My kid calls from San Francisco to see what’s going on . . .
“Well, I watched the debate, practiced my piano lesson, and now I’m preparing to teach a class tomorrow.”
“What’s the topic?”
“Leadership.”
“What qualifies you to teach that?”
Good question. Because it’s more of a workshop, not a class where I let people in on the secrets of leadership. We exchange ideas based on our own experiences and leave more prepared for whatever happens to us in the future.
I just saw a link to 4 Rules the Most Successful Leaders Live By. People love lists. The idea that there are rules of leadership — four of them to be exact — and someone has written them down?!
Because I have to make decisions in a limited amount of time, with a limited amount of information, and I don’t know what to do! Now here’s a list of four rules! My prayers are answered!
What I find if I click on these links — I can’t resist sometimes! — is not that the advice is bad, but that it’s simplistic and obvious.
For example, here’s the first rule from the link above: Don’t Waste Brain Power on Trivialities.
Is anyone advocating wasting brain power on trivialities? Why tell me not to do something that no one in their right mind would advocate in the first place?
That’s a good way to evaluate advice, by the way . . . if no one would advocate the opposite course of action, that is not wisdom, it’s banality.