Becoming a leader

This year I've found myself reading lots of books on leadership.

First of course was the sports coach view of leadership, Lou Holtz's Winning Every Day.

Then I read a book by John Wooden and most recently picked up a John Maxwell book that had been sitting on my bookshelf: The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader: Becoming the Person Others will want to follow.

I think you could almost recast it as a running book. Change the subtitle to "Becoming the runner others will want to follow."

Well, maybe not. We each only have so much talent. But I strongly believe that you can't be your best if you don't want to be a leader. Being a leader in some ways means learning how to be your best and then helping others to achieve their best.

That oversimplifies things a bit, but many of Maxwell's qualities of a leader correspond directly to the qualities that a great runner has to have: commitment, competence, courage, focus, initiative, passion, positive attitude, self-discipline, teachability and vision.

Those are just the most obvious. I've now started another Maxwell book - The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership as well as a book that relates directly to my career: The Essential Royster; the Vermont Royster Reader, by a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. That's in addition to a couple of other books I'm making my way through at varying paces.

But everything I read contributes to my learning to be a better writer and hopefully, someday, a strong leader. I say someday because the third irrefutable law is the law of process. Basically a way of saying that great leaders aren't so much born and definitely not made overnight but they develop overtime through hard work and study.

Kind of like great runners.