Leadership Lessons from Jimmy Buffett
When the word “leader” is bandied about, most people don’t think of recording artists. They usually think of world leaders, prominent business leaders, religious leaders – not famous musical performers.
That’s a mistake because much can be learned from them. As an illustration, let’s look at the life and leadership of Jimmy Buffett, a man who led millions of Parrotheads while building an impressive fortune. In possession of a shiny new history degree after a rocky college career, he went to New Orleans in 1969 and played music on Decatur Street while tourists dropped change in his guitar case. He moved to Nashville in 1970, and two years in Nashville saw Jimmy Buffett rejected by nearly every record company in town, many of them two and three times. Two years later, in an interview, he said, “Got depressed, got pissed off, got divorced and left. Best move I ever made.”
The move was to Key West, where he worked on an...
Does Resilience Really Matter?
Today is the anniversary of the birth of Helen Keller, a woman whose life was a portrait of resilience. Even today, 143 years after her birth in a northern Alabama hamlet named after a Chickasaw tribal rainmaker, people share her ideas about happiness and leading a useful, productive life. Schoolchildren learn about how she overcame her disabilities and graduated from Radcliffe College, which is now Harvard University. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, her statue stands in the US Capitol building, and a movie about her young life and the teacher who was able to find a way to reach her, The Miracle Worker, won two Academy Awards.
Illness – probably meningitis – when she was less than two years old left Helen Keller deaf, blind, and without language. Since she couldn’t hear, she didn’t have a way to even know words existed. Since she was blind, she didn’t have a way to grasp the abstract concept of objects and their descriptors. The fact...
