Excellence is not an act but a habit
The past week has been an intensive leadership discussion week for me. There was the visit of a Distinguish Engineer (DE) from Austin Texas during the first half of the week, and I had a classroom training at the second half of the week. Therefore, I had discussion on leadership all week long, what characterise a leader, how to grow someone to be a leader, how a leader can lead effectively, how important leadership is for this company, and so on.
The first remarkable event happenned during the Tuesday diner at Shu Zhe Hui restaurant. We were 15 people sitting around a huge round table in a private room. The atmosphere was good, we all know each other pretty well, especially the respected DE who has been with us for a week now. At one point, she launched a challenge to all of us. Each person would say one thing (a word or short expression) that characterises leadership, then the next person had to repeat the previous words before providing his/her word, and so on.
At first I worried that we would not find enough words by the time we finish half the table, but then it just went on and on. Eventually everybody had found at least one thing to say about leadership, and there were still words that we hadn’t use. So, here’s what we said about what a leader should have or should be:
- Influence
- Do the right thing
- Change agent
- Visionary
- Special
- Passionate
- Inspire
- Take ownership
- Lead by example
- Optimistic
- Confidence
- Mentor/coach
- Trust
- Risk taking
- Empathy
- Forgiving
- Honesty
- Perseverance
To our surprise, it takes quite a lot to be a good leader, to be a leader that is respected and sought after. And I’m sure that are obvious things that we’ve not thought of.
At Thursday and Friday, I had a classroom training on Technical Leadership Today (TLTP), given by a mature (mentally) and passionate instructor. He skipped most of the official content to focus on the most important material, which I found truely impressive because he mastered the content very well, and tailored it based on the duration of the class and the level of the students. Beside the important lessons that we learned from his experience sharing and the interesting stories shared by classmates, I was really enlightened by two statements from the instructor:
- Excellence is not an act but a habit.
This is a quote from Aristotle that I’ve not heard before. - Draw a horizontal line for your IQ level and a vertical line for your passion, your life achievement is the triangle surface covered by joining the horizontal and vertical line!
In other words, your achievement depends as much on your IQ as on how much passion you have. If you only have great IQ without passion for anything, you won’t go very far in life. If you have average IQ but lots of passion for what you do, you can probably achieve much more than the high IQ guy!
The first statement is logical to me, but hearing it in such a short straightforward sentence make it really strong. The second statement is new to me, I always felt that my IQ is just average so I can’t achieve anything great, but with this enlightening concept inspires and encourages me a great deal, now I know that passion can overcome some of my IQ limite. Yeah! 