Leadership as an art form
Many people around the world think that leadership is about authority, status that defines subordination. This is completely wrong. Leadership is about empathy.
Status and authority don't define functionality. Functionality only depends on how neat and appealing your arguments are. Which is measured by how your care cures other people's pain.
Leading a group of people towards an ideal is painful. To them, because they don't see that ideal as clearly as the leader does, or the path is far from ideal. To the leader, because explaining an abstract idea is very hard, and inventing a functional path to it is even harder.
So the right approach is reinventing the ideal instead, to cure more people's pain. And tweaking the ideal to make the path less painful.
That way, both the goal and the path will be the most humane. And then you'll realize that being the most humane is the goal. And the path. The biggest pain to cure is loneliness, and the main thing people need from you is to be there for them, without demanding anything.
In the end, the formal goal doesn't even matter. What matters is how happy we become along the way.
A true leader is merciful, asks people what they want, what they need, what they truly believe. And by asking the right questions, accidentally, unexpectedly for both sides, makes people see what is wrong with their believes and priorities.
A true leader isn't afraid of being (and looking) helpless, and doesn't stop there, doesn't give up, keeps trying to resolve things. So their care is not only subjective (psychological), but also objective (functional).
A true leader helps other people figure out their priorities and goals. And quality of a goal is measured by quality of methods it involves.
In a way, a good leader is also a therapist. One with so much balance that it can be shared with others, while still leaving them room to solve their problems as they see fit, turning that into a learning curve.
Leadership and fitness
Leading other people somewhere requires a unique ability to recognize trends. Only then one will be able to influence those trends in a desirable way, strategically building a desired environment.
It's impossible to build a desired environment, if one doesn't have another ability: to stop trying to adapt to a certain situation. After a certain amount of quantitative changes (fitness attempts), there comes a point when there needs to be a quality change that takes a new approach to the situation - changing the situation itself.
Without enough first-hand experience, it's impossible to change a situation in your long-term, strategic favor. So there needs to be some amount of honest attempts to fit. But it's not always clear that the situation is problematic in its current form. Strategic thinking allows to recognize a potential crisis coming form excessive conservatism.
A global fraud happens, when someone whose only goal is to be the fittest, starts acting like a leader capable of fixing big trends. Such a person is not interested in fixing any trends that have influence over people's lives, because that's not a concern for a systemic egoist. Their concern is abusing the power over a system for building a personal paradise - environment where one doesn't have to adapt anymore.
But such a fake leader won't succeed in taking control, if people refuse to buy into their populism. Which implies that those people have their own personal experience of dealing with a crisis, and winning.
For people with such experience, fake leadership is a personal insult, because a fake leader suggests a non-functional solution to a misdiagnosed problem, which is always a path to a heavier crisis. They know that adapting for real is very hard, but it's worth it if you have the dedication.
But for people who want to fit at any cost and then stop adapting forever, there's no contradiction between a promised impossible paradise and their egoistic desires. They will love the promises, and if things don't actually lead to anything good, they won't mind. For them, even within a crisis caused by fake promises, there's still hope that things will improve after more fake promises, magically. Because they've stopped adapting already, and they don't want to put in the work.
The key difference in the end is in how one decides to stop adapting.
- If you give up on the natural evolution of the current situation and you try to change it yourself, it's productive and only takes effort. And success inspires further effort and optimism, like in TASing. You tweak the situation, then you try adapting to its new form, repeatedly.
- But if you give up on both the situation and yourself - your own ability to adapt or change it - then you lose. You'll keep waiting for someone else to finally make the situation perfect for you, but it won't be possible due to your own pessimistic bias.