each event of my day, and what I want to get done by the end
of the week. I’ve been doing it for two or three years, and if I
don’t do it, I feel I’ve wasted the day.”
To look forward with acuity you must first look back with
honesty. After spending four days a week at her Washington,
D.C., office, Bryant spent the balance of the week at her home
in Chicago, where she read, reflected on the week just past, and
planned for the days ahead.
Those, then, are the four lessons of self-knowledge. But in
order to put these lessons into practice, you need to understand
the effect that childhood experiences, family, and peers have
had on the person you’ve become.
All too often, we are strangers to ourselves. In his classic The
Lonely Crowd, David Riesman wrote, “The source of direction
for the individual is ‘inner’ in the sense that it is implanted
early in life by the elders and directed toward generalized, but
nonetheless inescapably destined roles,” while “what is com-
mon to all the other-directed people is that their contempo-
raries are the source of direction for the individual—either
those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly ac-
quainted through friends and through the mass media. This
source is internalized in the sense that dependence on it for
guidance in life is implanted early. The goals toward which the
other-directed person strives shift with that guidance: It is only
the process of striving itself and the process of paying close at-
ten tion to the signals from others that remain unaltered
throughout life.”
In other words, most of us are made by our elders or by our
peers. But leaders are self-directed. Let’s stop and think about
that for a moment. Leaders are self-directed, but learning and
understanding are the keys to self-direction, and it is in our
On Becoming a Leader