Skip to main content

True Leadership

Talking with Amanda the other day, she said to me, "I think leadership is overrated.  I'm planning on being a follower instead."  Thinking of followers succumbing to peer pressure and doing dangerous things, sort of like lemmings going over the cliff, I managed to ask noncommittally, "Oh, really?"

So she explained.  If there are too many leaders each trying to go in a different direction, you get chaos.  What she was going to do was to find a leader who made the most sense, and follow that person and help him or her be more successful.  If there came another leader who was better, she would move to following that person.

It is definitely true that there are more people (for example) working at a company than being CEO, and so it makes sense to prepare to follow people you believe in and follow them well.  It is definitely true that at her elementary school where everyone believes him or herself to be a leader, there is a lot of chaos.  I did not tell her then (although she may find out from reading this blog) that what she is talking about is also a form of leadership, although not as flashy as being the person in front of the cameras all the time.  I did tell her that I am proud of her for thinking about this.  We will see where it leads.

Comments

FNDP said…
Smart girl!
November 19, 2015 at 8:15 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Things that are true

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.
8 comments
Read more

Science at home

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!
2 comments
Read more

A day at the fair

Yesterday afternoon the whole family went to the NC state fair. We had a good enough time that I think we are going back next year, although perhaps we will leave Luke at home with a sitter. We went right after Eleanor's school. Michael picked up Eleanor, I drove Luke and Amanda. Through an amazing bit of timing, we met in the parking lot and walked to the fair together, about a 10 minute walk (not bad at all, really). I had meant to get to the fair much earlier and see the parts that Eleanor and Michael claimed not to be interested in (the animals and crafts, mostly) but I was running a little late. Our area has been in a serious drought for the past few months, so I am not complaining that it rained (hard) on us as we were getting to the gate. But it does seem a bit hard that we planned to go to the fair on the one day in the past 3 months that we had a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain was scattered, and the clouds soon moved off to water another area. We took the opportun...
5 comments
Read more