What Zelensky's Leadership Can Teach Us About Our Own Path to Success

Zelensky used to be a comedian. Now he's an inspirational leader spearheading his nation's valiant fight to stay free. The media marvels at how the wartime Zelensky is so totally unrecognizable from the pre-war Zelensky. But maybe that's not true.

One thing comedy teaches you is the discipline of tuning in to your audience. The more you know your audience, their needs, their tastes, their highs, their lows, the more you can craft stories and ideas that draw out a laugh from them. Each time you travel to a new audience, you first strive to know them and then you adapt your style and message for them.

You recognize that a situation can be viewed from different lenses. A subtle shift in which facts you focus on, or what interpretation you give those facts, or how you deliver them in your words, facial expression and tone, can make all the difference in whether people see the events in their life as painful, frustrating, intriguing or simply laughable. It is all a matter of perspective.

You convey poise, but you realize your power only comes from your audience. If they do not engage, connect or resonate with you, your act is over.

You recognize the hidden power in groups. When you can open people up to collectively giggling and smiling and laughing, they start to draw joviality out of each other, each audience-member sharing and reinforcing the mirthful mood in the room.

You are an eternal optimist. Where others see a humdrum existence, you see opportunity for playfully shaking up the human spirit.

That's what a comedian - a good comedian - does. And isn't that what Zelensky has been doing as a leader, too? Tuning in and adapting to his different audiences, from the Ukranian people to the British parliament, helping his people see a seemingly hopeless situation as an opportunity to go on a hero's journey, recognizing that he's merely a servant leader, for it is the people who in their collective choices and actions hold the power, trusting that while they may be poorly armed and trained, their power multiplies when they stand united, and believing that even in the most adverse of circumstances, the human spirit can be stirred.

When we make a pivot in life, let us not assume that we have to give up on what we've acquired in the past to start anew. We may need to give up the superficial form of our former discipline, but the core strengths we have developed could then be repurposed into a new form.

In my own small way, I learned this over the course of making four major pivots in life - from mathematics to business-academics to strategy consulting to entrepreneurship to the science of success in life and leadership. I realized across the arc of my career that mathematics never left me, but returned, again and again, in different forms, offering me the chance to bring symmetry, structure and simplicity to my creations.

We have to, as Leonardo de Vinci once said and as Zelensky is now so beautifully exemplifying, "realize that everything connects with everything else."