Do Most Leaders Suck…and Where are the Great Leaders?
Chances are, if you’re over the age of eighteen and have worked a few jobs it probably occurred to you that most of the people you worked for were horrible leaders. Did you ever stop to ask yourself why that was?
We have over 7 Billion people on the this planet, so why are aren’t we brimming full with amazing leaders? Where are the Alexander the Great’s, the Winston Churchill’s, the Julius Caesars, the Asoka’s, the Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, the Thomas Jefferson’s and Napoleon Bonarparte’s, and the George Washington’s? Where are the Nelson Mandela’s, the Mahatma Gandhi’s, and Joan of Arcs, the Ataturk’s, the Hamurabi’s and the Leonidas’? Where are the 21st Century’s versions of Marcus Aurelius, Catherine the Great, the Simon Bolivars? Our world history is replete with tremendous leaders, who left their mark on the societies that they lived it.
Just here in the United States of America alone we had John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton just to name a few. The original thirteen colonies had a population of approximately 3 million people. Let that sink in for a moment. A fledgling country with a population of 3 million people had six brilliant leaders. The US population is now well over 350 million people. That means that we should have over seven hundred leaders at the caliber of the US founding fathers. But we don’t, why? In three words we can sum up why, education and role models. You see, these men all were educated not what to think, but how to think. Equally importantly they had role models. At a young age, Alexander was exposed to Achilles from a poem called The Illiad. was a heroic Greek warrior from a famous ancient poem called the Iliad. Achilles became the model of the noble warrior for Alexander, and he modeled himself after this hero.
Alexander was first educated by Leonidas, who was a relative of Alexander’s mother Olympia. Alexander’s father King Phillip asked Leonidas to teach Alexander math, horsemanship and archery. Alexander’s next tutor was Lysimachus, who used role playing as a way to engage and make the lessons stick. Alexander was enthralled by the warrior hero Achilles in the epic poem, the Illiad. Alexander’s fascination with the Illiad lasted throughout his life and he was said to always have a copy with him on his military campaigns. Eventually King Philip hired the philosopher Aristotle to teach Alexander. For three years, Aristotle taught Alexander philosophy, poetry, drama, science and politics.
America’s Founding Fathers were immersed in what was called a “classic education.” From the article The Classical Education of the Founding Fathers
“The typical education of the time began in what we would call the 3rd Grade—at about age eight. Students who actually went to school were required to learn Latin and Greek grammar and, later, to read the Latin historians Tacitus and Livy, the Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, and to translate the Latin poetry of Virgil and Horace. They were expected to know the language well enough to translate from the original into English and back again to the original in another grammatical tense. Classical Education also stressed the seven liberal arts: Latin, logic, rhetoric (the “trivium”), as well as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the “quadrivium”).”
By now you have probably already come to the same conclusion as I did, “Why weren’t we educated in this manner?” Can you imagine what America would be like today if we had, as opposed to the intentional dumbing down of this country’s citizens?
And my dear reader is what Hardcore Leadership is all about, educating the next generation of leaders. And as Patrick Henry once said, “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”