Leading

So I was reading today, looking for something to amuse my many readers, when I came across the recipe for perfect toast.

You read that right.

We've lived long enough to reach the stage that someone looked long enough to find the perfect recipe for toast.

I was thinking yesterday about how someone had spent their whole life trying to make a better razor. Someone had spent their whole life trying to take the fat out of milk, and someone had spent their whole life trying to make a better comb and a better brush and a better car and on and on and on.

Me?

I never made a better anything. Never. I bought some of them, and found them to not be quite so much better, but I never made a better anything.

This comes to me as I've been pondering leadership lately. I have deduced that I spent 25 years being a manager, but I've never been a leader. I've always wanted to be, still do in fact, but I've never led. I've been a good follower. And as a manager, if something needed done that wasn't being done by the many, the few (me) would do it. But I've never led.

Leading, it seems to me, is the better toast. It is saying what needs to be said without worrying about the outcome, good or bad. It's showing the way, when the easier way is more acceptable.

Seems to me we have few leaders today. That's the type of person you would follow to, as they say, the gates of hell. Few strike me that way. Obama might have at one time, but all I've seen is the gates of hell since.

Jesus, is strikes me, is the greatest leader we've ever seen. He never worried whether what he was saying was accepted. He never was concerned about being liked. He was anything but politically correct. He was everything we could have wanted in a leader. And we killed him.

The lesson learned there is not that leaders get killed. It's that leaders are remembered. More than 2,000 years later.