Leadership Styles: Condition People for Success

Leaving home for college in the fall of 1975 was one of the toughest transitions of my life. Looking back it seems almost ludicrous to me now. The University of Georgia in Athens was barely fifty miles away from where my parents and I lived, less than an hour’s drive. Obviously I could come home at anytime to visit. But to me, I might as well have been heading off to the University of Alaska. I was leaving my home, my friends, my neighborhood, and going off to live in a strange environment with thousands of students and gigantic classes. Arriving at the campus in Athens was an experience of total culture shock. I’d grown up in a tiny community on the outskirts of a town of maybe five thousand people. Now there were four times that many people just in my school. One of my first classes, Political Science 101, took place in a huge amphitheater with several hundred students. I took a seat in the back row and looked around. A lot of these students had come from the wealthier sections of Atlanta and gone to prep schools. They were ready for this place and looked like they fit right in. I felt like I’d relocated to Mars. That first day of class, the girl sitting in front of me raised her hand. When the professor called on her she said, “Are we going to receive a syllabus today?” A syllabus? What on earth was that? I had not the slightest clue what the word meant. I thought, The class hasn’t even started yet, and I’m already behind! Had these people all taken a course in how to go to college? Because they all seemed like they knew what was going on, what to expect, what to do, and I was absolutely lost. After that demoralizing political science class, I went back to my dorm room and called my dad from a pay phone at the end of the hall. “Dad,” I said. “I hate it here. I don’t like the people. I don’t like the place, and I don’t want to stay. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I want to quit school, come home, and get a job.” He said, “Look, Son. We’ve already paid your tuition. You’re already there. Tell you what. Wait till Christmas, and then we’ll make a decision.” “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give it a shot.” I hung up feeling heavy-hearted. Christmas seemed like an awful long way away. That first semester at college was the first and only time in my life when I found myself saying, “Okay, so this is what being depressed is all about.” A few weeks later, we had our first political science exam. When they handed around our graded papers, I was thrilled to see I’d made a 98. I peeked over at the girl who sat in front of me, the one who’d asked about the syllabus on day one. Because of the slope in the amphitheater seating, if I leaned forward a little I could just see her paper as she looked at it. She’d gotten a 46. I sat back in my seat, stunned, the realization echoing around my brain like a thunderclap. This girl with great leadership qualities had almost made me quit! Of course, she didn’t know that. And it wasn’t actually her who had almost made me quit. The fact was that I’d been just looking for a reason to disqualify myself, a reason to say “I’m not good enough.” It was me who almost made me quit. Now, this was weird. It wasn’t like I’d grown up with parents who told me I was a loser. I didn’t come from a miserable home. I had two of the greatest parents anyone could wish for. They never yelled at me, never hit me, always encouraged me and believed in me. I had a very happy childhood. Yet here I was, fully expecting myself to fail, for absolutely no good reason. I had this deep sense of inadequacy, this conviction that I wasn’t good enough. Where did that come from? I’m now convinced that it just comes with the territory. It’s part of being a human being in the world. People are designed for success but get conditioned for failure. You are not supposed to be broke. You are not designed to settle for mediocrity. But somewhere along the line, the world starts beating you down, programming you with the idea that life is hard. It starts telling you that as soon as you get out of school you’re going to go “get a job,” which is code for “go find something that’ll allow you to just get by.” Day-by-day, week-by-week, you gradually give up on your dreams and start accepting what you think life has to offer. Of course, if you had an especially tough time as a child, growing up with people who were constantly cutting you down and undermining your confidence, then it’s easy to understand how you’d arrive at adulthood carrying a pretty big burden of belief that you were a failure. But what I was seeing in myself shocked me. I realized that it doesn’t take a terrible, abusive, Charles Dickens type of childhood to do that to you. Because even if you grow up in the most supportive environment imaginable, it seems to be part of our human nature that we beat up on ourselves. Yes, circumstances can put up roadblocks and smash potholes in our path. But far more insidious are the ways we undermine our own forward motion ourselves. They say most plane crashes happen in the first 90 seconds after take-off. I think most careers are like that too. We sabotage ourselves and talk ourselves into outright failure or its sullen cousin, mediocrity, before we’ve even gotten started. Right there in my first week of college, I’d almost quit school. I’ve often wondered: if I had quit, how differently might my life have gone? Most people wake up every day looking for a reason not to win, a reason not to do great things in their lives. Looking for a reason to fail. Some people, as the saying goes, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. When they see a doorway of great possibility open in front of them, they turn the other way. I’ve seen people who started out in life with an “I’m gonna conquer the world” mindset. As the years tick by, that optimism fades. They start living in the past. By the time they’re 20, they’re already reminiscing about the high school football days. By 25, all they talk about is what they did in college. Some people are old at 30; the best of their life is behind them. Yet I’ve met 80-year-olds who are incredibly young. Chronological age is completely beside the point. I don’t care how old you are, if you want to live your best life, if you want to be someone who leads others, who makes a difference in the world, then you need to be focused on the incredible possibilities that lie ahead on the path at your feet. I believe the single most important factor in your success is to take responsibility for where you are in your life and for moving forward from there. You’re the one who sits where you sit, the one whose task it is to figure out what you need to do now to get to someplace better. You will never rise above the image you have of yourself. And the person in charge of that image is you. Nobody else. You are in charge of your life—not the people who doubt you, not the people who question you, not the people who put you down, not the people who look down their noses at you. If you want to win, don’t waste any time beating yourself up about the mistakes you’ve made or the ways you think you don’t measure up. You can’t let life overwhelm you. You have to be the one who goes out there and overwhelms life, the one who seizes life by the horns and wrestles it to the ground. Taking responsibility for your life doesn’t guarantee you’re going to do well, or that you’re going to succeed. In fact, it doesn’t guarantee much. But it does guarantee this: that whatever happens, you’re the one behind your own steering wheel. I don’t know if I can say this came to me as a fully formed revelation, exactly, sitting there in my freshman political science class, and I wouldn’t say I exactly went out there and overwhelmed life. But I did finish that first semester with pretty decent grades. I started to have a glimmer of understanding that I was the person in charge of my life. That in order to be a winner, I would have to start looking at myself as a winner, talking like a winner, acting like a winner, thinking like a winner. This was how the whole team at Primerica needed to start thinking again. During the nineties, we had experienced a period of changing visions for the company. The company had made a lot of positive strides, but all the changes had also taken a toll. On the positive side of the ledger, we focused on needs-based selling and implemented business systems that allowed the company to navigate a changing regulatory environment. But these changes also had our team wrestling with how to build their businesses. I felt that we were applying the gas pedal and the brakes at the same time. The changes were very important—critical in the IPO process a decade later—but our sales force was more focused on what and how to do business and not on why to do the business. They and we were focused on the business as a business and not a cause. We wanted to keep all the good that had been done and unleash the fun and excitement in the business.

This post is influenced and an extract from Thought Leadership Zen Blog