LESSON 10
By now, I hope you can believe me when I say that I’ve lived many lifetimes in my thirty-seven years. I’ve fought many battles and dodged many deaths. I’ve pushed myself up peaks and down troughs that have broken many of those around me. I consider that, by now, I’ve earned the right to call myself a leader.
But from that straightforward statement follows a straightforward question: what makes a leader – nature or nurture? Are they born or are they made? The experiences of my life convince me that leaders are made. They’re moulded in the fire that naturally burns when impossible situations meet relentless individuals. If you tackle enough problems, and tackle them well, then you too will inevitably become a leader.
Over the pages of this book I’ve described many of the lessons I’ve learned along the way: don’t let other people define you; don’t allow mistakes to win; use your enemy as an energy, and so on. But there’s one deeper principle that underpins every single one of them. It’s the ultimate leadership lesson, the holy truth that powers them all. Positivity.
No matter how much trouble I’ve managed to get myself in, the only way I’ve ever got myself out of it is by keeping a positive mindset. In my darkest moments, when sheer panic and despair felt as if they were closing in, I’ve always made sure that I’ve taken a moment to stop and think, ‘This is actually happening. I’m in this moment, and it is a negative one. And if I think negatively in a negative situation, then this is only going to go one way.’
If positivity is the secret principle of success, then negativity is its opposite. Negativity is a poison, and I’ve known my fair share of people who’ve drunk deeply of that particular toxin. They’re the ones who accept all the credit and deflect all the blame. If they manage to become leaders – and sometimes they do – they usually fail. They’re the leaders who, because they’re not honest about their own mistakes, breed contempt in their subordinates. Rather than admit their flaws and points of confusion, they deny them and blame everyone else when things go wrong. Nobody wants to help them. Nobody has their back. They become isolated and bitter.
People can’t trust leaders like this because if they’re lying to themselves, they’re going to be lying to other people too. It’s clear that such leaders’ view of the world is distorted. Their number one priority is not leading the team towards its objective but defending themselves. That’s the kind of mindset that breeds selfishness and self-obsession. In a military setting, it ends with the bodies of brave young men lying dead on the battlefield.
I’ve come to believe that the only cure for this poison is a positive mindset. It recasts life’s most difficult problems as challenges. Prison was a prime example for me. The instant the judge sentenced me, I took it as if he’d personally challenged me. I decided I was going to be the best inmate in there. Even at my lowest points, I was always trying to be the best. By doing so, those negatives magically turned into positives.
You might now be wondering, how do I foster a positive mindset? How do I become the kind of person who can experience something as bleak as a prison sentence, not as a disaster, but as a challenge? And, more than that, how do I become the kind of leader that people want to follow?
There are three steps to achieving a positive mindset. I’m not calling them ‘three easy steps’ because they’re not easy – but they’re infinitely possible. You don’t have to be a special person to do them, but you do need courage.The first step is the hardest. In fact, it might even be the hardest thing you do in your life. You should stand in front of the mirror and be brutally honest with yourself. You won’t want to be. Every atom in your body may well resist. Criticism from other people is bad enough – the last thing you need is criticism from yourself.
But I want you to rip yourself to bits. Look yourself in the eye and say, ‘What don’t I like about myself?’ It doesn’t matter if it’s something physical or something to do with your personality or character. You know what those things are. Perhaps you’re annoying. Or big-headed. Or talk too much. Or you’re patronising. Or you’re a nightmare when you’re drunk. Name the things you need to change about yourself. Look yourself in the eye and say them out loud, every single one. And don’t hold back. This is about brutal honesty.
The moment you can achieve this level of honesty is the moment you can start accepting yourself for who you are and make those changes to become a better you. This level of honesty frees you. It also bulletproofs you against the criticism of everyone you’ll ever meet.
Step two. Blame yourself. I don’t care how many reasons you have for blaming other people or events from your past. Maybe your mother beat you. Maybe your father left home. Maybe you’re not as clever as you might want to be. Maybe you’re poor. Maybe you suffer from depression. Maybe you had polio and walk with a limp. I promise you, there’s not a man or woman on earth who can’t list a host of reasons that lie behind their failures. And guess what? They’re right. In reality there are usually multiple reasons for failure, and many of those reasons will be out of our control.
But I don’t care about any of that – and neither should you. Looking backwards will not take you forwards. So let’s say it’s true that some of your problems today have their roots in something that happened twenty years ago. What are you going to do about that, assuming you haven’t got a Tardis parked in your back garden? This kind of blameful, backwards thinking is a dead end. It will only lead to you feeling like a victim. It will demotivate you. It will leave you angry and resentful. It will take up valuable headspace. It will exhaust you.
Even if you’re completely convinced that all of your problems are someone else’s fault, find a reason why they’re your fault. Again, look yourself in the eye and say it out loud. Be relentless. Rip into yourself. By accepting and believing that you’re responsible for your life, you’ll find a way to process your weaknesses, accept them and move on. You’ll make progress, sometimes rapidly and dramatically.
Step three. Fix yourself. Stop doing those things you’ve identified as flaws. If you’re annoying when you drink too much, drink less. If you’re patronising or big-headed or talk too much, watch like a hawk for those behaviours. You won’t wipe them out immediately. Sometimes you’ll take three or four steps back. But see every step back as a new challenge to tackle. Keep focused on how much better your life will be when you’ve finally fixed those problems that have been grinding on you for so many years.
If you tackle this final step in a positive way, then you’ll soon start seeing real benefits. It starts with honesty because, as soon as you’re honest with yourself, you’ll stop fearing what other people think about you. You’ll be less afraid of criticism because you’ll have done all the criticising yourself. People might think I’m an arrogant twat, but that doesn’t bother me because I’ve looked in the mirror and I know that I’m not. The people that do think like that don’t know me.
Once you stop worrying about what’s in other people’s heads, you’ll stop desperately trying to please them. You’ll cease being the kind of person who’s running around like a puppy, trying to charm everyone into submission. Confidence will start to emanate from you like light from the sun, and it won’t be that horrible, chippy confidence that demands respect. It will be the true, positive, charismatic confidence that radiates from people who know themselves in all their glory and ugliness, and have accepted themselves as what they are.
Soon you’ll find improvements in most, if not all, areas of your life. Your relationships will improve, at home and at work. If you’ve spent your life blaming your boss, your partner or your father for all your shortcomings, you’ve been making your relationships work against you. Once this process is thrown into reverse, everyone’s going to like you more. They’re going to want to be closer to you, to work with you, to help you, and will cheer when you succeed.
The entire world will start to look brighter. You’ll have more mental energy. You’ll become smarter. Why? Because negativity is an obsessive distraction. You can only focus properly on one thing at a time, and negative people are often constantly preoccupied by thinking about all other people they resent and blame. This is how negative people do problem solving – they solve the problem of how bad they feel about themselves by projecting it outwards. Once you’ve gone positive, that same mental capacity is employed with solving the actual problem!
Your social world will also become transformed. We act our thoughts. If you fill your mind with hate, you’ll become a hateful person and you’ll therefore attract hate towards you. Turn it around and you’ll start drawing people in. When you’re brutally honest with yourself it allows you to be brutally honest with others. That doesn’t mean being disrespectful and shaming people, but it does mean being unafraid to identify people’s weak spots and voice them honestly and openly.
That’s the essence of good leadership. With your newfound positive charisma, more often than not, people will react positively and ask for help. Before you know it, people will begin to think of you as a leader. And then the most magic thing of all happens. You realise that they’re right. You have become that leader. You’ve turned into the person you always knew, deep down, you could be. The kind of individual who always wants to be first man in.