What is it about leadership that makes leaders go out on the cutting edge of things? How does the rest of the world see leaders when they go out on their limbs?
Recently, Orrin Woodward wrote about pioneering leadership in an article called LIFE Entrepreneurship & Opportunity.
Leadership requires seeing things before others see
Orrin Woodward
them, believing in the future before others believe it, and moving in that direction before others will move.This is
the path that new truths follow to enter the marketplace. In truth, however, isn’t a new concept. This has been the reception of new ideas for as long as human beings have populated the earth.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer stated that all truth goes through three steps.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident.
Entrepreneurs, by definition, work within the first two steps, since by the third step the real opportunities are gone. So don’t expect raving fans when you get started. Don’t expect everyone to celebrate you as a hero when ridicule or violent opposition is the beginning environmental conditions for all revolutionary change.
Leaders create the future through better ideas and implementation. It takes courage, fortitude, and high adversity quotient in order to change the world.
The first essential for leadership is vision. Without a vision of where you want to go, you cannot take anyone with you.
A compelling vision will inspire the second essential for leadership, courage. Without courage, a leader cannot hope to face the opposition that will surely arise from the new direction the leader wants to take.
Courage creates the third leadership essential, determined persistence. It is only through determined persistence a leader will have staying power to go through and have victory over the opposition to the vision.
Understand your vision of a different future will be opposed. Then, using courage and determined persistence to get you through that opposition, let it take you there. When you start, the world will see and ridicule. When you arrive, they will see you as a genius. Let’s enjoy our journeys to genius.
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