Leadership

Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.
Tom Landry

For some of us it is very easy to know what we want, or at least what we think we want. We all want unlimited money, and perhaps a mansion by the waterfront, thousands of adoring fans, a chauffeur and a maid etc. It's easy to look at our successful neighbor and say "That's what I want. I want all those things he has." We tend to look at these people and just see the way they are now, enjoying all those things we wish we had. We don't see where they came from and what they had to do in order to get those things.

The truth is that for any really successful person, they had to do a lot of things they didn't enjoy in order to come to the place where they can enjoy the things they do now. Everything has a price. But we would rather not know that, we want whatever it is for free. We want to get it by doing minimal work for a minimal amount of time. We want it to be easy. We don't want to give up anything we have now in order to get that other thing. But that just isn't the way life works.

In order to get what we really want, we are going to have to get our hands dirty. We are going to have to make some hard choices and give some things up. We are simply going to have to do unpleasant, risky, messy things. So we need a leader. Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve. Sometimes, of course, you have to be your own leader, and find some way to inspire yourself to do what you need to do to get what you want. Leadership is about inspiration, and motivation to do the grunt work; both of which require vision as well as an action plan. With the right leader, you can accomplish anything.