You have to be willing to do it yourself

In my, albeit limited, experience in life I have repeatedly come back to one conclusion about leadership: you have to be willing to the things you don’t like yourself.

Here’s an example for context. I created a club at my school where I get the students interest in computer science together to build. Although my school doesn’t have many “builders”, we do have a lot of very talented young individuals who, I believe, could make great things if they worked together

I’ve largely succeeded in this mission. I’ve brought a lot of these people together to work on meaningful projects, though at times I’ve struggled along the way.

Initially marketing was an issue, I:

  1. did not want to market
  2. wanted to focus on building really cool projects with the members we had, and believed that people would naturally be drawn to us

The latter was a misconception of the mission of my organization, which was pernicious in it’s own right. However the former was immediately revealed to be a very damaging assumption

Because I didn’t like marketing, I naturally tried to find someone who would. The problem was, I didn’t know what good marketing looked like.

I recruited some of the highest-achieving and talented students at my school—the ones who showed interest in promoting the club—and we started. For weeks, there were no solid results. My instinct was to blame.

I held meetings with these members, we talked extensively about strategy, and so on. Still, nothing worked.

Things changed when I sat down, thought deeply about what the organization actually represented, and started marketing it myself. After a few weeks of running the campaign, I began to understand what worked and what didn’t firsthand.

The moat, in this instance, wasn’t the “laziness” or incompetence of my team. It was my own blindness. Even now, though I’ve come to appreciate the process, marketing isn’t my favorite activity. I’d still rather be building projects. But I now understand what it takes to be successful, which makes me a better leader.

I can give you a million different examples of this playing out, the core of the message is this:

“Good leadership requires a willingness to do, or at least fully understand, the things you don’t like yourself”

P.S - shoutout the Theo of t3.gg. I had been thinking about this idea for a long time, and his videos were the catalyst that got me to write it.