Why You are Needed to Lead

This is an article from AriWriter:

“The easiest thing is to react,” Seth Godin writes on page 86 of his 147-page self-help book about the importance of leadership, about the desire for you to recognize your calling and step up and fill the shoes of the tribe that needs you like Gary Vaynerchuk did for a wine community and Nancy Pearl did for book lovers.

If you can identify a group of people who have a shared interest and a way to communicate, they need a leader to enhance their effectiveness. They need you.

“The second easiest thing is to respond. But the hardest thing is to initiate.”

Seth writes about tribal leaders (and other marketing advice) on his blog every day. People flock to his website for his initiation of ideas.

Reaction, he writes, is what your body does with the wrong medicine or what politicians and managers do.

Response is what organizations do to competition or what applicants do to colleges.

But both pale in comparison to initiative. Initiating is really and truly difficult, and that’s what leaders do. They see something others are ignoring and they jump on it. They cause the events that others have to react to. They make change.

If this speaks to you, I implore you to follow me and read “Tribes,” a 2008 book by Seth Godin. There are no chapters and you can read it from page 1 or you can skip around and peruse different passages, as I did.

Page 135 refers to the notion of asking someone for attribution. Seth writes people “want to know how to be sure to give me credit for an idea in a book or blog post of their own.” I know what he means, for I frequently receive such emails. “Real leaders don’t care…. You can just use it. There’s no record of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi whining about credit. Credit isn’t the point. Change is.”

You can support your local bookstore and buy Tribes from IndieBound or opt for Amazon instead. Maybe your local library has a copy. But take a look at the book, glance through it (you could read it in a night) and learn why you are needed to lead your tribe.