Reality, Levity, and Human Potential

“A leader’s first job is defining reality” - Max DePree

I know there are many of us us out there that feel the same way that I felt for such a long time. Not just that we exist as spirits inside of a human body — but that the written word simply doesn’t do justice to the experience of living in today’s hyper-connected, fast-media world. Oftentimes language is just as brute a force as math or science. We delude ourselves into believing that the utmost most important thing in life is the all-mighty dollar — and because we our subconscious has an unquenchable appetite for ideological machinery. It fashions such mechanisms behind the curtain of our consciousness. It is this mechanistic religious impulse, the mythological brain and all of the other aspects of being in the universe that evoke a sense of mystery.

Rather than writing with too much consideration, perhaps what life requires of us now is to define reality using the words that most adequately capture the world as it exists. Machines can only answer questions (not ask them), and so humans are left to their own devices; one of the most ancient tools for such inquiry is the written experience. The challenge is that embarking on such a broad endeavor requires a cultural shift that appreciates the development of leaders as writers. They tell us we should be the change we want to be in the world. I suppose building toward such an reflective educational culture means adopting a role that I’d like to imagine myself infinitely questing toward: a professional writer who leads himself to lead others through his writing. This is all so disgustingly self-indulgent, but I don’t think that makes it any less worth of pursuing. As we cultivate more professional leaders, I imagine the most effective of these will also be able to better grapple with the tough decisions ahead. Grandoise yes, but this is also the sort of society I think is worth building toward, the sort of perspective I think we could do worse than introduce to young aspiring leaders within our schools and workforce.

An culture of inner leadership based around writing means that we use the process of writing as a praxis for self- and societal improvement. It means taking pride in nurturing a culture around ideas that make us vulnerable, topics and sentiments that may seem overly earnest or corny or unhip. Exercising this tragic cynical tendency is to dismiss much of what has made us evolve into a civil society, since the Rennaisance. It’s important to be able to feel these ideas for their emotional weight; this necessarily entails empathy, which we cannot expect ourselves to be able to build a prosperous society without. Communicating openly and with honesty is challenging and not for everyone, but it’s a task that I now feel suited to, if for no other reason than because I have experienced firsthand just how easy it is to get tangled up in the world, how such an approach to self-reflection can help one get back on track.

Most importantly, a renewed leadership culture requires reverence for human limitations in the presence of the written word. I’m well aware that the words I’m writing right now are those that can be used to excite or inspire toward something other than the Good — but it’s this same awareness that reveals the stark limitations of language itself. The written word has the power to make you believe in something larger than yourself: Your human potential. For me, this process comes to life most intimately when I’m communicating through my own inductive and deductive experiences, and I am driven by the need to expand this community as a process of wisdom unfolding in real-time on the web.

There are many leaders who do a really good job of embodying these traits elsewhere online, but you have to seek them out, because they spend most of their time writing about things of more immediate economic value, or otherwise enjoying their own private lives. The inner lives these folks experience however are so, so much more beautiful compared to the superficiality that we so regularly choose to influence our media diets. Anyway, because part of the approach with this blog is to pursue a sort of ex post facto reflective capacity in a more methodological manner, in time I may end up having a Resources section where I’ll keep links to this sort of content. In pursuing writing as leadership, I’m really striving to be someone who writes the right words for myself to live up to this task at hand, which is all part of this broader cultural change I’d like to help be a part of. To this end, on the blog I spend a good deal of my time writing about things that are personal, reflective, and geared toward my own self-improvement.

Of course, I write other stuff on this blog too. Stupid stuff that doesn’t really mean much. That’s because I value levity — and it’s simply impossible to deal with these topics without incorporating humor as well.

Or, as Lin Yutang puts it:

“Only he who handles his ideas lightly is a master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them. Seriousness, after all, is only a sign of effort, and effort is a sign of imperfect mastery. A serious writer is awkward and ill at ease in the realm of his ideas as a nouveau riche is awkward, ill at ease and self conscious in society. He is serious because he has not come to feel at home with his ideas.” (The Art of Living, p. 80).