Here are nine old and new snippets of wisdom that spoke to me at some point in 2024. And a bonus at the end…
“Leadership is no longer part of a job description: something anointed on the chosen few. Leadership is a role to be adopted when needed, and then passed on when the need has gone. It’s a dynamic thing, moving around the organisation, reshaping the organisation as it passes from individual to individual, team to team.”
— “Is your organisation irrelevant?”, Peter Evans-Greenwood, 2012
“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”
– Andre Gide, Treatise on Narcissus [Le Traité du Narcisse] (1891)
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a very loose English paraphrase of his French poem Dessine-moi un bateau, or Make Me a Boat, found in Citadelle, 1948
“The person you are just about to become is a stranger to you.”
— David Whyte via Viv McWaters, 2016
“Covering content does not lead to knowledge retention, understanding of information or how to apply it. It actually serves as a barrier to learning. It is only when attendees become participants with the content and use it, even if just in discussions, that the knowledge is retained and understanding happens.”
— “Is Your Conference Guilty Of Content Bulimia?”, Jeff Hurt, 2013
“All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished.”
— Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, 2015
“It’s easier to act our way into a new way of thinking, than think our way into a new way of acting.”
— Jerry Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance, 2010
“Humans and stories need each other. We tell them, but they tell us too–reaching with soft hands and wide arms to pull us into their embrace. They do this especially when we have become mired in lives of which we can make no sense. We all need a path, and stories can sometimes usher us back to it.”
— Michael Marshall Smith, Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence, 2017
“The deepest human need is the need to be appreciated.”
— Attributed to William James, 1800s
BONUS: Nine practical tips for letting go in a chaotic world