There are lessons in everything, and if you are fully deployed,
you will learn most of them. Experiences aren’t truly yours
until you think about them, analyze them, examine them, ques-
tion them, reflect on them, and finally understand them. The
point, once again, is to use your experiences rather than being
used by them, to be the designer, not the design, so that experi-
ences empower rather than imprison.
Entrepreneur Larry Wilson, a founder of innovative learning
centers who once described himself as a “game changer,” had a
crucial experience as a boy. “I learned about risk when I was
seven years old. I had just moved from Minneapolis to Little
Rock, and I was the littlest one in the class—boys and girls.
Even the desks were bigger. Worse, I was a slow runner and had
a Northern accent. These factors combined to put me in jeop-
ardy every noon hour. Every day the Civil War got replayed in
the school yard, and I kept losing. I was in a lot of pain.
“One day the priest came to do catechism, and I suddenly
found myself jumping up in front of the class like Lawrence
Welk, trying to lead them in a chorus of ‘Sister Loves Father.’
You have to be Catholic to understand the magnitude of my
sin. In a matter of seconds, I went from being the class doormat
to class hero.... They just sat there with their mouths open. I
got into big trouble with the teacher [the nun], but the benefit
was incredible. I learned then that the risk is easily worth tak-
ing, for the incredible benefit.”
Thus was an entrepreneur born from a painful experience in
a Little Rock parochial school classroom that might have
branded a less determined human being, might have caused
him to retire from the spotlight forever if he had assimilated it
differently. Wilson went on, “For most entrepreneurs, cer-
tainly for me, the primary pull is the vision. You are simply pas-
On Becoming a Leader