Much better than me?

The leadership adage goes that A people hire B people and B people hire C people and so on and so forth. Pretty soon that leads to certain disappointment and then we find ourselves wondering what happen? How did the ship lose its rudder? How did we fail to achieve all that we are dreaming about? Why is our organization less than we had hoped it would be?

When we lived in Canada many many years ago, we attended a church that was really incredible. Yet the lead pastor was an underwhelming small-minded, uninspiring, less than ideal pastor and leader in almost every respect - except one. He hired A level people. He surrounded himself with people that were better in every way than himself.  He truly sought out and retained the best in the business! That takes either brilliance or an amazing level of self-confidence. I still haven't figured out which one of those Wayne possessed, but I learned an important lesson and it is one I have honed all my life and I continue to sharpen and employ across the board.

I surround myself with the best people. I systematically eliminate whiners and low-potential people from my work and from my social networks. It sounds cold to some of you. It sounds exciting to some of you. Hahaha! The reality is that it is incredibly challenging and overwhelmingly difficult to intentionally choose to be the slowest person in the room. Read that sentence again, because it is truly true. It demands a humility that runs so deep, a self-awareness that is brutally painful and teachable at the same time. A refusal to think for a moment that I am on the same level as these folks. Most folks I meet and know, could not stand the heat in this particular kitchen, and so they don't. Instead they surround themselves with less. Less than they are so that they can shine. Less than they are so that they can be in the spotlight. Less than they are in order to have power and control and so many other things.

But they lose in that process. They lose the opportunity to learn. They lose the opportunity to improve. They lose the chance to grow. They lose chance to impact the next generation of leaders. And most of all, they lose the certainty of becoming much more than they are today.

The slow concentrated present

The slow concentrated present

I had a good friend send me a link today of a great Cal Newport blog about several things that he personally does to improve his deep thinking/deep work ability. He listens to baseball games on the radio - a task that has none of the glamor and BSO (bright shiny objects) that easily distract us and keep our fleeting attention engaged. Listening to a live game requires a unique concentration . . . and yes there are commercial breaks and Mr Newport fills those empty times in with a book.

Since I am no baseball fan, I had to work a bit to find some parallels that I could apply in my life to train myself to listen better, focus longer and train my brain to do something deeper and more significant than Twitter or Facebook.

So at last I settled on a whip-lash speed story audiobook series that forces me to listen carefully or I have to rewind to find the thread where my concentration broke and I lost the storyline or missed some details. So far I have found that . . . that I have to rewind frequently! And I do this while riding my bicycle trainer or outside bike up the mountain near my apartment. It makes the exercise go quickly, while entertaining me too. Hopefully I am making progress in deeper focus and concentration!

Accepting responsibility . . . the key to self-respect?

It is impossibly difficult to get your work done some days, it is so challenging and there are outside forces combining to defeat you at every single turn, to destroy your every effort to fulfill your responsibilities. Focus is fractured. The action never happens. The intensity of the urgency of the immediate consumes all ambition to do the important and change the world for the better. The costs of ignoring the loudest closest clanging blood-relative is so high, as to prohibitively decimate every wish hope and plan to do the amazing. The collaboration of each innocent piece and person clammoring for our limited and ever-so-important attention, overwhelms and drowns our best intentions. Even as I scramble to get all things done, and get out of the hotel within the time frames required, get back on the road, accomplish the next task and event, there are ever higher tasks and events screaming for their accomplishment too. 

But.

But I can make difficult choices. I can make a different set of decisions. I can respond in various ways to this conversation. We can accept responsibility for our own lives, rather than blaming the fiery intensity of too many choices and and options. We can change the world, if we are willing to choose to do so, and pay the prices of those decisions.

"Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” - Joan Didion