David Feldt Proud father. Entrepreneur. Builder. Catalyst. Accelerator. Guide.

The Great Leadership Challenge

[via Jim Rohn]

If you want to be a leader who attracts quality people, the key is to become a person of quality yourself. Leadership is the ability to attract someone to the gifts, skills, and opportunities you offer as an owner, as a manager, as a parent. What's important in leadership is refining your skills. All great leaders keep working on themselves until they become effective. Here are some specifics:

Learn to be strong but not impolite. It is an extra step you must take to become a powerful, capable leader with a wide range of reach. Some people mistake rudeness for strength. It's not even a good substitute.

Next, learn to be kind but not weak. We must not mistake weakness for kindness. Kindness isn't weak. Kindness is a certain type of strength. We must be kind enough to tell someone the truth. We must be kind enough and considerate enough to lay it on the line. We must be kind enough to tell it like it is and not deal in delusion.

Next, learn to be bold but not a bully. It takes boldness to win the day. To build your influence, you've got to walk in front of your group. You've got to be willing to take the first arrow, tackle the first problem, discover the first sign of trouble. Like the farmer, if you want any rewards at harvest time, you have got to be bold and face the weeds and the rain and the bugs straight on. You've got to seize the moment.

Here's the next step. You've got to learn to be humble but not timid. You can't get to the high life by being timid. Some people mistake timidity for humility. But humility is a virtue; timidity is a disease. It's an affliction. It can be cured, but it is a problem.

Humility is almost a God-like word. A sense of awe. A sense of wonder. An awareness of the human soul and spirit. An understanding that there is something unique about the human drama versus the rest of life.  Humility is a grasp of the distance between us and the stars, yet having the feeling that we're part of the stars.

Here's a good tip: Learn to be proud but not arrogant. It takes pride to build your ambitions. It takes pride in your community. It takes pride in a cause, in accomplishment. But the key to becoming a good leader is to be proud without being arrogant.

Do you know the worst kind of arrogance? Arrogance from ignorance. It's intolerable. If someone is smart and arrogant, we can tolerate that. But if someone is ignorant and arrogant, that's just too much to take.

The next step is learning to develop humor without folly. In leadership, we learn that it's okay to be witty but not silly; fun but not foolish.

Next, deal in realities. Deal in truth. Save yourself the agony of delusion. Just accept life as it is. Life is unique. The whole drama of life is unique. It's fascinating.

Life is unique. Leadership is unique. The skills that work well for one leader may not work at all for another. However, the fundamental skills of leadership can be adopted to work well for just about everyone: at work, in the community, and at home.

Tweets on 2008-03-28

• People tell me that I'm adaptable and versatile #
• They also say I'm dual-natured, elusive, complex and contradictory #
• Happiness is not about how much you have, but about how little you miss #

Tweets on 2008-03-27

• why do people have to stop and ogle at someone's misfortune - sad reflection of mankind! #
• @organic_inc the time on the board is wrong! #
• Being normal is not a virtue; it denotes a lack of courage #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-26

• I'm in Chryslerland ... #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-25

• It's my daughter's third year doing the "Walk with Israel" in Toronto. Sponsor her and her brother here: http://tinyurl.com/3xk43h #
• Headed to Bloomfield Hills later today #
• It's summer in Phoenix and Miami, it's spring in New York, it's mid-winter in Toronto #
• Hope it's not going to snow - I hate driving on the 401 to Detroit in the snow #
• Yoni is happily standing, balancing and traveling but doesn't want to take that first big step #
• White-out conditions on the road to Detroit. Winter storm in Spring? WTF?! #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-24

• Grooving in the new space - it is awesome! #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-23

• Talk is cheap - Play the Game #
• The city is so quiet and peaceful - no traffic on the roads. I think we need more Easter Sundays. #

Twitter Updates for 2008-03-21

• about to read the Megillah - the kids are freaking out! #
• The forecast calls for snow flurries this weekend - welcome to Spring in Toronto! #
• The Iraq War is 5 years old this week - Reuters provides a powerful retrospective http://iraq.reuters.com/ #

Honey bees and your favorite ice cream

We may not consciously think that bees are essential to our food supply but we'd be wrong. They are responsible for the survival of 1/3 of our food supply!

In recent years honey bees are mysteriously vanishing across the country and it has serious implications for our food supply, not to mention the beauty of nature. Albert Einstein once predicted that if bees were to disappear, man would follow only a few years later.

Haazen-Dazs presents a wonderful site that describes the plight of the honey bee, the impact on our food supply and what we can do about it. You'll have to explore the site to make the connection between ice cream and bees

The site was designed by Goodby and produced by London's unit9.

A sobering fifth anniversary retrospective of the Iraq war.

Whatever your political leanings are about the Iraq war, Reuters and Mediastorm's "Bearing Witness" site offers a stark, informative overview of the conflict that turns five years old this week.

Featuring interviews and profiles from three Reuters correspondents--Samia Nakhoul, Goran Tomasevic and Dean Yates--along with a catalog of photojournalism and documents, the site offers startling video footage, a timeline of events, maps of oil hotspots, fatality locations and links to several resources for info that range from blogs to news to U.N.-sponsored destinations and much more.