Nelson Mandela (http://blogs.ft.com)

Be the leader — Wining is for the rest.

Kenneth Matovu
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Leading and winning aren’t the same thing. While with leading you’re encouraging your followers to step up and catch up with you so that you can move on to the next thing, winning is about keeping your competitors down so that you can keep your position at the top.

Great businessmen like Sudhir, great leaders like Quadaffi, among others all end up losing everything they make because they won too much that they started to think that they were leading.

The leader will always stay on top not because he or she is better than everyone else but because for the leader, as soon as the competition starts, the problem is solved. It’s time to move on to the next problem. Nelson Mandela led from the prison for 27 years even when he had long stopped winning in many people’s eyes.

Leaders attract followers while winners attract competitors.

Competition is not healthy. Whether it’s about religion or politics or business or relationships or even sports. Competition takes away the focus from finding the solution to the problem and instead diverts all the focus to prove that one way of solving the problem is better than the other. Politicians will rig the votes, sportsmen will use drugs, etc… But eventually, all winners fall. All record holders are forgotten. It is only the game changers, only the first of their kind that live forever. And those are the leaders.

Think of the leader as the person who digs the trench to create the passage for the water. His duty is to the trench and lets the water fight over who gets to the end first, while he creates a new end. Because to him, the first drop, the drops in the middle, and all other drops is all just water because they would still be where they are if he had not dug the trench. The problem is not about who gets there first, it’s about who decides where to go.

The guy who discovers a solution to a problem doesn’t care how sneaky your version of his solution is, he instead wants to solve the next problem. Be that guy. Be the problem solver, not the “winner”. Start by ignoring this article, create your own definition of a leader and become that person.

Throw the stone now. You can always hide your hand… http://kennethmatovu.com/

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