Resilience and Personal Excellence: Two Paths to Greatness. #1

The Lion and the Ox: Two Modes of Jewish Leadership

The gift of life is the gift of opportunity. The choice is ours. Should we aim for greatness, or satisfy ourselves with mediocrity?

Choosing to pursue greatness is only the beginning. From the start, distractions and frustration litter the road before us. How we deal with these impediments will define the type of life we build. How we respond to this question isn’t a personal matter, because the person we become for ourselves is the person we become for others. Successful leadership is simply successful living, perhaps with bigger and broader stakes. The aim of this (podcast) is to showcase two approaches to success – on a personal and leadership level.

There are two pathways up the mountain: the path of focused strength, and the path of resilience. The former is the path of Yosef and the latter is the path of Yehuda and his descendant King David.

Yosef was a tzadik; the paradigm of moral strength, he always managed to turn dust to gold. As a young slave, recently torn from his family, he does well enough to become head of household for an important court official.

Handsome, uber successful, and lonesome at the age of seventeen, he had the inner strength and focus to resist the daily advances of his master’s wife.

Yosef teaches us to set our moral compass early in life, and never waver. He knew where he wanted to go, and nothing could distract him.

Yosef was a dreamer, he had ambitions, and he set out to conquer them. Calm and composed, he had an intuitive sense of who he was, and the faith to know that he would eventually arrive. Failure was simply not in Yosef’s lexicon.

Yehuda and David, on the other hand, were all about resiliency. While Yosef taught us how to avoid failure, Yehuda and David taught us how to succeed despite and indeed because of failure.

Yehuda was seduced by Tamar. Compounding the problem was the very difficult choice he faced: admit to it, or see an innocent woman killed. He admits to his lapse, and from this embarrassing union Mashiach is born.

Resiliency isn't about recovery but about transformation. Yehuda uses a powerful formula of humility, faith and hope to bounce back from failure stronger than ever.

There are the things we excel at. There are times and situations that bring out the best in us. We must grab those opportunities and soar. But there are also moments that test us, and sometimes we fail.

Yosef and Yehuda, resilience and excellence, aren’t mutually exclusive. With Yosef as our guide, we discover our strengths and learn to focus our efforts where they matter most. But what happens when we fall - and if we travel the road to greatness, we will falter. It is inevitable. But - does that spell the end? Do we stop dreaming, stop trying? Yehuda and David teach us to dust ourselves off, get up, and get back to work. We will prevail because it TOO, is inevitable. One day in the future, we’ll look back at this moment, not as our greatest failure, but as the catalyst for our greatest success.

Let’s see how these two approaches play out in some common scenarios.

Scenario number one: A corporation achieves major success, but confidence quickly gives way to arrogance, and high standards to a stifling bureaucracy.

Leadership has forgotten that the past should inform, but not define, the future.

The great poet John Keats advised that we acquire 'Negative Capability'. According to Keats we need to fight the need for control. Our ego loves a nice clean explanation. It delights in saying, “I got this.” Instead, we should suspend our judgment and humbly embrace uncertainty.

With humility, we sneak a peek at that which is beyond us. It puzzles us; it annoys us; it stretches us beyond our comfort zone. It challenges us to rethink our paradigms. Our deeply held beliefs, indeed our entire world, comes under careful scrutiny.

Yesterday, we had a nice neat way of explaining the world, but today we’re simply confused. Initially, this process will be tedious and painful. However, with consistency and tenacity, the breakthrough WILL arrive. The brilliant flash of creative understanding, the ability to see the world with a new pair of eyes, make the journey worthwhile.

This is the Yehuda/David way. However, Joseph the dreamer teaches us another way. Joseph’s dreams teach us that we don’t need to negate self to transcend. We already are transcendent; we just need to uncover our inner essence and unleash our inner power. In the world of dreams our limits disappear. Take a moment to imagine that anything was possible. What monumental goals would you focus on? You can do anything, so what’ll it be?! You can be whomever you’d like; well, who do you want to be? The purpose of this exercise isn’t fantasy but reality. The truth is we can be ‘more’, but we get stuck, we get complacent. With the power of dreams we can rediscover who we really are, we uncover our true potential. Yesterday’s reality is but a hint of who we can be tomorrow.

Let’s take another example – office politics. How can we deal with being the object of the water cooler whispering, when in fact whatever they’re accusing you of, the failed contract, the botched product roll out, is entirely false?

The Joseph way would be to stand above the mess. You know your self-worth, track record, and objectives. You pity this poor person who so desperately needs to play petty politics. Their arrows miss the mark, because they have shot them straight ahead, at some imagined, sea-level target, when, all this time, you’re halfway up Mt. Everest.

While Joseph is miles above the attack, Yehuda/David are miles below. The attacker assumes that there is in fact a target, but, with his incredible humility, King David is nowhere in sight. In the sense of a personal benefit-ego driven sense, he never showed up to work. The David who goes to work in the world each day, is bigger than his personal interests. And so personal insults completely miss the mark with him.

Two paths, two ways to be above it all: Greatness, and self-negation.

Obviously, none of us will be a perfect Joseph or David, but we can reach our greatest potential by applying both of these incredible tools.