Welcome back!
Thank you for joining me :-)
Today we talk about 2 different angles for starting your leadership journey. Do you start building a foundation by learning about great leaders of history, or do you start by making someone's day better? We're going to review a little of both angles, in this short intro to 2 of my favorite leadership resources.
References to most of what's talked about below
Snapshots of Great Leaders LINK
Kid President (Robby Novak & Brad Montague)
Gandhi
Jobs
Merkal
Musk
Mayer
SoulPancake
Thank You for Listening!
Welcome back!
Thank you for joining me :-)
Today we talk about 2 different angles for starting your leadership journey. Do you start building a foundation by learning about great leaders of history, or do you start by making someone's day better? We're going to review a little of both angles, in this short intro to 2 of my favorite leadership resources.
References to most of what's talked about below
Snapshots of Great Leaders LINK
Kid President (Robby Novak & Brad Montague)
Gandhi
Jobs
Merkal
Musk
Mayer
SoulPancake
Thank You for Listening!
Hello, and welcome to common leaders. I am your podcast host Trevor, and thank you so much for being here. I am excited to talk with you today and share this space with you. I have a couple of really foundational books that started my path into leadership to talk about today. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time going into super deep details at this point, but later on, maybe in certainly if you're interested, the links will all be connected in the show notes.
And they're pretty readily available in both pretty affordable books. I'm going to use them to make kind of a broader point about why. I am here and why I hope you choose to be here with me and to help make this community what I hope it can be. I want to jump right in and again, thanks for being here.
The two books I have to share are a guide to being awesome with kid president. And snapshots of great leaders. These two books are very, very different books in terms of what they're trying to accomplish at their core. One is more of an academic book that being the snapshots of great leaders and kid president's guide is a really, really great book, but it's a little bit less formal. That really is one of the defining differences between these two in a lot of ways is just their approach to leadership and what they are asking of readers and what they are really trying to show leaders too. Because both of these books have a ton of leadership qualities in them, but take it from very different angles.
I have a personal favorite of these two, but both have a lot of really great content. Why I chose these two books to talk about first as we delve into common leaders. And what this is going to be is that both as I mentioned, were really important to me in terms of my experience with leadership and snapshots of great leadership is an older book, but again, it's more textbook style.
It goes through gosh, upwards of 30 different. In socially defined great leaders through history that range from Gandhi to mother Teresa, to Steve jobs and Nelson Mandela. There's a few sports folks in here as well, but primarily like political, really socially prevalent leaders. Like the folks that I mentioned. And it gives about eight pages per liter goes into some of their history, what set them apart, why people follow them. So it was really, really good in terms of understanding, again, really like the great leaders that are being talked about historically have really left their mark and had a ton of influence in really cool ways.
Then we have kid president whose guide to being awesome, as I mentioned, but less formal and really hopes to help you as the reader achieve both some ideas and some different approaches to change people's day. And this book had a huge impact on me going back to even before it was a book when it was a video from kid president -- Kid presidents, pep-talk, which I'll also link it's one of my all time favorites.
If you've ever worked on my team, you've sat and watched that video with me not as like a training per se, but just as a philosophical understanding of, of how I roll. It is a pretty, pretty cool concept. Differs a lot from the snapshots of great leadership.
The snapshot of great leadership. One of the things that gets me every time I pick it up is that Steve jobs is on the front. In, when I think about what is in the leadership world now and what is pushed frequently in terms of folks that we should aspire to be, it's oddly, not a lot of political leaders anymore, at least in the United States.
But it is a lot of, a lot of business people like your Steve jobs or Elon Musk's of the world Jeff Bezos --- like when you think success, you think folks like that. And Melissa Meyer, I believe was her name, who was the head of Yahoo for a bit. You set those bars pretty high, and then there's other a couple of political figures that maybe slide into there.
Like Angela Merkel is in the news right now is the first female German chancellor and had a really, really high approval ratings. Just again, like these really earth moving individuals, who I love to learn about, but in terms of how they got there and what they sacrificed to achieve those things are always pieces that I have thought maybe that I could do, but have never been willing to give up the things that maybe they gave up probably starting with sleep for a lot of them and in a lot of cases, family, life and things of that nature.
And it's just as never been worth it to me. Or I didn't think it was going to be worth it to me to do that. And I think that's the same for a lot of people. Again, I mentioned the people I grew up around and grew up with and the people that helped raise me, they had other priorities and somehow still managed to make huge impacts in the lives of the people around them.
And that is more along the lines of what's going on in the kid president book and in the philosophy that's behind what soul pancake and kid president do. Which is chip away and make the person next to you; who's closest to you make their day better. And if you make their day better, like maybe call that a win call that good and call that improvement, call that doing your leaderly duties as a, as a fellow human. And those things to me are great starting points because I would like to start each day with a win, especially when it comes to people. When I reflect on my day, it's often defined around the interactions that I have with people.
So why not start there is how I have, I guess, looked at it. And that's how I would encourage you and the common leaders community to also look at leadership. And the idea of betterment and improvement is to start with the person close to you, start with the people around you, and don't make it overwhelming where you feel like you need to, this is going to exaggerate, but fast, like Mahatma Gandhi did and brought peace and freedom to so many people in India.
But most people are probably not ready to make that type of sacrifice. Elon Musk, who is just a phenomenal technologist and business person has done really, really incredible things. And I've read his biography. Interesting and inspiring to some extent, but also pretty aspirational for most people.
He and his brother started a company and that became PayPal, I believe. And they stayed in a office front for, I forget how long. It was quite some time, but they rented an office space to work out of, and they slept under their desks and worked, you know, 20 plus hours a day programming this wonderful thing.
That's been kind of how he worked with Tesla more recently. And I think to a lesser extent space X and excuse me, to a greater extent, space X and a lesser extent solar city. But he's been wildly successful working 20 hours a day, I guess, is what I'm getting at. And while, without a doubt be hard pressed to turn down an opportunity to change the world in the way that I think most believe that he has, I'm not willing to give up 18 hours, 20 hours a day. And of course, all the things that come along with that, like a potentially shattered family here and there, it seems like he makes it work, but that's not the version that I want for myself.
And again, when I think about the majority... not by a slim margin of people that I know, I think they feel the same. How can I both improve myself if I want to go down that path and keep everything together, keep everything maintained. I have seen it firsthand that it can happen. So it know that it can, because the leaders of my world have helped me see that.
I think you probably have those leaders too. And those are the people that I think we should chase after we should aspire and be inspired by the people who have a tidbit that can help us tomorrow. Not necessarily the 180 that can revolutionize an entire automobile industry, for instance, again, just to pick on Elon again. But those are the things I want to go for. And kid president has helped me do that. I talk about it a lot, but it really has redefined over and over for me again, what a wind can be and what good leadership can look like. And. -- full of examples. The, the lesson, the takeaway from today is we're going to talk about some books we're going to eventually get into the snapshots.
But my big takeaway for today is find yourself a low key book, a kid president type of book. I'm not endorsing it necessarily because there's not any, anything binding that would lead me to need to do that. But one of the pages that I turn to and thinking about where to go with this in terms of how I feel towards kids present.
There's a lot of great ideas that have come out of it for me personally, but I wanted to start with something from a page and on page 89 in the book. It's be somebody who makes everybody feel like somebody. And that is a complex phrase, but it's the one that I want to have as really the focal point as we walk into our week today is Monday.
And I'm going to repeat that again: be somebody who makes everybody feel like somebody's. I think a different way to say that might be: make everybody you encounter feel special to some extent, maybe specials a little too soft and flowery for you; make them feel respected, make sure they feel important.
Why wouldn't you? And make sure they feel those things in terms of how you treat them. Because that's going to have a big impact on. How you go about your day at the very least. And if you can improve that person's day, there's not too many negative consequences of having more happy people in the world or more people who have gotten a compliment recently, even if it doesn't change their whole day.
So be somebody who makes everybody feel like somebody is the quote of the day. And that's the one I want to walk into Monday with, if you are ready to start, I guess, becoming the leader that you look up to. The leader that you wish you had, if you've had bad leaders and maybe the leaders that you do have, because they are the ones that probably fill your cup on a regular basis.
If you. I would like to check out kid president again, I'm going to link the videos, a couple of my favorite videos that are kind of old now and dated as a my, and I'll also link the book to the publisher and the same for snapshots of great leaders. Because snapshots of great leaders, does, as I mentioned, go into some pretty deep, big picture visionary type of things. But it's also a really, really outstanding explanation of different styles of leadership. How it happens because leader ship in terms of how most define it these days is related to influence. And there are a lot of people with influence and historically there have been Interesting characters.
They talk about Hitler in this book as a leader, they don't obviously praise the practices. But he was certainly very effective in getting people to get behind his cause early on, which is then what led to the awful wave that followed. With the point being there, that influence is a really, really big responsibility. So you might as well know a couple of different types and some of the different techniques and KP will help us on our way to having more influence over people, but also more positive influence towards them.
Again, as you wrap up and head out into your Monday be positive, make everybody feel like somebody and honestly, after you get off of this podcast, if you could do me the biggest favor and just post something positive, say something positive in a public place.
There is an awful lot of neutral at best and negative stuff floating around on the internet. So if you can contribute something even silly that will make someone laugh, but it's positive. I think that's a big move that you can make. And is appreciated as we move into a week. Everybody's going to have their days and that will make it better.
I hope you have a great rest of your day. I hope that you enjoy this and if you have feedback, please let me know. I hope that you'll consider downloading and sharing my future podcasts with the people that are around you. And the biggest ask that I have of you is check out the website, but check out a very specific place on the common leaders website.
It's called submit a leader, and that's a place where, I am looking to build a network, a community of people that I can learn from, and that we can learn from that are in your world and continually making a difference in it. That submit a leader piece is something I'm extremely excited about. I love to talk to people.
I love to listen to people. I love to learn. People's world and what makes them awesome. So if you have somebody who's awesome. Let me know. So I can absorb a little bit of that with a chance to share it on here, because some of those people that are nominated will end up on the podcast and an interview, some will end up on the social media with a shout out, some end up I'm hoping in a gallery on the website. So we can show your leaders off, give them a little bit of appreciation while hopefully learning something that will help us along our day. Again, that's a submit the leaders program at commonleaders.com.
Again, thank you for being here and have a great day.