8. I HAVE A SECRET JOB
One of the reasons leadership is hard is because you deal with so many intangibles. It’s brain work. People management. Conflict management. Getting people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do.
On bad days, many leaders I know dream of doing something entirely different. For a season, my escape job was to stack boxes in a warehouse. Because at least if you moved a box, it stayed moved.
9. SOMETIMES I DREAM OF ESCAPING
In my unhealthy seasons in leadership, I’d dream of escaping. Not only would I stack boxes in a warehouse for a living, I’d do just about anything except what I’m doing.
If that thought lingers for more than a season, you either need to get healthier and stay in the job you’re doing, or if you are healthy, it may simply be a sign it’s time to find a new job.
10. I FEEL LIKE I DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT I’M DOING
Eventually, you reach a level of leadership, either because you’ve been at it long enough or because whatever you’re leading got big enough, that you realize there are no clear answers. There just aren’t.
You surrounded yourself with the smartest people you could and you realize that even the smart people don’t know what to do.
That’s where real leadership begins—when you feel like you don’t really know what you’re doing, but you keep doing anyway.
That’s how history gets changed. You were just the last person standing, even though inside it felt like sheer confusion.
11. PEOPLE SEEM TO BELIEVE IN ME MORE THAN I BELIEVE IN MYSELF SOME DAYS
When you’ve been through #9 enough times, you will be ready to give up believing in yourself. But you look around and realize other people keep believing in you.
That’s exactly what you need. You’re likely leading very well if enough of the good people keep believing in you.
So when you stop believing in you, keep believing in the people who believe in you.
12. I THOUGHT WE WOULD HAVE MADE MORE PROGRESS BY NOW
You don’t want to say it out loud, but you really do think you would have made more progress by now.
You look at all the overnight successes and think “How come that wasn’t me?” This only works, of course, until you look more closely at the overnight successes only to realize almost all of them were five to 15 years in the making.
The fact that your vision is bigger than your reality is paradoxically a sign that you’re a good leader.
So keep being mildly disappointed, because it will always spur you on to more.
I was talking recently to someone who became an ‘overnight’ TV star. When I really drilled down on his story, it went back to VHS tapes in the early ’90s. No one knows that part of the story, but again, a lot of the time when people think someone just emerged overnight, it’s only because that leader has been working harder for years, sometimes decades.
The part about overnight success no one really understands is that it’s usually a very long night.
So keep working.
And one day when it’s over you’ll look back and be amazed at how much you actually accomplished.
This article originally appeared here.
