One of my heroes is Dee Hock, the founder and CEO Emeritus of Visa International. Dee’s work to create Visa is one of the iconic business stories of our time, beautifully told in his book One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization. Visa manages $16 trillion of transactions every year. Dee’s story shows that wisdom and ethics are not only possible at that scale, they are essential to build truly reliable infrastructure for civilization.
Every morning, I try to review this quote by Dee:
Here is the very heart and soul of the matter of leadership: If you seek to lead, invest 50% of your time leading yourself – your own purpose, ethics, principles, motivation, conduct. Invest at least 20% leading those with authority over you; and 15% leading your peers – Use the remainder to induce those you “work for” to understand and practice the theory – If you don’t understand that you should be working for your mislabeled “subordinates,” then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny— Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivial.
This shows clearly how training in personal discipline and refining your own purpose needs to remain at least 50% of your life, no matter what level of leadership you find yourself in. Building that basic foundation at the earliest stages of life is indeed a leadership training.
The Formula for Leadership
Wisdom is a mind that can guide ourself and others to long-term well-being. It is the internal quality required for others to trust you.
In a previous post, I explained that the main requirement for building trust is becoming trustworthy.
I like to think of wisdom as being intelligence times virtue. You need intelligence that is relevant to the challenges at hand, and you need virtue so that people can trust your intention:
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I think of leadership in turn as wisdom times inspiration:
In this post, I’ll discuss what is inspiration and what does it mean to inspire others?
Breaking Through Ordinariness
I define inspiration as:
The ability to see beyond the ordinary by opening your own and others minds to new information
I’m borrowing that definition in part from Dacher Keltner’s book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The book explains how awe enables us to open our minds to new information and knowledge.
Je Tsongkhapa explained that the primary obstacle to rapid transformation is our overwhelming sense of ordinariness. Ordinariness arises naturally in the mind as an energy-saving technique. When we first encounter something, the mind needs to apply effort to make sense of it. But once we have given something a name, we tend to think that we “know” it. When we subsequently make contact with that object, we just rely on our previous perceptions, and the object comes to seem more and more ordinary. It’s this mental habit that causes us to take things for granted so quickly.
What is new breaks us out of our sense of ordinariness. What is new is by definition rare and thus seems valuable and extraordinary. Economist Joseph Schumpeter said that innovation is the real source of new value.
At the root of all of our delusions is a deeply internalized sense of powerlessness that believes that we depend on outer conditions to be happy and to be inspired.
But our mind habituates rapidly, so that as soon as we encounter something new and delightful it begins to become old, boring, or ordinary. Things age from the moment they arise. Our ordinary view of the world clings to our outdated understanding which causes increasing disappointment.
Based on this fundamental delusion, we think that the only way we can find something outside of the ordinary is to encounter something new. This is what leads to shopping addiction (aka retail therapy), social media addiction, sex addiction, and many of our other compulsions.
This fixation on the new makes it easy for marketers to manipulate us. There is no single word that more reliably increases sales than the word “New!”.
The Extraordinary in the Ordinary
Just as the basic foundation for winning others trust is to becoming trustworthy. So too, if you want to inspire others, the basic foundation is becoming inspired.
In reality, the entire world is extraordinary. There is an extraordinary world everywhere we look: inside, outside, and in the precious relationship between inner and outer.
Out of laziness, we quickly come to believe that we know what’s actually happening in the world. We believe that we are seeing the world directly when, in fact, all we’re doing is building memories and concepts of the world and then mistaking them for reality.
Inspiration is all around us. There is never a moment when there’s not something that we can draw inspiration from. Look at how fascinated a child can be with a stone or a feather. This is because their mind is wide open. They are rapidly taking in new information. They’re studying the world.
Lessons from Burning Man
This summer, I went to Burning Man as a way of throwing myself into an environment unlike any I’d experienced before. I’ve spent my whole life trying to reduce distractions and to increase my focus and discipline. All of a sudden I found myself surrounded by people who were, at least temporarily, fixated on maximizing distractions, playfulness, and breaking out of their normal mode.
Burning Man is designed to break you out of your ordinary world rapidly and completely. It’s the world’s largest art exhibition. It’s the world’s largest collection of music, dancing, and self-expression of every imaginable type.
Even the most jaded artists and explorers still find in Burning Man a source of inspiration and magic.
It is common to greet people arriving at Burning Man by saying “welcome home”. At first, I found this puzzling. I associate home with clarity and stability, whereas my experience with Burning Man was utterly destabilizing, disorienting, and beyond the ordinary.
As I pondered, I realized that our first experience of home comes at the moment of our birth. Our first encounter with home is as a strange and magical world. Our first encounter with our parents is as strange and magical beings. A baby’s first experiences are characterized by an overwhelming sense of wonder and inspiration, along with fear, anger, pain, and grief. The intense pantheon of a baby’s experiences sets the emotional tone for the rest of their life. The primary function of Burning Man is to break people out of their ordinary world, their ordinary perception, and to provide inspiration that people can then take in any of a million different directions.
We don’t need such extreme events to develop inspiration. As it says in Awe, we can find inspiration in nature, music, art, or science. It is especially common to find awe in the moral beauty of others.
The Role of Inspiration in Leadership
One way or another, it’s critical that all of us seek inspiration and try to offer inspiration to others. Especially if we hope to lead others in a beneficial direction, it’s not enough to just become trustworthy. We need to offer others inspiration.
A lot of what people find inspiring is novelty: new technology, new cultural practices, and so forth. But ancient practices are just as alien and unfamiliar to modern people as new things are. Our pace of life has accelerated so rapidly that we’ve become utterly untethered from nature, including the slow rhythms of our own internal human nature.
As we come to see with new eyes and come to see with ancient eyes, we can perceive a world beyond the ordinary, which ignites our curiosity, our desire to learn and to change.
As our curiosity and wonder grows and eventually overflows, we can find ourselves sharing inspiration with those around us. Inspiration influences others in small and large ways to open their own minds to this extraordinary world we live in, especially in ways that lead to long-term happiness and health.
Take a moment now to contemplate the digital device you’re reading this on. It connects you to the entire world, unlocking infinite possibilities. How could you connect with it in a more meaningful way?
True Wealth Is Contentment
We prize technological innovations because these offer the promise of new material wealth. But we need to understand that the best wealth is contentment, a sense of deep satisfaction with our world and life. As much as our economy is growing, our contentment is often being eroded. This creates a vicious cycle where no amount of external economic growth can satisfy us.
Inspiration brings delight in our present circumstances just as much as it brings delight in that which is new.
A great leader helps people to both deeply appreciate their current circumstances, as well to envision an inspiring world that is characterized by less suffering for both ourselves and others.
If you’re looking for a source of inspiration, I’m gathering a group of technical leaders for a virtual training program in January of this year. It’s a light lift, just seven 90-minute sessions, one per week. But we’ve made the program into a rich learning experience. Lots of opportunity to connect deeply with a group of smart, good-hearted peers; and a set of topics that are both broad and deep, to help draw out a depth of wisdom in your daily work. Learn more and sign up here.