Your Accidental Education
As I get closer to launching Inspired by LIFE, there’s one idea in the book I keep coming back to because I think it matters more now than when I first started working on it: we’ve been trained to look in too few places for the answers we need as leaders.
Think about how most leadership development works. We study business. We read business books. We learn models, frameworks, best practices, and the experiences of other successful leaders. There’s tremendous value in all of that. I’ve spent much of my career helping leaders do exactly those things.
But leadership is changing too quickly for us to believe the answer will always be sitting inside the same playbook.
AI is accelerating what technology can do. Roles are changing. Decisions are happening faster. And more leaders are finding themselves in situations where experience helps, but doesn’t necessarily give them the answer. Sometimes the challenge itself is new. Other times, we’ve seen something similar before, but the people, circumstances, or stakes make it a completely different problem.
So where else do we look?
That question gets to one of the central ideas in Inspired by LIFE.
Our lives give us an incredible amount to draw from, and much of it comes from what I think of as our accidental education. These are the things we learned without ever thinking of them as lessons. Experiences that shaped us, ideas that stayed with us, moments that changed how we see people or pressure or possibility.
None of that needs to be overly inspirational. I’m not suggesting everything happens for a reason or that every experience contains some hidden leadership message. I mean something much more practical.
Something you experienced years ago can suddenly help you see a problem differently. An idea from completely outside your industry can change your thinking about something at work. Something you learned in a part of your life that had nothing to do with leadership can turn out to be incredibly relevant when you need it most.
What makes those experiences valuable is the connection we make to them.
Most of us have had that moment when something seemingly unrelated suddenly clicks. You’ve been wrestling with an issue and then, for whatever reason, you see it differently. The problem itself hasn’t changed, but your perspective has.
For leaders, that matters because our biggest challenges rarely arrive looking exactly like something we’ve dealt with before. And even when they do, applying yesterday’s answer without questioning it can create a whole new set of problems.
The more we can draw from different experiences, ideas, and observations, the more range we have in how we think. We become less dependent on having seen the exact situation before, and more able to question our first instinct, make a useful connection, or see a possibility that wasn’t obvious at first.
I believe this is becoming even more important because of what is happening around us.
Information is becoming incredibly easy to access. AI can already give us analysis, ideas, recommendations, and answers in seconds, and those capabilities are only going to get better.
So simply having access to more information isn’t going to distinguish us the way it once did. What becomes more valuable is how we interpret what we’re seeing, what we notice, and whether we can connect what we know to something new.
That’s a big part of what I mean by being Inspired by LIFE.
We spend years trying to add to what we know as leaders, and of course, we should. But we’ve also spent our entire lives absorbing things we never thought of as leadership material. Some of it has been sitting there for years, waiting for the moment when it suddenly becomes useful.
That, to me, is the opportunity.
The next time you’re stuck on a problem, resist the urge to immediately go searching for another answer. Before you do, ask yourself whether there is something you already know from somewhere else that might help you see the problem differently.
You may have been preparing for that moment longer than you realized.