How - Dov Seidman [157]
Optimism lives hand in hand with passion. Would the United States have spent 10 years trying to land on the moon if we believed there was a chance we would take off and miss? “I am an optimist,” Sir Winston Churchill once said. “It does not seem too much use being anything else.”19 Self-governing people don’t allow themselves to entertain the notion of not landing on the moon. They don’t keep the vote in their mind to say, “I choose success versus failure.” They only envision how they are going to land on the moon. They’ve got that positive, passionate energy.
That last thought may seem—well—optimistic. But there is an important power lurking in optimism, the power of unlimited belief. Pessimists hold limited beliefs. The doubt and fear of failure that are natural to everyone trying to achieve something great creeps into their brains and ossifies there, creating friction and dissonance and bottling up the amazing power that brains can unleash when filled with belief. The only way to get to the next level, to reach the point of no return and to push past it, is to spend zero time contemplating the alternative. “Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier,” said former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell.20 Helen Keller, who had vision greater than eyesight and was no stranger to the point of no return, said, “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”21
Pursue Significance
When Bill Gates was in high school, he and his friends would sit around marveling at what they thought was the undeniable future. “We couldn’t believe that everyone else didn’t see what we saw,” he said in a recent television interview, “that personal computers were going to change the world.” This was long before the fateful meeting with IBM when Gates and Paul Allen realized that if they just had an operating system, they could change the world (so they went out and bought one, which they resold to IBM, and Microsoft was born).
It’s virtually impossible to be inspired and generate passion unless you have an important mission. The journey to self-governance is inspired by the pursuit of significance. Leaders believe that landing on the moon will benefit mankind, not just profit the company. Leaders believe in ideas. I founded LRN on the idea that the world would be a better place if more people did the right thing. Leaders think of themselves as cathedral builders, not bricklayers. Mission, whether personal or organizational, needs to be important, something worthy of your inspiration or your passion. It could be number two on your list or it could be number three, but it’s got to be on your list of important things. You will never find enduring, self-perpetuating power by pursuing the mundane. Passion and optimism compel those who assume a leadership disposition to engage in enterprises of transcendental importance.
Significance means different things at different stages of your life. The young, for instance, often have less time and resources to devote to giving back to their community than those who are older and more established in life. The most successful among us might feel that our achievements alone add up to a life of significance. But the pursuit of significance I am talking about is a disposition toward serving others, toward devoting some measure of every stage of your life to improving lives. Even the most successful need to always measure their efforts against the higher standard of service to others. To make that shift, to envision your efforts in service of a better world, creates a disposition that leads you beyond the immediate and mundane toward the extraordinary and exceptional. If you can pursue significance in this way, then, and only then, can you achieve true success.
Circles in Circles, Part Two
And so we have circumnavigated the lens of HOW and returned to where we began, envisioning