If
This week I offer you a lightly edited version of Rudyard Kipling’s idea set.
If is like a bowl of well-formulated muesli—a cornucopia of life-sustaining morsels—some are easy to spot, many might be familiar, others require imagination—a taste and a bit of nerve.
Make of if what you will.
For me, there are features that speak to being an influential leader, more than 13, but that is enough for now:
- Be steady, be a rock, calm the storm.
- Be comfortable with personal responsibility.
- Trust yourself.
- Be self-aware while walking in other’s shoes.
- Be courageous, and purposeful.
- Great things are to be dreamed, but made real through action.
- We must think, with a purpose.
- We fall, but if we rise, we never fail.
- Be tireless.
- Expect no kudos from the vain and indifferent.
- Treat all people with basic respect and dignity.
- Each of us is responsible for doing something worthy and meaningful with our lives.
- Leadership is a choice.
Regards,
Colin @ Karoo
Influential leadership is a choice!
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on [others],
If you can trust yourself when [others] doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being [scorned], don’t give way to [despising],
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and [Falling]
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by [rascals] to make a trap for [truth],
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your [successes]
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And [fall], and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your [pain];
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing [left] in you
Except the Will which says: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with [citizens] and keep your virtue,
Or walk with [presidents]—[but] not lose the [peoples’] touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all [people] count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the [Universe] and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a [Leader], my [friend]
R. Kipling (1865-1936)
Edited
Leadership Weekly Note: 3223. 070823
e: colind@karoo.world
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