Leadership

Going to touch on a subject today that tends to follow me around quite a bit.

Leadership.

From childhood up until I graduated from high school, I was involved in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. (Get the gay jokes out of the way now Iz.) As I progressed through the various ranks and watched the other guys my age get them before me, I went to Dad pissed off that I wasn't progressing as fast as they were. Dad explained to me that the other guys were progressing as fast as they were because their fathers were pushing them to do it. Shoving them to the next rank wasn't going to offer them the learning rewards of taking time to really soak it all in.

At the time, I didn't understand what Dad meant. All I knew was Dad would help me if I asked, but he wasn't going to take the initiative to do the various projects involved with progressing through the ranks with me. That was all on me.

By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had attained the rank of Life. For those of you unaware of where that rank stands, it's the 2nd highest rank the scouting program has to offer. By comparison, the guys my age had attained this rank when they were in 8th grade and some had even earned Eagle at this point. I had started a lot of extracurricular activities in high school that had piqued my interest far more than the scouting program did at this point too. Scouting was put onto the back-burner until the start of my senior year.

I found myself at the end of summer just before the school year started wondering what a lot of my old buddies from scouts were doing. As our interests changed, our paths changed and our time spent together changed to near nothingness. I started asking around about them and, much to my dismay, I found out the vast majority of them were on drugs, in jail, or new fathers.

Troubled at this turn of events, I went to Dad again to ask what happened. He didn't really have an explanation as every one of the guys had great, stand up, hard working, parents. But then it dawned on me...

The only plausible explanation was the fact they were pushed at such a young age that they perhaps had built up a false sense of who they were and didn't actually have a clue about themselves at all. Dad knew all along not to push me faster than I wanted to go. Encouragement was the right path to take, but if it was something I sincerely wasn't interested in starting/finishing, doing the work for me offered no satisfaction or gratification to anyone other than him. So many of the lessons I had worked on that didn't quite make sense to me all of a sudden started clicking and I suddenly found myself motivated finish my Eagle Rank.

And before Iz starts laughing more at me, I want to point out that Eagle is sirius biznes. I got letters from Clinton, Reagan, Pope John Paul II, Bob Hope, Colin Powell, Ross Perot, Queen Elizabeth and MANY other prominent figures in the world shortly after I completed the requirements. Seriously, the pile of letters and autographed photos from these guys stands about 6-8" tall...and it's fkn paper stacked that high. I seriously didn't expect that once I completed it.

I'm not going to get into things like the Scout Law and Oath as about half of it doesn't apply to me anyway (courteous? thrifty? reverent?...yeah not words normally associated with my personality :P). What happend through those years was a foundation being laid for my approach to organizing and interacting with projects and people. Since then, pretty much anything I've been involved with, I've ended up leading or co-leading in some capacity w/o even trying to get into those positions. This ranges from being in management of various jobs I've had to being a sackholder in damn near every linkshell I've ever been a part of.

What has generally put me in those positions can be boiled down to one word.

Initiative.

Yes, there are other things that got me there that would probably cause a polarizing debate on my effectiveness. You have to be good with people. You have to have a desire for success. You have to have patience. These are all things that can fail a person at times and I'm certainly no exception to it.

Initiative is what gets noticed though. Going that extra mile to get a job done. It's cliche, but it's the truth. I get called out to work on a server for a company. While I'm working on it, I clean up a messy wire closet. Residential customer calls me out to fix some malware issues. While the scan is running, I teach their kids or grandkids the dos and don'ts of internet surfing. Too often people just do the minimal amount necessary to get the job done.

Applying this to FFXI is same thing. I've been out of end-game for a couple years now mostly due to being burned out from leading. The pattern my in-game life has taken suggests that eventually, I'll be asked to help lead whatever shell I applied to. Of course I can say no and I do not fear saying no, however there is the general feeling that saying no means I'm letting down my teammates. I'm not trying to be egotistical when I say this, but I know the level of preparation I put myself through is above and beyond what most people do for events I'm just taking part in. If I'm leading, that level of preparation from a time stand point can get doubled or tripled.

There are a lot of people in this game who really don't know how lucky they are to just be able to show up to an event that's organized by someone else and benefit from it. A while ago, (slightly)Old(er) Man mused "Everyone should lead a linkshell at least once in their in-game life." (which is generally the statement I take as the primary reason he and I get along now). It's one thing to know what to expect from an event. It's something else entirely to sit at the top and try to make sure EVERYONE knows what to expect from an event and have them in a position to succeed.

But if these people don't understand how lucky they are, why put yourself in the position you're in?

The answer to that comes in the form of rewards.

Each day I lead dynamis for example, I know the work that our team of leaders puts into it contributes to X number of happy members that happened to acquire a piece of AF2 they wanted. For some, that piece of AF2 is reward enough for the work they put in. For others, like me, AF2 is mostly meaningless, but if we have a large amount of success, my reward comes from knowing I helped organize that success. This sort of reward is magnified greatly when it's your close friends getting what they've worked hard to get.

Each day we do Einherjar, I'm hoping something that will help progress someone's character further pops out of that chest or that Odin drops a highly contested abjuration.

Each day I attend salvage, I try to bust my ass so the leadership of that run feels that same reward I feel from dynamis should we experience success. It's far more work from a leadership standpoint, but it's far more rewarding from a personal standpoint. If that makes me selfish in some eyes, so be it. Everyone is certainly entitled to their opinions, but everyone also has their own reasons for doing what they do that can probably be termed "selfish". (I may blog about the correct use of this word tomorrow at some point...it gets used incorrectly quite a bit.)

Leading isn't easy and it's often times a thankless job. It's downright the most difficult challenge there is in almost any aspect of life. Some people have a more natural ability to be in a leadership position than others. It is safe to say that most people know if they're leadership material or not.

You don't have to be a leader to take initiative though...and initiative goes a very long way towards succeeding in a specific goal.