Burden of Leadership

 When a man picks up any title for themselves, their mind instantly inherits all the societal expectations that come with it. It creates a “job description” for the person to live up to. It punishes him when he fails, and rewards him when he succeeds in living up to that ideal. 

This isn’t good or bad, it just creates an imprisonment that hinders the ingenuity of the human being to shine at its fullest.

Leadership is not different. All the books, articles, lectures, and youtube videos about “Keys to success”, “Guide to a perfect leader” etc. become the how-to for the person, and that’s where his focus, attention, and time goes. This creates an enormous burden to perform in the right way.

In this performance, he tries to memorize the lines that will get applause, and learns the body-language that will convince others that he is the best performer of this role. All the while, this burden weighs down on him so much that he can’t wait to put all of that aside so he can work in fulfillment of his vision. To be free and immersed in his true calling.

The only way out for him is the way of understanding. Once you learn the truth about your motivations and passions, and where those arise from, you’ll be able to free yourself from the prison that they create.

It is about finding out why you picked up the title, and what came with it when you did.

This isn’t something that you can read in an article and create a roadmap out of. This is a serious journey to the interiority of your self; to take apart each thread of your being in order to understand the truth.

The theme that you’re going to see throughout that journey, is that most of the things that you have been doing, are in pursuit of pleasure, with the hope that you’ll find peace. The problem is, that pleasure only gives you more craving for pleasure, and can never give you lasting satisfaction.

As a leader, you have been learning behaviors, tips, tricks, how-tos, and getting pleasure out of successfully implementing them. But as all those things are just the highlights of someone else’s journey, you’ll be performing mimicry of someone else’s art, and not get the results that the original artist achieved. This will leave you hungry for more, and you’ll then start mimicking someone else, and the cycle will go on.

A true leader is someone who isn’t there for the title. Who isn’t there for the applause. He is there to pursue a vision and allows himself followers only because his vision is too big to be achieved alone. He isn’t looking for followers for the sake of self-aggrandizement, but for the sole purpose of fulfilling the vision that he must bring to life. He doesn’t need anything else from people. He doesn’t care about respect, and love, from his followers.

And because he doesn’t need all those things…he gets them naturally, without sacrificing his freedom.