My thanks to Stacey Abrams and her sage advice in her new book – LEAD FROM THE OUTSIDE. Great advice for any citizen or leader.
- Leadership requires the ability to engage and create empathy for communities.
- Parental Trinity for Success -go to church, go to school, and take care of one another (faith, education and service)
- Leadership stands at the crux of how we get to power, and it demands the willingness to go first, to take responsibility as well as hold authority, to help others get where they need to go.
- Ambition should be more than a title or position…Ambition should be an animation of soul…Ambition means being proactive.
- Instead of repeating…mistakes, we must identify our own uncertainties and doubts and develop the habit of rebutting them…[T]urning fear into a companion rather than the driver of our worst decisions helps improve how we lead.
- Defeating fear of otherness means knowing who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish and leveraging that otherness to our benefit.
- From my experience, the barriers [to success] fall into a few consistent categories: a person, a tradition, a system, or just old habits.
- Smart leaders internalize the limits of their own actions and search for counterparts who can help them move farther along.
- I reject the idea that beliefs cannot evolve with better information…[S]mart colleagues understand that new information leads to new ideas and understandings and possibly new beliefs.
- When a belief allows only for a single myopic focus, a solitary fiber that has no room for debate, leaders miss the true role of government and of public policy.
- Real leadership, true power, understands how to enter the world purposefully and know what we’re responsible for doing here.
- Taking power demands self-analysis.
- One perk of humanity is the ability to make friends into more, to learn from them and to disappoint without losing their love.
- Give me good friends to stand beside, and we will move the world.