Leaders get past their own need.

Successful leaders get past their own need.  They see life as a place to give, and as a by-product of giving, they receive back in the end.  ~Henry Cloud

Given the time of year, it seemed appropriate to pause and take a moment to think about giving and leadership. 

A leader who I greatly admire is Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS (probably better known as TOMS Shoes but they’ve added sun glasses, etc. so they’ve grown way beyond shoes).  I admire Blake because his sense of giving in the context of for-profit business initiated a movement.  In Blake’s recent book, Start Something that Matters, he says

“There is something different in the air these days: I feel it when I talk to business leaders, give speeches at high school and college campuses, and engage in conversation with fellow patrons at coffee shops.  People are hungry for success—that’s nothing new.  What’s changed is the definition of that success.  Increasingly, the quest for success is not the same quest for status and money.  The definition has broadened to include contributing something to the world…”

We live in an era when giving is truly becoming a virtue to be pursued, admired, and included in the idea of “success.”  Frankly, it goes well beyond an idea, it is a movement.  I’m personally challenged by Blake’s philosophy of simplicity, which I think is linked to our ability to give.  Blake says, “Own as little as you can get away with.  Seriously—how much do you need?  The fact is, the more you have, the more effort and money you have to spend taking care of it, which distracts you from enjoying it.”  He goes even further to say, “Clean out your closet.  Clean out your storage drawers—at least four times a year.  I firmly believe that the less stuff you have sitting around, the less stuff you have cluttering up your mind.”   

The generation of emerging leaders has a lot to teach us Baby Boomers about leadership and giving.  For thousands of years we’ve been told that it is better to give than to receive, but this generation of leaders seems to actually “get it.”  Maybe it’s because they’ve known from a fairly early age that their likelihood for financial gain greater than their parents’ was going to be minimal, so they began searching for meaning in other places.  Or maybe they simply observed their parents' and the entire Baby Boom generation's drive for money and status, which we never seem to have enough of, and it really didn't appear all that appealing from a distance.

Regardless, we have a lot to learn from the generation of young social entrepreneurs and philanthropists who clearly see the value in giving and seem to very quickly get past their own need.  As we pause during this holiday season, may we all (especially us Baby Boomers!) take an extra moment to get past our own need and see life as a place to give.

One of my favorite quotes of all time is from Winston Churchill who said, “We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give.”