A takeaway about leaders and novelists
Novelist Henry Miller said his memory was essential to his success, but so was his “forgettery.” Great novelists don’t simply report on their lives, they create new realities.
So do the best leaders. It’s a crucial point that’s often missing from leadership models and frameworks, because it’s intangible, an inner immeasurable.
Leadership at its best is **fundamentally** artistic, because its true best purpose is to create new value. That creative core involves much more than having a vision and a plan.
It’s an ongoing, adaptive, creative combination of self-awareness (Miller’s “memory”) and self-transcendence (“forgettery”) to improve human reality.
The best leaders believe in better, even without evidence, and commit to it, even when all seems lost.
Social science models & measures can provide useful insights for leaders to be aware of. But the leader’s **essential** difference-making work is to make things better in people’s lives. And **that** is more creatively discovered & expressed than planned. Conviction powers process.
Novelists know great stories mostly take shape along the way, are discovered as they write. They must be bold enough to set ambitious plans that will almost certainly unravel and need to change, again & again & again.
It’s part plan, propelled by creative courage, and faith in forgettery.
That’s also the “story” of most innovations, entrepreneurial ventures, and social breakthroughs that scale to sustained success.
The best leaders influence us, not only to perform with excellence, but to create possibilities -- possibilities that often evolve co-creatively en-route to become different or better than what the leader initially had in mind.
Leadership is **much** more art than algorithm.
Leaders are reality novelists, committed to their craft, keepers of hope. Leadership learning is lived into. Who the hell really knows how any particular story-in-progress will turn out, but let’s do our damndest to make it great!
Leaders (you please!) should influence us not only to achieve worthy goals & notch impressive metrics, but inspire us to create & contribute beyond what we thought was possible at the outset, for ourselves and others.
Please challenge us to explore:
Are there better problems to solve?
Are there better possibilities to seek?
Who else we should ask or involve?
What else we should try or test?
What assumptions might be holding us back?
What we should stop doing, or say “no” to, sooner rather than later?
How else we can live up to our values and advance our purpose?
How else can we engage each other to bring out our best abilities?
How we can find more happiness in working together even on hard things?
Who will be affected by what we do months, years and decades from now? and
How can we carry ourselves today in ways we’ll be proud of in the end.
Regardless of what’s in the way, and of their own shortcomings, leaders must keep writing “make it better” stories, so we can make them real.
Like artists, leaders need “forgettery.”
Unlike artists, leaders don’t make the art themselves, we all do.
Don’t “forget” that:)
That’s the takeaway: Remember forgettery.