I think people operate on fall pre-tenses they grew up with throughout their lives. In any standard parenting book, it’ll tell you to avoid ambiguous personality praises. ‘Oh you are so smart’, or things like this create a false sense of security in children. At the ripe old age of 26, I think it was time I addressed some fall pre-tenses I carried.
There is a large list here, but the most apparent recently is that ‘Haruun is a great Leader’. This is something I’ve been told throughout my entire life. I have never let this get to me to the point where it has become a token personality trait I would post on my Linkedin or something.
“Haruun: Leader.”
This shit sounds more cringe every time I read it. Like I try not to come off as an arrogant ass when writing this stuff, but man is this painful to read through. How do the Tim Ferris', Matt D'Avella's and Ramit's of the world do this.
But I did always think I was a strong leader, in the aspect of being able to deliver results. I think I grew up thinking I had the power to inspire, motivate and bring the best out of people around me.
I think if you asked me 5 years ago to define what makes a great leader I would say he needs to be able to deliver results at any cost. He is either loved or feared by the people, and he is reliable.
If you ask me now what I would define as a great leader, it is by far the ability to bring the best out of the people around you, period.
A good leader to me is able to take the resources, situation and people around him at hand and bring the best out of them, completely ignoring any short-comings they have and fully leveraging their advantages and hiding their weaknesses. In the last 3 years, I have fallen into managing a team I asked for but wasn’t ready for. I was placed here because of just pure need, I am good at what I do, but I can’t do everything. When that happened I ended up in management. What happened over the past few years was that I struggled greatly. I was suddenly responsible for tons of projects, people and situations in a language I wasn’t 100% confident in at the time. I was critical of people around me, I was authoritative in direction, ‘Just do this and stop f**king asking so many questions’, ‘I will do this, just take care of this’, and ‘This doesn’t look good, just send me the file I’ll do this’. I didn’t do this intentionally, but I wanted to get shit done, this was my subconscious just doing it the only way I knew how. I had enough Chinese back then to get shit done, but looking back I probably sounded like a 12 year old passing out directions. Yikes. Thank god I take language much more seriously now.
What happened was that I would take on a huge burden of work that would cause me endless nights of no sleep, and creating team who were never given the chance to take responsibility and grow, as well as creating a tiring work environment for everyone. I would take the blame for everything, never offer instruction on how to improve, and when shit needed to be done I couldn’t trust anyone to do it or take responsibility. It was a learning curve. I know now I failed at leadership.
I took a lot from these experiences, I learned not to be a martyr, to trust people, give people room to grow and my real goal in leadership I think now was to inspire, motivate and let others thrive. Thank you ‘How to win friends and influence people’.
I also learned a lot about my own personality. I think I do come off too direct, half of dealing with management is making sure everyone feels good. Like yes that project will get done if you put in 12 hours by yourself, but taking it away from someone else means they feel like shit, and you end up feeling like shit as a result.
I learned that I should try to be more patient with people and just straight up try and take it easier. Happy people work better.
Failure Lessons:
1. Question your false pre-tenses.
2. Good leaders make people around them better.
3. Just be nice.
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