A Skill You'll Actually Get To Use

Excerpt from What Now? by Ann Patchett from an essay based on the commencement address she gave at Sarah Lawrence in May 2006:

In a world that is flooded with children's leadership camps and grown-up leadership seminars and bestselling books on leadership, I count myself as fortunate to have been taught a thing or two about following. Like leading, it is a skill, and unlike leading, it's one that you'll actually get to use on a daily basis. It is senseless to think that at every moment of our lives we should all be the team captain, the class president, the general, the CEO, and yet so often this is what we're being prepared for.

No matter how many great ideas you might have about salad preparation or the reorganization of time cards, waitressing is not a leadership position. You're busy and so you ask somebody to bring the water to table four. Someone else is busy and so you clear the dirty plates from table twelve. You learn to be helpful and you learn to ask for help.

It turns out that most positions in life, even the big ones, aren't really so much about leadership. Being successful, and certainly being happy, comes from honing your skills in working with other people. For the most part we travel in groups—you're ahead of somebody for a while, then somebody's ahead of you, a lot of people are beside you all the way. It's what the nuns had always taught us: sing together, eat together, pray together.

We Need to Hear Other People

"People need to talk. And often, a willingness to sit and listen is the greatest kindness one person can offer another. One of the first lessons of childhood is to be wary of strangers. And while this is good counsel to guard against the world's very small nefarious element, it also teaches us to block out the large majority of those who just have something on their minds they'd like to say. We are taught to be suspicious, especially of anyone who might not look like us or share our beliefs. By the time we reach adulthood, many have perfected the art of isolation. Of being careful. Of not listening in the name of safety. But the truth is that we need to hear other people—all people—especially in those moments when we don't know exactly where we're going ourselves. When it comes to finding our way, we're better off taking in as much information from as many sources as possible...For the most part, wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you're lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you're alive."

~ Ann Patchett, from What Now? an essay based on the commencement address she gave at Sarah Lawrence in May 2006