One of the best summaries I’ve read on the etymology of the word hack appeared in The New Yorker a few years ago.
The word itself generally has, in historical terms, a negative connotation (which is why programmers who try to break into networks and/or computers are known as hackers), and, since in reality its results are, for the most part, negative, that’s how we’ll look at the word in this article.
(more…)
It seems that it’s much easier for us to give easy and voluminous lip service to committing to do something than it is for us to actually take the actions and efforts to follow through on commitments we’ve made.
Part of the reason is that we don’t take our verbal commitments very seriously. They’re easy to say and take so little time and they temporarily pacify whomever we are talking to. But the reality is that there is no real intent to follow through behind them.
Another part of the reason is that we tend to over-commit, even though we can’t possibly follow through on everything we commit to, because we want to please people or we don’t want to disappoint them.
And still another part of the reason is that our tendency to commit to doing things that we end up not following through on is to make ourselves look good in the eyes of others as being generous benefactors.
No matter what the reasons are why we don’t follow through on the many commitments we make every day, the fact that we don’t follow through puts us on the path of unquintessential leadership.
Why?
Because quintessential leaders strive to follow through on their commitments, it’s important to go behind the scenes to examine how they do it (what this looks like) in a world where the majority of people, including those in leadership positions, fail to follow through on their commitments.
Quintessential leaders follow through on their commitments by:
Quintessential leaders value quality over quantity. They also value substantive action over superfluous talk.
That is why quintessential leaders carefully choose – and have no problem saying “No” to things and people – what they commit themselves to and follow through with.
Quintessential leaders are also people who do the right things for the right reasons, striving for anonymity and being completely under the radar.
Unlike the many people who say they’ll do something so that they’ll look good to other people, yet they fail to follow through at all, quintessential leaders always ensure that their left hands don’t know what their right hands are doing.
As we look at our own leadership lives – wherever we are in life, we lead at least one team and our lives are living examples to everyone around us to either reject or emulate – we must ask ourselves about our commitments and our follow through.
How are we doing?
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Greek word agōnízomai, from which the English word agonize comes, means to struggle intensely. Real change involves real agony. As Dr. King so astutely observed, change is not inevitable.
Inertia is our natural state. Inertia is comfortable. But inertia is also stagnant. Too often, we settle for inertia as our state of being because it’s easy and because that’s the way we (or someone before us) have always done things, have always thought about things, and have always been.
Inertia, as all of us who’ve studied physics know, requires a lot of force to overcome. But, for change, the force comes primarily from within us in the elements of desire, choice, and action combined. (more…)
The Quintessential Leader 