how Americans, in general, are consciously proud of abandoning intellect (both in educating themselves with facts and knowledge) and critical thinking (proving or disproving everything they see, hear, read, and encounter in life).

As a society, Americans in general have embraced dumbing down in every aspect of our lives. Because we choose to remain ignorant (educationally and otherwise), we have become slaves to our emotions, which makes us fair game for the ignorance that abounds in the society around us. We don’t know how to tell truth from untruth. We don’t know the difference between facts and opinions. We are so deficient in basic knowledge and the ability to think deeply about anything that we fall easily and compliantly for “junk” in everything that comes our way (we are also more biased and prejudiced against knowledge and intellect, in general, so we reject anything that sounds too intelligent because it’s just confusing us with the facts).

We don’t read, for the most part, preferring images (sound bites, videos, anything that can stimulate us visually), and because we don’t read, we don’t know anything (visual – and I would suggest that just audio falls in this category too – is quick in and quick out – I avoid video or listening to just audio anything because I need to see words in print to understand them, to process them, to think about them, to have a record to go back to when the words or images change – which they inevitably do every single time, but it’s easier to hide with video and audio than it is with print – to compare and contrast).

Therefore, when all this junk comes at us, we’re fair game because it’s couched in an “aw shucks, we’re just one of you folks” lure that engages the emotions, the biases, the prejudices, and, quite frankly, the deceitfulness of our own hearts and pulls us right into the unreason the pervades every part of American society, including all of our “sacred cows.”

The interesting thing is that even some of us who realize this refuse to admit it, because admitting it means admitting we’re wrong and we need to change. And change is the hardest thing for any of us to really do. Oh, we talk about it a lot, but the fruit of actually doing it is rare to non-existent.

And yet change we must.

Unreason exists because we allow it to exist.

We need to read – even authors like this with whom I found some of the same characteristics that she is exposing and with whom I disagree wholeheartedly on some things – and we need to know and understand with our own two eyes and our own brains fully engaged what is real and what isn’t, what is true and what isn’t, what is fact and what isn’t, and we need to be able, in our own words (not parroting someone else’s words), to explain what is real, what is true, and what is fact with depth and thought that shows we have actually done the mentally-challenging work ourselves and not abandoned out brains to the plethora of junk that’s out there ready – and, in many cases, has already to a great degree – to move in and fill up the increasing empty space we leave upon our abandonment.

There are no voids in the universe, so if we don’t use our brains, there is plenty of garbage out there that is more than happy to rent the space, at the highest cost imaginable.

For quintessential leaders, this supreme cost not only negatively affects us, but it also negatively affects our teams and our organizations.

When we stop reading, we stop learning. When we stop learning, we stop critically thinking. When we stop critically thinking, we stop understanding. When we stop understanding, we stop discerning.

When we stop discerning, we lose the ability to distinguish between truth and lies, facts and opinions, and reality and fiction.

Quintessential leaders can’t afford – nor can their teams and organizations – to allow this to happen.

How are we doing?

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Book Review of “Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva”

Posted: July 13, 2016 in Quintessential Leadership
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Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana AlliluyevaStalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve read in a long time. There are times reading about Svetlana Alliluyeva’s life when you just want to reach out – although she’s been dead for several years now – and hold her in comfort and fix all that is emotionally broken in her to give her peace and stability. And yet that is beyond me – indeed, it is beyond any human capability.

Even though she was the daughter of Joseph Stalin, Svetlana was also just another one of his victims. Stalin’s effect on his family, his associates, and indeed on the citizens of Russia shows what tyrants, despots, narcissists, and power-hungry people in positions of leadership leave in their wake. The damage outlives them and it is, in the end, their only lasting legacy.

Joseph Stalin was a cruel, heartless, and loveless man. Whether he began life that way isn’t clear, but in his effort to gain power and control over Russia after Lenin’s death, he lost any humanity that he may have had before he embarked on that quest.

He treated Svetlana’s mother, his second wife, with a cruelty that perhaps drove her away from her home and her children from the time they were born. (In many ways, Svetlana never had a mother, although she did have a nanny who loved her and whom she loved, but it was not the same as having a mother.) What is certain is that Stalin’s last act of cruelty to Svetlana’s mother was the catalyst for her subsequent suicide when Svetlana was 6 1/2 years old.

Stalin was in the midst of consolidating his power and his purges and gulags were already in motion when Svetlana’s mother died. Until then, both sides of the family were around and a part of Svetlana’s life. Because many of her mother’s relatives knew Stalin when he began as a Georgian Bolshevik, they also knew his secrets as a young man.

Suddenly, they began disappearing from Svetlana’s life into exile or the death camps that took care of Stalin’s problems and rivals. Death, secret police, and the constant threat of harm were things that Svetlana became aware of early on. Neither she nor her brothers were exempted from that threat or the sudden eruptions and violence that accompanied her father’s wrath.

Stalin and Svetlana had a push-pull relationship that was never secure for Svetlana. When she matured enough to realize how terrible her father was and the extent of his cruelty and disregard for human life, she began what would be a complicated love-hate view of Stalin the rest of her life.

All of this led to an emptiness, a restlessness, a searching in Svetlana that never got filled, not got eased, and never got found in her lifetime. The hole of emptiness was bottomless. The persistent restlessness never found a quiet, peaceful place to alight and anchor to. The endless searching was chasing ghosts and illusions of things that never existed to begin with.

Yet despite all the psychological damage that Svetlana suffered, she was generally sane, very cogent, extremely intelligent and insightful, and, most amazingly, enduringly resilient. Although she had trouble forming and maintaining stable and healthy relationships (she suffered from anxious-preoccupied attachment and made terrible decisions and choices because of it), she took whatever came her way – and it was a rollercoaster from the beginning to the end of her life – and, for the most part, dealt with it with a stoicism that is quite remarkable.

The leadership – or lack of it – lessons abound in this book. And Svetlana’s life – as well as the detailed descriptions of Russian life in general and Russian lives specifically in Stalin’s family and associates – puts the results (which lasts beyond the grave) of unquintessential leadership under the microscope.

It’s an education we can’t afford to miss.

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Book Review: “The Glass Cage: Automation and Us” by Nicholas Carr

Posted: July 8, 2016 in Quintessential Leader Book Reviews
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The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing UsThe Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us by Nicholas Carr
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As with The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr has brought the role of technology in our lives into focus with another aspect that I doubt many of us really understand in its pervasiveness in our everyday lives and what it is costing us, not just in obvious ways, but in ways that are fundamental to being human and be uniquely skilled to productively and expertly interact in and with the world of opportunity and possibilities we’ve been given.

The subtitle of this book is “Automation and Us,” and how automation has infiltrated every aspect of our lives and what we’re losing in the process is Carr’s subject in this book.

Automation, of and by itself, is not bad. It is the things we’ve automated and our relationship to automation (serving it instead of letting it serve us) that turns what could be a good thing into something that is destined to destroy us – our unique human abilities, skills, and talents – unless we take control and do something different.

One of the points that Carr makes in this book is that we have offloaded critical thinking skills, technical acumen, analysis, and creativity to technology. By doing this, we gradually lose the ability to operate successfully manually (without the technology) and use judgement, intuition, experience, and knowledge to navigate our lives and our professions.

Carr looks at the impact of automatic in the airline industry (specifically looking at how autopilot has degraded the skills of pilots to successfully deal with emergencies and crises when flying), in business (stock market, accounting, business decisions, human resources, hiring, etc., which have all been relegated to software to handle, with no human factors involved, resulting in the global financials messes we now deal with and with a loss of talent because there’s no human contact or intervention to recognize the talent), in medicine (with the advent of electronic medical records in most medical facilities, software is now making the decisions that doctors used to make and because the software adds procedures and tests, the costs, which were supposed to go lower, have actually increased exponentially) and in manufacturing.

He also looks at us and how we’ve turned over our brains to automation. We depend on social media to decide who and what we like (or don’t) and who we’re friends with (and who we’re not – anyone who chooses to limit this exposure disappears and becomes invisible because they simply don’t exist outside the virtual world) and we have chosen willing to live in this virtual world more than we actually interact with the real word.

We’ve given control of our lives to our electronic devices: to do lists, calendars, phone numbers, etc. We let our software do things we should be doing ourselves: spell-checking, grammar-checking, basic math functions, etc. We have fallen for the myth that automation gives us more power, when instead it erodes our power and our humanness.

People are much more extreme in their polarization of love and hate (nothing in between) in an automated world. It often seems that empathy, compassion, care, concern and love – all unique human abilities – is absent in the presence of a world that is automated. We lose our ability to relate to each other in any kind of real way and, as a result, we lose our humanness, and we become programmed to polarized points of view that we simply pick up and accept by what and who we choose to listen to, follow, and expouse in the landscape of technology (cable, streaming, internet, etc.).

We are losing our life blood – our hearts, our souls, and our minds, because we serve the god of automation that lacks emotional richness, deep understanding, and caring concern. I hope we reverse this trend, but I also am realistic enough to realize that we probably won’t and it will probably get much worse before it gets better.

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