5 Leadership Lessons: The Pursuit of Excellence

RYAN HAWK has interviewed hundreds of leaders on his podcast The Learning Leader Show. He has collected their wisdom in The Pursuit of Excellence: The Uncommon Behaviors of the World’s Most Productive Achievers. It is filled with practical thoughts and behaviors that will make you think and potentially set you on a path to sustained growth. Here are just five ideas he shares from those on his podcast:

  Success is based on a comparison with others. Excellence is measured against your own potential.

  The worst advice given to young people is follow your passion. Your job is to find something you’re good at. And then spend thousands of hours and apply the grit and the sacrifice and the willingness to break through hard things to become great at it. Because once you’re great at something, the economic accouterments of being great at something, the prestige, the relevance, the camaraderie, the self-worth of being great … will make you passionate about whatever it is. Here’s the problem with believing you should follow your passion: Work is hard. And when you run into obstacles and you face injustice, which is a common guaranteed attribute of the workplace, you’ll start thinking, “I’m not loving this. This is upsetting and hard. It must not be my passion.” That is not the right litmus test.

  New goals don’t deliver new results. New lifestyles do. And a lifestyle is not an outcome. It is a process.

  The best leaders know how messy they are. They challenge themselves. They have a high level of self-awareness. They know they need people around them to help. They acknowledge their imperfections, and they give others grace for their imperfections.

  Progress happens too slowly to notice; setbacks happen too fast to ignore. There are lots of overnight tragedies but no overnight miracles. Growth is driven by compounding, which always takes time. Destruction is driven by single points of failure, which can happen in seconds, and loss of confidence, which can happen in an instant.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:05 AM

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