If you were asked to identify the most precious resource in the world, what would you say? I know what my answer would be: leadership.
I believe leadership is the single most valuable, most important commodity there is—and the scarcest. Not oil, not land, not cash, not technological know-how, but tenacious, focused leadership. Leadership is everything.
There are many different styles of leadership. One of the most colorful leaders of World War II, with his brilliance and his ivory-handled revolvers and his ego bigger than a Sherman tank, was George Patton. Patton certainly got results. But I lean toward being more of an Omar Bradley kind of guy. General Bradley spoke quietly and wore a uniform so plain he was occasionally mistaken for a private. They called Bradley “the G.I.’s general.” He commanded 1.3 million men—the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a U.S. field commander, and he did a tremendously good job.
There’s no doubt that an autocratic, carry-a-big-stick leadership style—the kind that works through fear and intimidation—can be effective. However, if you want to be a leader for the long term, that approach generally doesn’t work out too well.
There is a leadership style that fosters not just results but purpose. The kind of real leadership that comes from an authentic concern and respect for those we’re leading. The kind of leadership that draws people to follow you even when they may disagree with you because they trust you and know they can count on you.
If you want to lead people in that deeper way, in a way that achieves results without an oppressive game of who’s boss, then you have to inspire them—inspire them to commit to a cause, to better themselves, to live their truest lives.
So how do you do that?
Well, you could just try to be as impressive as possible, inspiring people by your mere presence. I don’t know about you, but that one doesn’t work for me. Frankly, I’m just not all that impressive.
When I’m getting ready to go out in front of an audience and talk, there’s not really any “getting ready” to it. I put a good deal of thought and preparation into what I want to say. But once it’s time to show up, it’s pretty much just go out there and talk. I’m not practicing my opening lines. I don’t have a makeup artist. I’ve been in the green room before a lot of events, and sometimes it seems like the level of preparation people can go through is just unreal. With me, hey, how I look is how I look. I’m not thinking about getting my face made up or my hair sprayed into place or getting myself to look perfect. I don’t have a speech on a teleprompter all lined out. I go out there with my Georgia accent and my imperfect sentences and my pages of handwritten notes—single words, a few phrases, the bare essence of what I want to get across—and then it’s just me and whoever’s out there sitting in those seats listening. Whatever I got, that’s it. I’m not thinking about how the sizzle sounds; I’m focused on the steak. And it’s not like I come out on stage and talk some noble high-flying philosophy and then go backstage and holler at people and throw things. What you see is what you get. I’m real.
The basic facts of my story are these:
At the age of 25, I went to work at a company where I never planned to stay for more than a few years. Over the following three decades, I rose through the ranks, weathering ownership changes and executive leadership changes. Eventually, serving with Rick Williams as co-CEO of Primerica and surrounded by incredible leadership in our sales force out in the field, we took that company through the epicenter of the worst financial collapse in generations. The odds of our emerging intact, whole and healthy, were astronomically small, yet emerge we did, and we have seen our market cap double in the five years since.
You get up every day and aim to be a little better than you were yesterday.
This book is less a chronicle of exactly how that all happened than it is my attempt to show you why that happened. The Nine Practices highlighted in these nine chapters are a systematic breakdown of my approach to leadership, an approach built up over these decades from the examples of exceptional people I’ve had the good fortune to know. They are my best effort to give you a deconstructed recipe for real leadership.
My view is that you get up every day and aim to be a little better than you were yesterday.
You figure out what you’re naturally good at, then focus on building those strengths and don’t fuss about the things you’re mediocre at. You work hard, try to be a person of generous spirit, and make your success about shining your light on the people around you, not on yourself. You do your best to develop enough likeability in yourself that you’ll have people around you who are pulling for you instead of trying to pull you down. And when things get rough, as they will always do, you have the courage to stand firm—and then keep standing firm.
The five sentences you just read sums up what I’ve done throughout my life and my career.
I’m a normal guy who happened to find himself in abnormal circumstances. That’s not false modesty. It’s the plain truth. I’ve worked hard to get where I got, always did well in school (Mom made sure of that) and graduated from college cum laude, got my MBA with honors—but from the University of Georgia and Georgia State University, not from Harvard or Stanford. I am not your Ivy League–bred, Wall Street–trained CEO from central casting. When I entered the business world, I was just a kid from an average middle-income family in Georgia. I like to joke that the first time I went into the boardrooms of Manhattan they had to bring in a Southern translator to understand what I was saying.
Let’s just say, Gordon Gekko and I don’t have all that much in common.
Don’t get me wrong. The way things have worked out for me? That was no accident. I’ve worked my butt off and done my level best to do right by the people I’ve worked with. All I’m saying is that I haven’t achieved what I have because I’m anything special or extraordinary or unique. I’ve had the great fortune of knowing some good people along the way who’ve taught me, through their words and even more through their actions, some fundamental leadership principles that have stood me well and steered me straight. These are my own personal laws of success. What they really come down to is principles of living your best life.
To me, the essence of real leadership is having the courage to live your true life, the one you were put here to live, and to do it in a way that makes the world a better place than it was before you got here.
We thought about titling this book Personal Development for the Rest of Us. Because I’m not going to tell you that to be a success, you have to get up every morning and work out for three hours, and then do your affirmations for another three hours, and then reread your goals list a hundred times, and then go out there and by the end of the day have every one of those goals accomplished and ticked off that list. If that’s what it takes to be a successful leader, then let’s be honest: Neither one of us stands a chance.
Fortunately for you and me, that’s not what it takes. You don’t have to be some superhuman being to have out-of-the-ordinary success as a leader. Real, purpose-filled leadership is something we can all accomplish. I hope my story will show you that.
So here’s the thing. I’m going to tell you my story—but as you read these pages remember that the point is not to tell the story for the story’s sake. The point is to offer whatever experiences and perspectives I can in hopes that they may help you work out what your story is and muster the courage to live it full out.
Here, as I see it, is the bottom line: When it comes to carving out the life you were put here to live, achieving great success, and being a leader who inspires, there are only two things that really matter.
There’s what happens.
And there’s what you do about it.
Luck happens. Any truly successful leader who tells you luck had nothing to do with it is a liar. Whether you call it lucky breaks, good fortune, or Divine Providence, the plain truth is that circumstances will happen that are beyond your control and that change the course of your life, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better. You can’t do a thing about it. It just happens. But that’s not the whole story. It’s not even the important part of the story. The important part of the story, the only part that honestly matters, is that second thing:
What you do about it.
Lucky breaks come by chance. Success comes by choice.
When people win at roulette, that’s luck. When people win at life, it’s not luck; it’s because they learned how to meet circumstances head on and respond in a way that works—and that works to the highest good. Does it help to be in the right place at the right time? Of course. But that “right place at the right time” shows up a lot more often than you might think. It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime thing. In fact, it happens all the time. Most people just don’t recognize it or show up to meet it when it does. The world is full of people who happen to be at the right place at the right time. That’s not good enough. Winners do the right things at the right place at the right time.
Lucky breaks come by chance. Success comes by choice.
The truth is that you don’t have to be brilliant, or exceptionally talented, or unusually lucky to be a leader who makes a powerful and positive difference. The truth is, you can achieve way more than people who are way smarter than you are, way more talented than you are, and even way luckier than you are, just by showing up, taking the right actions, working hard at it, and being an honorable person.
So yes, luck happens. Events shape your life. But there’s another truth, too. You can also shape events. Sometimes that takes courage, even a lot of courage. But just remember this: The courage to be yourself, to do the right thing and to devote yourself to making a positive difference in others’ lives, is all it takes to change the world. And that’s real leadership.
At the end of each chapter, you’ll find a summary of the “practice” associated with that chapter, and at the end of each summary I’ve listed a single ACTION STEP you can take to put that practice into operation.
You may have read books before with those lists of things to do, and if you’re like most people, you may have said, “Hmm, sounds like a good idea,” or, “I’ll come back to that later.” I want to encourage you to do something different this time.
This time, don’t just read them.
This time, actually do them.
Real leadership, the kind of leadership that inspires, doesn’t spring up all at once, fully formed, out of nowhere. It isn’t born in a flurry of thunder and lightning, out of some amazing breakthrough or dramatic event, no matter how much it may seem that way from external appearances. Real leadership emerges over time as an expression of who you are and what you do every day. More than anything, it takes shape as a result of everyday practice.
These nine ACTION STEP represent the distillation of everything I’ve experienced, witnessed, and learned in the world of leadership. If you take the time and initiative to actually put them into practice every day, I can make you this promise: They will change your life—and in your own way, in your own time, you will change the world.