How - Dov Seidman [142]
But I am also cognizant of the fact that you might still be wondering what this all means, or more precisely, how do you do HOW? I wouldn’t blame you for that. After all, you have worked through a couple of hundred pages of a book, and I almost never told you how to do anything. I have not provided you with instructions on how to write a better e-mail or greet another person, or elucidated the manner in which you should speak. In short, I have not provided specific steps or actions that you can take to employ in your daily working life the concepts I’ve presented.
The reason I haven’t done this is, quite simply, because I am not able to, or, more precisely, because the very nature of what we have been talking about renders writing such an instruction manual impossible. If you remember, I told you early on that I didn’t have a “Manual of HOW” filled with Six Rules for This, or 24 Steps to That. Much to your credit, you have kept reading anyway. I have tried to provide you instead with a way of looking at the world, a lens through which to see everything we do with new weight and meaning. These ideas simply cannot be summed up in a list of things to do.
And yet, for a system of thought to be truly useful, we must find a way of bringing it to bear on every moment of our lives, to put thoughts into action, in our case, to do HOW. I can’t give you rules, but I can give you a framework, a way of focusing your efforts, time, thought, and passion on behaviors and approaches that will help you make the choices that will set off Waves all around you. At LRN, we call it the Leadership Framework, and we use it to guide our HOWs every day. I developed it in the early days of the company and refined it since then.1 It now encapsulates all the concepts that we have covered in this book and provides a way to put them into action in everything you do.
Why leadership? Because to be a self-governing individual you must lead yourself and approach everything you do from a leadership perspective. You can write an e-mail as a leader, attend a meeting as a leader, or build a report as a leader. You lead your own journey of significance every day, in how you choose to act, treat others, and see the world. A leadership mentality brings you into an active relationship with the forces and circumstances in your personal sphere of influence. It helps you to reach out to others, to create the kinds of strong interpersonal synapses so crucial to thriving in a hyperconnected world, and to inspire those around you to do the same.
LEADERSHIP
Let’s talk for a moment about leadership. On May 25, 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy stood before a special joint session of Congress and asked for a number of special appropriations to address “urgent national needs.” He spoke for about 45 minutes, but few remember most of what he said. What the whole world remembers, in one way or another, is that for about eight of those 45 minutes, JFK shared his vision for landing on the moon. In about a thousand words, he launched an effort that would involve hundreds of thousands of people for the next decade and more. On that night, and in the days that followed, people coalesced around this common idea. He did not say it would be easy. “It is a heavy burden,” he said, “and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. . . . This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, material, and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization, and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts.” But JFK spoke