Inspiration Is the Easy Part

I have consumed a ridiculous amount of leadership advice over the course of my career.

Books, articles, conferences, podcasts, classes, conversations with some incredibly smart people. I’ve highlighted passages, taken notes, saved articles I was absolutely going to read again and, like most people, probably forgotten far more than I remember.

Some of it has been incredibly valuable.

But when I think about the ideas that have really stuck with me, there’s something interesting about where many of them came from.

They weren’t always from leadership books.

They came from conversations. From sports. From movies. From my family. From watching people handle difficult situations well, and sometimes from watching them handle those situations terribly. They came from things that happened years ago that suddenly became relevant for a completely different reason.

That’s obviously a big part of the idea behind Inspired by LIFE.

But there’s a catch.

Noticing something interesting doesn’t make you a better leader.

I can watch a great movie and come away inspired. I can hear something from a coach or a friend that makes me think differently. I can have one of those moments when an idea clicks and I immediately reach for my phone to write it down before it disappears.

And then I can go right back to doing exactly what I was doing before.

I’ve certainly done that.

Inspiration can fool us that way. Having the insight feels productive. Sometimes it is. But I’ve had plenty of great ideas that accomplished absolutely nothing.

As I developed Inspired by LIFE, I knew I didn’t want the takeaway to simply be, “Pay more attention. There are lessons everywhere.”

That might be true, but it doesn’t get us very far.

The more useful question is: What do I do with what I notice?

That question eventually became the LIFE Process:

Learn
Notice what an experience has to teach you in the first place.

Inspire
Let it open up your thinking and help you see something you might have missed.

Frame
Take the idea out of its original context and ask where else it might apply.

Execute
Do something with it. Because eventually, thinking about an idea has to become using it.

That last part is where a lot of good ideas go to die.

It’s easy to be inspired by a great story about trust. It’s harder to think about the person on your team you haven’t trusted enough lately and change how you work with them.

It’s easy to hear something that makes you rethink how you handle conflict. It’s harder to walk into the conversation you’ve been avoiding.

And it’s easy to admire a leader who creates an environment where people challenge each other openly. It’s a little less comfortable to notice that everyone in your own meetings agrees with you suspiciously quickly.

I think all of this becomes even more interesting when you consider what’s happening with AI.

We now have access to more information, expertise and ideas than at any point in our lives. If I want ten ideas for handling a difficult conversation, I can have them in seconds. The same goes for summarizing a book, analyzing a business problem or giving me another perspective on a decision.

Access to ideas is no longer the problem.

But having access to an answer and knowing what to do with it are two very different things. The second part still requires judgment, context and an understanding of the people involved.

Six days from now, Inspired by LIFE will officially be out in the world.

That’s a strange sentence for me to type.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared some of the individual ideas from the book. The Accidental Education. The Quicksand Effect. The challenge of moving from expert to leader.

They’re different ideas, but they’re all connected to the same belief that led me to write this book in the first place: we have access to far more insight than we realize.

Some of it comes from our experience. Some from the people around us. And some from places we would never think to look for leadership advice.

The opportunity is learning how to recognize it and put it to work when it matters.

That’s what Inspired by LIFE is really about.

And next week, after a very long time working on it, I finally get to share the whole thing with you!