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Want to be a great leader? Work hard to develop extraordinary skills. Become an independent thinker and have the courage to follow your ideas. Show respect to others and never think more highly of yourself than you ought. Avoid bad habits of sloth, dissipation, dishonesty, and other qualities that would cause others to lose respect for you. Set goals that challenge you to do your best and follow diligently after them. Apply all this consistently to every part of your life, always striving to better yourself in even the smallest ways while maintaining integrity.

In my student days, I worked in restaurants. I worked with a guy who was a Mexican immigrant, who washed dishes with me for several years in a busy restaurant. He worked hard. He was always upbeat. He never complained. And he radiated a sense of joy all about him. Why? Because he was content with what he was doing while obviously striving to improve himself at the same time. He would often sing while he worked. And that was inspiring. That man might never make a mark in the broader society but I could see he would be a fine leader wherever his life circumstances took him.

These same qualities can be found in the startup world, as nicely reflected in this piece. But they are by no means limited to those who seek success in business. They are life qualities. It profits us all to follow them.




"That man might never make a mark in the broader society but I could see he would be a fine leader wherever his life circumstances took him."

Ah the leadership question...

Being a few years past high school, it's interesting to look at many people who seemed like leaders but never made it.

Some times it was life-circumstances. But I think think there is also a too-great a willingness to merely work hard at what presented itself.

There much that has been said on this but it's worth mentioning that to reach a certain level of leadership, while you can continue leading a bit by example, you have to be mainly willing to delegate a lot of the actual work. Essentially, you have to be able to use people. It's more than positive vibes.

In software, in particular, inspiration has never been part of the equation for any good manager manager I've had. Instead, saying what mattered and getting out of the way has always been key. Don't lead technical people by example. Don't clean our bathrooms or our code. "Mr. Energy" would not be welcome here. And I've had too many managers who were bad because they never learned the lesson that their job was no longer coding or even "inspiring" but organizing and bureaucracy-hacking.


Not all leaders are managers. Some leaders lead quietly from behind their desks while their managers stay out of the way.


"willing to delegate"

There is so much to be said here. When I first had the idea for the project i'm on now I decided to find someone to help me with the business tasks, and I found another person who knew the domain better then me. It took a few months, but eventually I found them. Then something weird happened. We were all in the same room, I had brought them both there because I knew they were the best! however I somehow couldn't allow myself to let them do the things they needed to do. For some reason, I still knew more than my domain expert, I was going to make better business decisions than my business guy. The meeting was great for meeting everyone, but in terms of progress none was made.

Then they found my weak spot. We went out for lunch at a bar, and for some reason never left the bar. After many beers, I had this drunken vision that I was doing things wrong! So I went home, and said to myself hey i'm the tech guy, i'm just going to worry about the tech, and let these guys do the things they need to do. Thats when the progress ball rolled down the hill.


I'm with you on most of that, but I think this point is a little dangerous:

> Avoid bad habits of sloth,

Willingness to pitch in when hard work really is called for is a necessary and valuable trait, of course. However, working hard when you don't have to is wasteful, and too many people confuse the two.

Sometimes, a natural inclination to be "lazy" is a lot like trying to avoid unnecessary work by being smart. I would rather work for the boss who identified the problem and bought a dishwasher.


Being seen doing the dishes obviously made an impression on at least one employee. Maybe time optimization isn't the only factor?


> Maybe time optimization isn't the only factor?

Sure, that's possible, but could the CEO have been doing something else during the same time that would have made an even better impression, or that would have positively influenced more than "at least one" employee?


I think the uses of "sloth" and "lazy" here are quite importantly different. The idea of working smart by being lazy, really means (at least to me) coming up with a better solution than the obvious hard work, time consuming approach, then going off and doing something better with the time that you have saved. Sloth implies to me sitting around doing nothing.

So: general sloth=bad;lazy approach to some tasks=good when it frees your time to do more important stuff.


Like most things, there's "good lazy" and "bad lazy" , and "good sloth" and "bad sloth".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wall#Virtues_of_a_program...

In my experience, sometimes when I'm being "bad lazy", the "good lazy" outcomes happen anyway, but it's certainly not a recommended path to success...


I agree with your main point - that being a great leader is more caused by other things and not at all by washing dishes.

It's funny that you thought of a story about dishwashing in response to the dishwashing story :)

The headline intentionally gets causality wrong in order to attract attention. Misleading sensationalism is pollution.




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