You no longer need permission to lead.

Leadership hasn’t always been accessible. If you look at how people viewed leadership 500 years ago, they thought the ability to lead your fellow man was something that was inherited from your parents. That the ability to lead was based in your genetics.

In fact a guy named Thomas Carlyle wrote a whole book arguing the case of hereditary leadership called ‘On Heroes And Hero Worship.’

A famous quote from this book was:

“Great men are god-gifted. Not man made.” Thomas Carlyle

The basic idea was that leaders were born, not made. You can tell who his audience was. It was the aristocracy.

This argument had a lot of appeal during the aristocratic time period. It helped rationalize the status quo and solidified the idea that one class was destined to rule, while the other was destined to serve. And no matter how much we dramatize that time period, and play up noblesse oblige and chivalry in shows like Downtown Abbey — if you weren’t a member of that privileged class it sucked.

We no longer live in aristocratic times, and the idea of leadership being a trait that derives from the heritage of one’s birth has been thoroughly debunked.

In the modern world, leadership is a mindset not a genetic trait.