Leadership thrives on companionship

(Please note that the views represented in this article and on this forum are entirely my personal)

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Who wins in the war between the “Illusion of Control” and “Pursuit of Purpose”? I think the energy that is fed by you when you are with your true companion – whether this companionship is personal or spiritual is less relevant. ??

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Great minds and writers say frequently that leadership is a tireless journey. But what does it require not to get tired on the long journey? My simple answer: a true companion.

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This appears to be quite contrary to the normal textbook answer I have read. No course during my MBA and afterwards mentioned this as the necessary element in leadership, but I have found it to be truth. Leadership is a long and tedious journey of hard work and positive energy. In my life, I have seen many talented getting tired on the way and ending up losing heart in their noble struggles and genuine pursuits. And I started contemplating the reasons. My emerging conclusion in that quest is that 1) it is not the hard work or lack of appreciation that cause the fatigue, 2) It is the illusion of control that causes the fatigue when things don’t go the required way, 3) one has to have a purpose to do all the work even after realizing that controlling outcome is only an illusion, and 4) in this tiring struggle, companionship is the medicine. Allow me to focus on the 4 parts of this argument in sequence.

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Hard work / lack of appreciation are only excuses as reasons of fatigue:

We always resort to easy conclusion that hard work causes fatigue and people get tired when they put a lot of hard work. However, over time, I have never found anyone emotionally tired because of the hard work s/he had put. To the contrary, I have seen that those who do hard work end up doing hard work till the time life allows them. Some of the best achievers I know worked both in health and sickness and it was, probably, hard work that kept them going in spite of challenges they faced. In other words, as long as people have appropriate time for themselves, I have always found hard work as a source of energy and not of fatigue in leaders. So, the perception that “I am tired because I have worked hard” warrants a vacation at max. No one should or has left a journey because s/he was working hard on something. Case in Point: Longer vacations have caused more tiredness than the longer working hours. Nothing has caused me more fatigue than sitting idle. ?

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Similarly, the case of “lack of appreciation” is even a weaker one than that of hard work. The mere fact that one considers appreciation as an important thing implies that the locus of his / her control is outside of his / her soul. It is tiring, I agree. You are never able to satisfy the world around you, and you can only obtain inner peace through focusing inside. So, not being appreciated causes tiredness but that should be overcome by anyone who wants to seek peace in life. If lack of appreciation causes tiredness, change the locus of control. I would rather recommend, that you change the locus of control regardless of whether you feel tired or not. Because one day, you will feel awful and tired both. Case in Point: the greatest leaders have not been gauged by how many followers they had. Rather, they pursued what was right to be pursued in the face of adversaries. Only time proved that they were worth following by billions. Imagine if they lost heart because of lack of followers!

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What causes fatigue: I think, Illusion of Control:

We get tired when we fail. When we succeed, we sleep for a good night or two and we are back with all the more energy. The greatest illusion one can have in life is that one controls the outcome. But we don’t realize it until we fail. Till that time, this illusion keeps one going and convinces people for putting hard work in the expectation that one controls the outcome. It is only human to expect outcome after doing the work. And probably one day, science will help convert part of that illusion into reality. But for now, we are far from that point. When things go wrong, our hard work, combined with the failures, fatigues us. Case in point: Winners find the energy to jump on the podium of Olympics while the losers don’t find energy even to stand up. Who is more tired?

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The key is to find a purpose while we eliminate illusion:

Imagine you failed, and I convinced you that it was an illusion that you controlled the outcome. This is demotivating and, without support from a deeper energy, you are more likely to stop working at all. That has been the real challenge in my life: how to put hard work knowing that I control nothing. In other words, why should anyone work if the outcome cannot be controlled. It is a very difficult and, mostly unresolved, dilemma. But I am tending to conclude that it requires a much deeper energy that compels us to work. Most learned people have identified the source of this energy as the “deeper purpose” one has defined for oneself. Case in Point: I have never met a person who has impacted the world positively and was not driven by an inner energy to do something.

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To survive in this struggle, companionship is needed:

Where do you rest your head after a long and tedious day – on a nice soft pillow. Companionship is that nice pillow for our emotions to find peace and rest. “Pursuit of Purpose” and “Illusion of Control” are always at war as conflicting forces. On one hand, while purpose drives everyone, on the other hand, the failure or the feeling that one does not control outcome demotivates. These opposing forces lead to a struggle that takes place inside everyone – more in leaders than in followers. This war is tiring. Finding the energy to fight with the world albeit losing mostly is the most essential trait one requires. The more one fights, the more one is likely to get fatigued unless one finds an emotional vacation. That emotional vacation is only found in meaningful companionship. One of my friends called such vacation as having “nucleus”. But I think that the word companionship is more profound in connotation though it may not be gender-based preference. If you are a saint of self-actualized, then you may not need a human companion but for most people like me, we are far from achieving it. Case in Point: the saying “behind every successful man, there is a woman” is only meant to highlight the importance of companionship in more conservative societies.

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If I am right in concluding above, it raises a much deeper question: why is it that we never look at personal lives as a mean to achieve excellence in professional lives? Why are all our struggles at the cost of personal lives if these would not help us excel in leadership and we will end up getting tired??