Books People Have Given Me pt. 2
Primal Leadership
I moved into entrepreneurship without knowing it. 1888 Center was already a publisher when I met them, but I went all in where there was talk about launching a cultural center. With my usual obliviousness but also focus on the mission, I accidentally became a co-founder. I suddenly had creative control and a staff to manage.
Leading people would later become a strength, but it was not for a long time, and this was mostly because I didn’t see myself as a leader.
In my mind, leadership was a hardhearted thing. When I thought of leadership, I thought of cold decision-making and a ruthless sense of direction for goal-setting.
The more brutal and harsh you were, the more clearly it appears that you know what the endgame is and how to get there. Shutting down nonsense and a zero-tolerance policy for failure was my vision of leadership, but it did not connect to how I simply felt as a person or how I wanted to be.
Looking back, this was just a bad version of masculinity, not leadership.
What got me to open my eyes was this: Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence
Learning emotional intelligence was the game changer. It was a reworking and reframing of what I had already understood as my strengths and of qualities that I saw as useless. Until my now-ex gave me that book, I had never heard of that (or even Harvard Business Publishing, where I would later work).
With this illumination, all the work of artistry and studying literature in school doubled as a process in developing emotional intelligence, the most critical element of leadership.
More soon,
Trevor