The Secret of a Thousand Leadership Books

Some perceptive reader condensed several top selling business books down to three or so points printed on an index card and posted them on his blog. As I skimmed over the 3 major points of Good to Great by Jim Collins, a book I was very familiar with, I was fascinated by how accurately the mini outline caught the essence of the book. As I read a couple of leadership books after my index card outline discovery, I noticed that most of these books follow an easy to condense format: A couple or three main points then lots of examples of those points. When read, the points capture an "aha" moment that fades fast once the last page is turned.

Soon after my three point index card discovery, I came across an article by Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame in which he made the case for will power as a muscle of sorts that can be developed with practice. He concluded that many people simply don't have the will power to pass on dessert or get work done on time without distractions, because they have never experienced overcoming a previous barrier multiple times. According to Goleman, by overcoming an obstacle once, we begin to build the muscle of discipline to overcome it again in the future.

The index card experience of discovering three simple points in leadership books, yet not giving them much thought after finishing the book and the idea of building a discipline muscle to overcome barriers seemed to want to be married to each other. Maybe the reason we dive so heartily into leadership books but don't execute on what seemed to make a lot of sense when we read it, is that we haven't built up the discipline muscle that gives us the strength to make something new happen. We are lazy, disassociated readers. We read, we yawn, we sigh that's nice and forget what we read in less than 36-hours.

We would be better off to simply execute on something, anything, and then repeat the process again to build the stamina and mental perseverance to apply that execution ability to other things in life. We can forget the higher forms of leadership for a minute and practice execution whether it is brushing our teeth after every meal or keeping our desk clean for a week. Consistently doing something is the goal.

We are a nation of attention deficit readers who hope by assimilation to become great leaders without the messy prospect of doing something. Change your pattern of read and forget to read and do something. Just do something. It's where all great leaders start.