Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Geography and place, where you happen to be on the map, carries as much meaning as other elements in your life.

Many people, when thinking about meaning, don’t think about place. Or if they do, it’s a transient, flittering sort of thinking that doesn’t really land on the whole of the problem.

Where you are on the map matters for who you are, as well as what you like.

Case in point: The differences in thinking and attitude between people living in large cities and small towns are pronounced. As are the differences between people living on farms and those living in more suburban environments.

When people have freedom of movement and freedom of association, they can choose to engage or disengage with the location that they are in and journey away from past experiences, hurts, and traumas. When people do not have freedom of movement, tyranny reigns.

The assumption of being able to change your story by having the freedom to change your geographic location, unfettered by governmental oversight or dictate, is an unchallenged assumption for the most part in the United States.

However, for most of the last 20 years the concept of staying in one place—with one job, one set of friends, and one continuous story—has been upended viciously, not by geographic movement so much as technological expansion.

The person in Mumbai, India, and the person in Clear Lake, Oregon now have more in common with each other on Instagram than they do with the people in their near geographic reach.

This technological destruction of boundaries and borders has led to the deceptive lie of having global reach and has led to the compression of what used to be termed “3rd order” relationships into “1st order” concerns.

But this is all a lie.

Real people in the real world real close to you, still matter more than people inside of the supercomputer in your pocket. The ability to physically move freely without coercion or bribery is still a key component of the human conception of freedom.

Leaders nurture that conception. They are the ones that go to new horizons and are pioneers into new physical spaces. This is what the work of the billionaire class to get to space—while self-centered and in many aspects blinkered for sure—is exciting and invigorating.

Leaders lead physical humans, in the physical world, to new and exciting physical places, so that their stories can change.