No leader sets out to be a leader. People set out to live their
lives, expressing themselves fully. When that expression is of
value, they become leaders.
So the point is not to become a leader. The point is to be-
come yourself, to use yourself completely—all your skills, gifts,
and energies—in order to make your vision manifest. You must
withhold nothing. You must, in sum, become the person you
started out to be, and to enjoy the process of becoming.
Henry James, midway through a life filled with writing mar-
velous novels, wrote in his Notebooks,
I have only to let myself go! So I have said to myself all my life—
so I said to myself in the far-off days of my fermenting and pas-
sionate youth. Yet I have never fully done it. The sense of it—of
the need of it—rolls over me at times with commanding force: it
seems the formula of my salvation, of what remains to me of a
future. I am in full possession of accumulated resources—I have
only to use them, to insist, to persist, to do something more—to
do much more than I have done. The way to do it—to affirm
one’s self sur la fin—is to strike as many notes, deep, full and
rapid, as one can. All life is—at my age, with all one’s artistic soul
the record of it—in one’s pocket, as it were. Go on, my boy, and
strike hard.... Try everything, do everything, render every-
thing—be an artist, be distinguished to the last.James’s major novels were written after this self-exhortation.
So strike hard, try everything, do everything, render every-
thing, and become the person you are capable of being.
On Becoming a Leader