Lust Has a Language

We live at a really interesting moment in history.

Unlike all of our ancestors, we live in this moment of peak individualism, and so whenever we see achievement, we focus on that individual.

We focus on what makes them special.

We focus on their habits, their behaviors.

We just see them.

But like all matters of focus, focus makes you a little bit blind.

There's all kinds of other currents, connections, and more ecological powers that are making someone improve.

If you were to ask Hemingway, if you were to look at Hemingway and look at him through the lens of individualism, you would say, "Well, what, what makes you great?" And it would be about his hard work.

It would be about his particular gift, his talent, and that's a very sexy story to tell.

It's a very beautiful story to tell, that he's sort of a magical person, uh, that Steve Jobs is a magical person, that Michael Jordan is a magical person, and that Baryshnikov is a magical person.

We get kind of addicted looking at-- through this individualistic lens.

But when we do that, we're blind to all the other forces that are actually truthfully generating that talent, generating that performance, generating that fulfillment.

When you actually scratch the surface of a great performer, when you actually look into what made a Hemingway or a Jordan or a Baryshnikov, what you will invariably find is an elite environment, a bunch of relationships, a bunch of connection.

"Oh, who-- Mr. Hemingway, he's a great writer." Well, who taught him to love words? What model served him as he began to develop? What kind of environment was he in? And when you begin to take this environmental lens and put it on, it opens up new opportunities for leadership.

It's really, in the end, about creating conditions where people can grow together.

There's a great saying in the Tao Te Ching, "Where there's a good leader, people say, 'What a good leader that is.' But where there's a great leader, people say, 'We did it ourselves.'" That's not how we typically have thought about leadership in the past.

We often focus on control.

We often focus on results.

We often focus on sorta treating people as if they're separate from others.

But when we take this more ecological approach, it opens up opportunity.

It opens up new ways to create more growth.

So I spent five years visiting talent hotbeds all over the world, like places that produced impossible numbers of talented performers, a Russian tennis club that produced more top twenty-five players than the entire United States or a, or Bulgarian chess club.

And the places that I visited had these sort of common features in their environment that I saw over and over again.

The first thing is that they were kinda junky.

I started to call them chicken wire Harvards.