Success vs Leadership

Many people think that leadership and success are synonymous. If you can be a leader, you will surely be successful. If you are successful, you must be a leader. So, no wonder many of us are trying to be leader to be successful. Can you think this again? Have not you seen someone who is a leader and unsuccessful at the same time? Have not you seen someone who is way successful and never a leader? Please think again.

Leadership and success are unlikely to go hand in hand all the time.

Leadership is about your choice. If you want to be leader, you can. You need to practice leadership. You can learn leadership the way you can learn any other skill. It requires dedication, willingness, sacrifice,…..you name it …….to learn leadership or to be a leader. It’s not about learning leadership theory, it’s about learning leadership theory and practice those on the ground day in and day out. While learning and practicing leadership, it requires sacrifice from one’s side. It’s not a neutral or win-win game for everyone associated with you at least while you learn and practice leadership. It’s about serving others, giving all the benefits of doubts to others, making others great, giving credits to others, helping others, seeking opportunity to think how you can help others, ………again, you name it. It is a losing game for yourself almost all the time since you need to sacrifice. You can easily see that doing all those for others may not make you successful, rather those are likely to make you unsuccessful both in short term and long term. Yet, surely, if you can do those for others, you will continue to be leader. Leadership is a journey, and you need to be a practitioner throughout this journey. And you can never be a perfect leader, never ever. Now, think twice or more whether you still want to be a leader or not.

• There are hundreds of thousands of genuine leaders around you who are damn unsuccessful. Still, they prefer to be leader or practice leadership.
• There are plenty of successful people around you who have never practiced leadership and they do not need to be leader. They need to be successful and they are!

Who does not want to be successful? We all want to be successful. We plan to achieve something in life based on our desire, wish, need, often capacity, and capability. When we can achieve those, we become successful – be it for money, security, love, self-fulfillment, community service, ……….or whatever we want in our life. And we can become successful in many different ways – we can be solopreneur, individual contributor, team member, manager, trader, ……….thousands of available different type workers. Now if you relook to your surroundings, you will find many successful people who are successful for many different reasons.

• Those successful people are not successful because of the fact that they are leaders, or they are continuously practicing leadership.    

You may ask whether there is anything wrong to be a leader while trying to be successful. The answer is, of course, it is not wrong. Prioritization is important – being leader or being successful.

Let’s not unnecessarily focus on trying to be leader while in reality we are trying to be successful. Happy New Year 2021 :)