Total Leadership Exercise – Page 41

I’m reading the book Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life. There are a bunch of exercises in it, and rather than write my responses down on a Livescribe
pad, totalleadership.org or on Google Docs, I decided to work through the exercises here.

I’m still twenty years from the typical retirement year, but have already met a lot of the goals I set for myself fifteen years ago. Back then, I was just a software engineer in an “Individual Contributor” role at a big company. My aspirations back then where, on a fundamental level, to do something to leave the world better than when I entered it as well as to influence others to do the same. I had no idea how to get to that point back then, so I went to business school. The process of business school gave me a boost of confidence that’s only grown since then. It also allowed me to quickly discover whether the ideas I was having were worth investing more time and money into.

Eventually, I came to discover the idea that would become the strategy I used to help me realize my fundamental goals, while also raising a great family, taking care of my interests and to never break promises to family, friends or work. I wake up early, before the rest of my family, so that I can exercise or indulge in other personal interests: reading, movies, biking, etc. When my kids and wife wakes up, I help get the ready for the day by making them breakfast and packing their lunches. Then it’s off to work. My work day is never dull. I refuse to sit in meetings where I won’t have an impact and allow my assistant to sit in and make decisions for me when I’m overbooked. Despite this, my peers love to include me in open conversations even when they aren’t related to the work at hand. The employees at the company also know that my door is always open.

What was it that I figured out? Well, what I can say is that is has to do with the fact that I used to think that going back to an agrarian society like after the fall of Rome would be the only way to fix the world. I realized that this way of thinking wasn’t valid given the amount of information and experience we have at hand. I put together a team of ecologists and business people to think about how we could use the spread of information to also improve farming conditions world wide. This was just as much a policy solution as it was a technical and infrastructure.

I’m extremely satisfied with my life and am looking forward to the next twenty to forty years of contributions I have left.