A short spoken monologue by Chad Silverstein reflecting on the ubiquity of addictions (beyond substances) and connecting a personal tendency to "always be chasing" with leadership and growth. He argues leaders must model the behavior they expect, practice humility, inspect to learn rather than to punish, and build skill through effort so they can authentically lead others.
Chapters
Everyone has addictions. We tend to think addictions have everything to do with drugs and alcohol, but it doesn't. People are addicted to all kinds of things. From their phones to social media, to shopping, to buying things, consumers consuming things, tv, binge watching, eating. There are addictions that run wild and there are just some that are frowned upon more than others. One of my personal ones is that I am always chasing, I'm always trying to achieve. I'm always trying to do more, more than I could probably do. I always take on more than I can. And it's a problem for me that I've had to really work against because my tendency is just to keep saying yes to more things and that can get me in a lot of trouble. But the one thing that I love about that characteristic of mine is that I'm always trying to grow, I'm always trying to get better. And it's true what they say, and we say it in Built to Leave, that you can never take others further than you've gone yourself. And if you just reflect on what that means for you, someone who's trying to be a leader, someone who's trying to lead themselves or be a parent, or someone who is leading at work, someone who's taking on a passion project, whatever it is that you're trying to do in your life, whether it is your own or trying to influence other people to come come alongside with you, you're never going to be able to get others to be able to do things that you haven't done yourself. Unless you're a con artist and nobody wants to be led by a con artist. And when you're found out about, you're going to get fired and you're going to have people leaving you. So think about where that shows up in your life and think about how and what you want to get from others. And if you're in a leadership role, if that's some sort of metric or performance or purpose driven, you know, project that you're working on or you know, sprints that you're, you're tackling every single week, whatever it is, you got to be able to show up and model the way and show them how to get it done and do it even more. And it's one thing to be able to just be in a position to tell people what to do, but again, people don't want to just be told what to do by someone who they know doesn't know how to do it themselves. So if you're a manager or you're someone who's been put into an authority role. I would say instead of going to inspect, you know what you expect first, go inspect to learn, and go humble yourself, and you'll get so much more out of the people that you're working with. And hopefully, eventually you can work your way up through effort, through building skill to show them that you're capable of leading them, even if at first maybe they're leading you. That's hard for people to do, but that's a humble leader and someone who knows their place and knows that they have people around them that can do the job better. That's a special kind of leader, especially if they can recognize it and humble themselves and be transparent about it. So no quick fix to that, for sure.
