Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories. - Sun Tzu

I've been a leader of people for many years across various roles; I believe some are built for it, have natural attributes that lean them towards leadership, and others are followers. All good leaders will be able to learn from others, evaluate good and bad examples, and apply that knowledge to becoming a better leader. This new series is designed to expose great quotes by various leaders and to investigate how they may relate or apply to myself or others. _{original im src}

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This week's leadership quote

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Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.

- Sun Tzu -

In all of the previous weeks of this leadership series I have received comments from people telling me they're not leaders - I call bullshit though.

Not everyone may lead men into battle, lead on the sporting field, in business or the workplace. Not everyone has children to lead through their formative lives, or siblings, social or peer groups in which to lead...I get it, but leadership isn't the sole domain of such people...leadership applies to everyone, in my knuckleaded opinion anyway.

Ownership

In my opinion, ownership of oneself is as much leadership as leading others is.

I'm talking about taking ownership and responsibility for one's own thoughts, attitudes, actions, behaviours and other such things that affect our lives and that of others. Not doing this means one is a passenger in their own life and I don't think that would lead to a good quality of life overall. Again, just my opinion. Failing to learn from past experiences, taking ownership of success and failures, and applying them to the present and future will lead to...well, more of what happened before rather than proactive forward progress. I say success and failure here as we can lean from both, failure especially. Learning what we did to achieve success is also important though, as we can build on that and create more of it moving into the future.

I used the word success in the previous paragraph but don't get caught up in the word; it means many different things. Treating someone with kindness and generosity is as much a success as securing a big new client at work. It's those small successes that help us lead a better life. I've said it many times, but will do so again, if we hold our breath waiting for big things to happen we may miss the many smaller things which, in my opinion, are the true essence of life itself, small things combined make up big things.

Discipline

I'm big on this one; it means a lot to me and I'm personally very disciplined - partly my personality and partly a learned behaviour.

Leading the best version of life possible takes effort and to do so consistently one must apply discipline. This takes many forms including finding the discipline to do, or not to do, things that could have positive or adverse effects upon our lives.

Having the discipline to make better choices is what leads towards a best-life situation and having to go without something now and then, or to do something consistently and to the best of one's ability, is part of that.

Taking ownership and having the discipline to apply it to one's life is going to help a person lead a better life and those that do it are leading themselves in the right direction. In my experience, those who show ownership and discipline are more focused on their goals, more honest about and with themselves, the situations they face and tend to live a little more passionately in respect of the best-life ethos.

Effort

We live in a world that brainwashes the value of effort out of people; it's done through lowering the bar, rewarding mediocrity and tearing down those who rise a little too high which makes those that do not look bad. You may not do that, but many do and it happens minute by minute around the world, even here on Hive. Tearing others down rather than lifting oneself up is a plague.

The other day someone popped into my Discord, a person who I've not engaged with before, and asked me for upvotes and delegations. They didn't warm up to it either, just asked. That's bonkers.

I'm a man who rewards effort; this doesn't mean I don't encourage others that don't show it though, just that those who don't show effort don't get rewarded. I said some things (constructive things) to the user mentioned above but I don't know, are they the sort of person to show ownership, discipline and effort? Time will tell I guess.

Effort takes effort...meaning it's sometimes difficult to maintain it, but sometimes [mostly] those things we most like to happen or achieve aren't easy to do; that's just the way of it. But if the reason we want to achieve a thing is compelling enough and ownership and discipline are applied the effort becomes less onerous and we're more likely to get to work.

I don't believe it for a second when people say they are not leaders - they might be lazy and not show leadership in their own lives and for themselves - but they're still leaders nonetheless. It's just that those people are leading themselves in directions that might not be overly advantageous or productive. A person can lead themselves in positive or negative directions; it's a choice and one that a person ultimately has to make, then own.

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If you have read this post and have any thoughts on this leadership quote, experiences of your own, or questions please feel free to comment below.

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