The Quintessential Leader

Beginning this week, I will be starting a new series of posts that will evaluate how quintessential – or not – the leadership of well-known people in history that held leadership positions was.

This idea came as an outgrowth of a request from a very good friend of mine to consider writing a “real” history book – an idea that I’m researching and considering seriously – to counter all the mostly skewed, angled, and sometimes outright untrue information that passes for history these days – in education, in non-fiction writing, and on the internet. 

It seems that we, as humans, have become lazy enough to believe just about anything without proving or disproving it and we like “smooth words” more than the truth.

The history of humanity is ugly. If we, as quintessential leaders, look honestly and closely at ourselves, we’ll admit that some of our personal history is ugly too. It seems, though, that a lot of people would rather just lie about it or doctor it up, instead of facing it and doing something about it to clean it up and make our future histories not ugly.

Once lies and deception become part of our histories and established histories, then we’ve lost the battle for change, for betterment, and, in fact, to become quintessential leaders. Let’s be sure that we’re not afraid to be honest, with ourselves, with our histories, with the world’s history. Only when we face the truth about all of these are we ever in a position it to change it and do something better and different.