had to figure out ways to do what I wanted to do and still
show up in a pinafore for a piano recital, so as not to blow my
cover. You could call it manipulation, but I see it as observa-
tion and picking one’s way around obstacles. If you think of
what you want and examine the possibilities, you can usually
figure out a way to accomplish it.”
Brooke Knapp, a trail-blazing pilot and businesswoman,
also fought her way out of the mold. She said, “I was raised
in the South, and I was raised to be a wife. When I went to
college, the definition of success was to get married to a gen-
tleman and help him succeed and have children... [but]
I was a little savage, in the best sense of the word, because I
was stronger than my mother, and there was no way to
control me.”
As Knapp learned, however, breaking out, being yourself, is
sometimes anything but easy. She said, “In high school, I real-
ized that I was going to be voted the most athletic, but I didn’t
want the ‘lady jock’ label, so I decided to become the most pop-
ular. I learned the name of every single person casting a ballot
and called them all by name and won.” Her popularity took a
nosedive when “the mothers of the girls in my class started tak-
ing potshots at me. I concluded that success means that people
don’t like you and you become a bad person, so I shut down for
a lot of years. It wasn’t till after I got married that I began to
experience my need to achieve again.”
Know thyself, then, means separating who you are and who
you want to be from what the world thinks you are and wants
you to be. Author/psychiatrist Roger Gould also declared his
independence very early. He said, “I remember, during argu-
ments with my father, there seemed to be arbitrary rules, which
I never understood. I used to ask ‘why’ all the time. One time, I
On Becoming a Leader