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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Plato once said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”
Leadership involves an internal versus external dynamic. We’ve looked at the temptation all of us face to mask or hide the things that distract us using different forms of white noise.
Good leaders learn to manage external factors well. A good leader can respond effectively to even the most abrupt external changes.
Andy Stanley describes vision as “your preferred future.”
“What does your preferred future look like?”
But when you constantly live in present mind, you’ll continue to operate in present mode, and the next few years won’t look much different than the last few—regardless of your level of output.
Spend some time asking yourself what you want your future career to look like; consider the level of financial freedom you hope to achieve in the future; think about the kind of relational health you’d like to develop.
people who experienced extreme personal growth and improvement maintained fervid expectations for their future.
Envision your future self. That’s the first step toward seeing that person show up in your future.
But the first member of this unholy trinity of distraction is not being successful; rather, it’s the appearance of success.
People love to present the best version of themselves on apps like Instagram.
For thousands of years, people have dressed up their careers with job titles that make them sound more important than they are.
Sometimes we run around like mini tornadoes, rushing from one thing to another because we’ve convinced ourselves that the busier we look, the more important we will seem.
If the game isn’t ultimately about appearing successful, am I willing to lose all that in order to win? In other words, would you be willing to allow some of the veneer of your success to fade, to get real and honest about yourself, your faults, your fears, your weaknesses, and places where you are emotionally unhealthy in order to heal and grow as a leader?
Don’t spend the precious years of your leadership life peacocking for others.
When you’re thinking ten, fifteen, and twenty years down the road, dropping the shiny exterior of success is nothing more than a short-term loss.
No, what sets apart the truly great investors, the Warren Buffets from the Warren Bluff-its, is how they react when a stock value is up.
Don’t let your short-term wins take you out of the game.
the allure of progress. We all know progress is addictive.
While our desire for progress can be a powerful asset and can help us make healthy lifestyle changes, it can also become another form of distraction.
The attraction of certainty is a dangerous distraction to our leadership because it leads us to compromise our integrity. In our longing to appear confident and certain, we become liars.
A 2002 study by the University of Massachusetts found that 60 percent of adults are unable to conduct a conversation of longer than ten minutes without telling a lie.
If you can exude confidence, people will buy what you say.
Authentic leaders are comfortable letting others know they don’t have all the answers.
I’d rather be a leader who acknowledges his uncertainty and leads someone else to find the right answer than a leader who fakes it and has the wrong answer.
Some problems require nuance, not certainty, and the danger is that our quest for certainty can lead us to oversimplify a complex problem.
The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right.
We constantly have to resist the temptations that keep us from paying attention to those things that need the most attention—in particular, our emotional health.
In this chapter, I want to help you avoid the distractions of the world and instead train yourself to turn down the noise and listen.
The practices I am suggesting and the habits you must develop will make you uncomfortable.
I can promise you this: you’ll never be the leader you want to be if you don’t learn these things.
Becoming emotionally aware requires you to learn how to study yourself. You need to understand what’s happening inside you, and as you grow in self-awareness, you become more emotionally intelligent.
The number one reason leaders crash and burn is that they’re unaware of something about themselves—or at the very least are unwilling to face it and admit it.
What I don’t know about myself is hurting me even as I write this.
Awareness is as powerful as unawareness is problematic.
That’s why self-awareness is sometimes referred to as emotional intelligence. As you grow more intelligent about your own emotions, you will be better able to help others understand their own emotions. But it all begins with you.
Too often we allow our emotions to sit in the driver’s seat, taking up that leadership space without any interrogation or confrontation.
A leader who doesn’t know themself is a dangerous guide.
As a parent, I’ve discovered that one of my greatest challenges is appropriately and effectively monitoring the use of technology in our home. The struggle is real. As adults, we know the addictive power our devices have over our lives. We can make efforts to resist and guard ourselves. But children cannot. In one of his opening monologues, Jimmy Fallon joked, “Studies have shown that it costs $600,000 to raise a kid. Or for $600 you can just buy an iPad.” Ah, very true, Jimmy.
There are loads of problems we don’t have time to wade through, but if I’m honest, our use of technology is one that constantly bothers me.
I’m concerned that we’re jeopardizing their creative abilities to play without a screen.
I once heard someone say it takes at least fifteen minutes of boredom before kids begin to exercise their creativity.
If it takes fifteen minutes of boredom for our creativity to kick in, then how much silence, solitude, and boredom must we suffer before we are able to actually hear what is going on inside us?
Key question of insight.
Great leaders turn down the noise low enough and long enough to be ruthlessly curious about their emotions.
the awkwardness, the embarrassment, and several actual alligator-sized tears arrived at about the same time.
“You’re welcome to pray for me, but please do it later. I think I need to leave.”
Until you can identify the emotions inside you, they will stay right there, locked up inside you. If you fail to listen to them, they will simply sit there, hidden and unexpressed.
Here’s the thing. As long as you keep your fingers on that volume knob, regulating the white noise of your busy schedule and masking your feelings with the appearance of success or another habit of distraction, those emotions will continue to accumulate and build.
Until you identify what you’re feeling, you can’t learn to manage it, and if you don’t manage your emotions, they will eventually manage you.
Learning to become an emotional detective is like learning a foreign language.
