Your accumulated experience is the basis for the rest of your life,
and that base is solid and sound to the degree that you have re-
flected on it, understood it, and arrived at a workable resolution.
Gloria Steinem, like many pioneers, has made a vocation of
venturing into uncharted, untested waters. Her approach is di-
rect: “I’m not very reflective. I work out whatever it is by acting
or doing or saying it. It’s the Midwest in me. In the Midwest, in-
trospection is practically forbidden. As a result, I’m future ori-
ented, which isn’t great, because you can only live in the present,
not the future.... There are learning moments. I think things
happen over and over again, and we learn in a spiral, not a
straight line... and then one day we get it. So I don’t have the
sensation of reflecting or examining. I have the sensation of,
‘Oh, that’s why.’ If you’ve experienced the dynamic before, you
sort of understand when it’s happening again. There’s a plateau
for a long time, and then a sudden leap forward, and then an-
other plateau. I think of those leaps as learning moments. But I
think you often know things intellectually before you understand
them emotionally. I wrote a piece about my mother that I can’t
read, because now I understand it, and it makes me too sad.”
As both Steinem and Gould have said, too much intellectu-
alizing tends to paralyze us. But true reflection inspires, in-
forms, and ultimately demands resolution. Steinem leaps first
and looks or reflects later. There is something to be said for
that headlong approach, but only if you are able to see mis-
takes, failures, as a basic and vital part of life. Most of us, unfor-
tunately, aren’t that wise or that cool-headed. It is the pioneers
like Steinem, the ones who head straight for the unmapped
territory marked only by the legend “Here there be tygers,”
who believe so much in what they’re doing that they accept the
risks inherent in such undertakings as part of the job.
On Becoming a Leader