PLAY - Intro - Leadership and Loneliness
Back in July, I had a guest on my show whose name is Billy Kolbrener.
He was in Toronto last week to speak and I caught his presentation at the University of Toronto and I thought it was very good.
So, I'm going to share with you what I took away. Billy might not agree that this is what he was saying but this is my take-away.
Billy's talk was all about passing on knowledge as in how to teach the next generation. And Billy is always talking in terms of Freud, religion and Milton so he started off by saying that when Moses was dying he said to Joshua:
"Hey, man, I'm on my way out of here so do you, like, have any questions you want to ask me?"
And Joshua said, "Hey Mo, how can you ask me that? Haven't been listening to everything you've said since I was a little boy?" And in that moment, Joshua forgot 300 laws that Moses had given.
Because, you see, arrogance leads to ignorance. If you think you know everything, soon you won't know much at all that's worthwhile because you won't make the effort to adapt what you know to new situations.
With you, its going to be the same old thing every single time and Billy told us very clearly that repeating the past like a robot is not the way to go because if you do, you're soon going to be out-moded.
But you might say, "Hey, if Moses was doing it right, why should I do any different? And Billy would say that, in theory, there might be an ideal way but in fact you're not Moses and you're never going to be Moses and your boss might think he's got a direct line to God but he's not Moses either.
And you know that kind of boss who gives you a script and tells you to say every word the exact same way that he does? That kind of boss is a jerk. He thinks that what works for him is going to work for everyone.
He is immune to the fact that things change over time and from person to person. He doesn't realize that you're not him and you don't think like him and you can't speak like him.
And Billy tells us that to be a success you have to look at your teachers and take what they can give you and use that as a source of strength but realize at the same time that you're on your own and you have to figure out a way forward that's appropriate for you.
And you know what Billy calls this? He calls it mourning. You have to mourn the fact that you don't have the support you want. You have to experience the grief that comes from knowing you're on your own and you don't know which way to go.
But if you decide to move forward even when you don't have all the information you want, you're going to find that with this action you acquire a lot of the certainty you need.
That's because the key to success is not knowing how to do everything right but recognizing the overwhelming need to act even when you know you are going to make mistakes and do some things wrong.
Making mistakes is a minor issue; moving forward is the major one. This is the bedrock wisdom. It's the one thing you can be certain of: faith in forward movement.
And, in recognizing this you can have a creative confrontation with the future because it's a challenge to figure out what to do tactically but, at the same time, you have the security of knowing at a strategic and profound level exactly what to do.
That's the tragedy of living and its cure as well.
