What do I want my leadership legacy to be? How will this impact my life and career?
Just for some context, this is the prompt for the first essay due for the capstone course of the Presidential Leadership Academy. For the past three years I’ve been a member of the Academy and I’ve blogged (perhaps more spottily than I’d have liked) about all sorts of leadership related topics. To be honest I’m not particularly sure whether all (or even most) of my blogs have been related to “leadership” or not. If you’re reading this and asking accusatively why it is that a senior member of Penn State’s honors leadership organization isn’t sure what leadership is – perhaps it’s because I’m a senior member of the PLA. I’ll bet I’m not alone, either. Running a simulation in my mind, I can imagine Dean Brady asking our PLA class as freshman “What is leadership?” and having a tide of fresh faced hands spring up with inadequate (or at least merely partial) answers to the question. I can imagine the same question being asked of our class now, two years later, and seeing few hands raised – the majority of us entering some sort of thoughtful contemplation of the magnitude of the question.
The lack of hands raised isn’t a symptom of a decline in energy for the topic which we’ve spent the last couple years exploring – it’s an indication of our evolution as thinkers. I remember once hearing Dean Brady frankly remark that our academy might perhaps be better referred to as the “Presidential Critical Thinking Academy” but that it just didn’t have the same ring… I now fully understand what he’s saying. My thinking has evolved. I am now able to better recognize alternate points of view before I hear them. Through all of this – I haven’t become an opinion-less ponderer, which sometimes happens to people after they are taught that issues can be multi-sided (with valid and logical arguments on both sides no less!). I’ve become more strongly convicted on some issues, changed my mind on some issues, and no longer care about other ones!
This brings me to the question at hand today? What do I want my leadership legacy to be? Well I’m not even particularly sure what that is supposed to mean, but I can explore what it means to me. Firstly, I think that the place in the world where – if I’m to have any sort of impact before I’m dead – I might leave a legacy will be in the conservation of our global resources. Conservation. Biodiversity. If I can save wildlife and wild places then I’ll die content (I think – I haven’t particularly saved anything yet and I’m not facing a loaded gun so it’s hard to make that comment with any real security).
I have frequent conversations with a friend from Los Angeles, and on nights where my old group of friends is home and all nine of us are reunited at his beach house (our quintessential high school base of operations) in Oxnard, CA – he’ll have a drink or two and then, without fail, this Wake Forest University Business Major with point to the cosmos. He is absorbed with its beauty – day or night – and often tells me that it’s often all he thinks of during his 400-level Econ. courses back in North Carolina. That same friend is pursuing a major in Business for “lack of a better idea” because he doesn’t know if he even “has a passion”. This is a smart kid with a scientific mind who fails to recognize that the thing he thinks about the most – the true beauty that he sees in the world – is his passion.
I am lucky (or stupid) enough to have recognized my passion from day one and to have never looked back at pursuing it for the rest of my life. As my friend sees beauty in the heavens, I see beauty on earth – in life itself. I know that I’ve written this before on this blog, but as others are spellbound by art crafted by the human hand, I am mesmerized at the beauty one can see in this world that is shaped by the chisel of necessity. Every species we see today is unique and complex beyond our understanding, and they are all in existence because of the cutting away of some individuals by the hand of death, chance – probabilities.
Regardless, I could rant all day about my passion for life. As I see it, the currency of life on this planet are species – and we can encompass all of the species of this world within the umbrella term biodiversity. Conserving biodiversity is what I hope to accomplish. This is a particularly critical time for that endeavor, as we humans are on the precipice of plunging our world into the next true mass extinction. Biodiversity is being lost, and so there is a great struggle awaiting us going forward.
If it seems like I’m avoiding the prompt while writing this – it’s because I am. Even as I type away right now I am having such a hard time coming to grips with what I want my leadership legacy to be – probably because am still having a hard time defining it. I know that I want to protect wildlife and wild places, but that’s an action. An end result. How will I lead in my field?
Right now I’m on track to become a scientist. I love doing research. Nothing brings me more joy than spending time out in the field on a research project that I’ve helped to devise. Simply being outside as an active observer of nature would be enough, but when you’re doing so in the process of creating new knowledge for humanity the joy is magnified. If I follow my current track I will end up finishing undergrad at Penn State, going to graduate school and earning a doctorate somewhere, and then I’ll become either a professor or a curator at a natural history museum (dream job in many ways). If I make it to that level then I’ll get to do the research that I love essentially until I’m dead. The question, though, is whether doing that will make me a leader. I’d be able to lead a lab full of students and turn them into future scientists – a truly phenomenal undertaking when I think about what goes into it (the head of my lab does it amazingly, but I’m convinced she has superpowers). Conceptually I could lead my field with the research that I conduct, but with absolute honesty I am not sure that I have the same “stuff” as the people who I see leading the field of ecology today. So how will I lead? Is it even necessary for me to lead? Honestly two years ago I don’t think I would have cared, but now I do. Now, at least, I’ve got to at least TRY. I’m not sure whether that change of heart is only the doing of my time in PLA – it’s probably a couple of changes in my life – but my time in the Academy is obviously responsible to a great degree: it’s probably mostly my interactions with the PLA students which have shaped me the most in that regard. Our conversations out of class are have been one of the most formative group of experiences that I’ve had as an undergraduate.
How will I try to be a leader? I can’t ignore the fact that my mind keeps jumping back to John Muir. Muir is one of the fathers of conservation in the world – and his writings on the beauty of the natural world and man’s place within it have provided me with a foundation for my own thoughts. At the most elemental level, Muir explained that we are a part of nature – not at the center of it. Most importantly, he knew that this didn’t diminish us. Showing that we are merely a part of the world unlocks my ability to appreciate nature’s grandeur. Go to Yosemite, Muir’s adopted home, and feel small. But if you let yourself truly feel small and appreciate the magnitude of the landscape surrounding you, I promise that the experience of being a part of that landscape will uplift you far beyond the stature of someone that thinks the world exists merely for man!
Muir’s writings are almost spiritual for me, but why do I think of him in this context of leadership? Muir wasn’t a hopeless hermit. He wrote prolifically, and he took stands. His writings are massively responsible for creating a conservation ethic in America. I want to follow in his giant footsteps. I can’t pretend that I’ll be as great as Muir – impossible. However, I do have some help. I want to spread Muir’s values around the world – especially as nations become developed and the luxury of such thought becomes available to the citizens of the world – I want to make sure that enough find a special connection with nature that it will be protected. This is the first time that I’ve said this – or perhaps even realized it myself, but I can’t do that if I’m merely an academic. I still want to be a research scientist. I am still going to go to grad school. But I want to be an activist. For me, being a leader is going to be changing people’s minds. John Muir fought to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed. This was a valley so beautiful that Muir considered it a Cathedral of rock and water. The valley was dammed, and it was lost. Muir was heartbroken at its loss and died along with the Valley. In this era, Hetch Hetchys are dammed so frequently that it’s become routine. As conservationists, our standard of success will be different. Two hundred thousand acres of rainforest are burned every day. So perhaps if half is destroyed, but then through our efforts half remains in perpetuity – that will be a success. I think that being a leader in my field is, at its root, going to be defined by the simple action of not giving up after Hetch Hetchy – or even a thousand Hetch Hetchy Dams.
I want to thank Dean Brady and Melissa for making me write this essay, it’s been more valuable than you know.
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