Nonprofit Leadership, Innovation, and Change

Leaders are Patiently Impatient

Leaders are patiently impatient.

Patient in the area that they are persistent and committed to an outcome or goal. But are impatient in the area that they want the outcome and goal to be done as soon as possible.

Dirty Running Shoes

For Christmas Santa Claus brought me a new pair of running shoes. I usually prefer Converse, but this Christmas he brought me some Nike’s.

It’s only four months after Christmas and those shoes are new longer new. By many people’s standards they are ready to be replaced. They’re dirty, worn out, and as you probably guessed they smell like sweaty feet.

I recently wrote a post titled, Beaten, Scared, Tired, & Torn talking about how I want to make it to heaven sliding in head first. Worn out and beaten having used every single once of energy in my body.

That’s what a leader does—he gives it everything he’s got and a little bit more. He doesn’t hold anything back, he puts himself on the line where he can be vulnerable. He gives every ounce of effort, energy, and enthusiasm for his cause in hopes of having an impact on the world.

When a leader is wearing and burning himself out, this is shared with others. Hard work and dedication is contagious and it’s easily transferred to others.

I hope you wear out yourself as I’ve worn out my running shoes, and I hope you inspire others to do the same along the way.

Running Out of Gas

In my new eBook I'm working on a chapter which talks about young leaders and how they often run out of gas. When you a€™re in your car and you run out of gas, what do you do? You stop! Young leaders have to find more gas before they run out, which is what happened to me last week.

Last week was an extremely difficult work week for me; I had four days where I had worked 13+ hours a day. I would leave my apartment around 6am and not return until 7pm or 8pm.  It was an extremely long, tiring, and difficult work week.

As young leaders we are not going to make an impact based on our job title and good looks! We must give our best effort, and then give a little more.  Last week I could feel that my body was getting tired and that I was starting to wear out a little bit.  So I acknowledged it and decided I was going to have to push through and continue to crank out work and ideas.  I had to dig deep and reach for a little reserve.

I'm writing this at 6am on a Saturday morning following that work week, and I'm still going strong!

Beaten, Scared, Tired, & Torn

I usually don’t write about my faith very often but tonight is an exception.  Hopefully it’s a long time until I stand before God, but when I meet him I hope that I’m beaten, worn out, tired, and exhausted with dark bags under my eyes. I know I won’t be arriving in an Armani suit with my shoes shined looking wonderful and handsome. 

My mission is to always give 100 percent of my best effort to serve and help other people: this translates into working long hours, late nights, early mornings (I’m a morning person who is up at 5am everyday) and long weekends. This past week I worked four 13+ hour work days. Many days I left my apartment at 6am, and didn’t return until almost 8pm. 

However, I love what I do and I would gladly do it for free  I’m writing this at 9:45 on a Friday night, after I drank coffee with a business lady at Starbucks at 6:30am, went into the office and worked until 4:30pm, drank tea with a Network Marketer at Starbucks at 5pm, then I stopped by the church [enclave link] to work on our Maximum Impact flyers, went home, ran for 30 minutes, cooked some food, and here I am.