Tricky Situations, Pride & Honor, Old Wisdom, and More
On Tricky Situations...
Being a great leader means responding to difficult situations appropriately. Recently, there were lies and slander threatening to destroy and/or overthrow the ECU Club PIckleball which I helped co-found, and given the amount of work we have put into this thing, this was a big deal. This is how I responded. This is what worked:
"Hey everyone, this is Eli Richmond with a quick reminder...
So much of ECU Club Pickleball's progress happens behind the scenes, and our current execs are working incredibly hard to grow the club and support the comp team. I can personally attest that they're doing a fantastic job.
That said, we'd love your help! If you have ideas for opportunities, fundraising, events, or anything else you're good at, please get involved. That's exactly how I started this semester – I just jumped in and began helping :)
One thing we haven't communicated clearly enough: ALL funds raised go directly toward supporting the comp team. Our communication with the comp team in general has not been good enough, and we will fix this moving forward.
I can speak for the entire board when I say we want to serve you as best we can. If you ever have questions, concerns, or ideas, please reach out – you know how to find us.
Amazing work this past weekend! Cheers to a bright PPC future!! 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️"
12 Cool Things
The entire "Cool Things" section this week is dedicated to the book, The Warrior Ethos, because it absolutely blew me away. Warrior culture is almost the exact opposite of what we grow up hearing in America which is in part why the book is so flooring. Here are my highlights in no particular order:
Honor is the psychological salary of any elite unit. Pride is the possession of honor. Honor is connected to many things, but one thing it’s not connected to is happiness. In honor cultures, happiness as we think of it—“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—is not a recognized good. Happiness in honor cultures is the possession of unsullied honor. Everything else is secondary.
In the West, pride and honor are anachronistic these days.
But the king didn’t pick his 300 champions for that quality. He picked them instead, he says, for the courage of their women. He chose these specific warriors for the strength of their wives and mothers to bear up under their loss.
"These scars on my body,” Alexander declared, “were got for you, my brothers. Every wound, as you see, is in the front. Let that man stand forth from your ranks who has bled more than I, or endured more than I for your sake. Show him to me, and I will yield to your weariness and go home.” Not a man came forward. Instead, a great cheer arose from the army. The men begged their king to forgive them for their want of spirit and pleaded with him only to lead them forward.
Once, a Spartan was visiting Athens and his host was showing off his own mansion, complete with finely detailed, square roof beams. The Spartan asked the Athenian if trees grew square in Athens. “No, of course not,” said the Athenian, “but round, as trees grow everywhere.” “And if they grew square,” asked the Spartan, “would you make them round?”
The group comes before the individual. This tenet is central to the Warrior Ethos.
His answer became famous throughout the world: Better to live in a rugged land and rule than to cultivate rich plains and be a slave.
The point of the common mess was to bind the men together as friends. “Even horses and dogs who are fed together,” observed Xenophon, “form bonds and become attached to one another.”
Soft lands make soft people.
The Persian chefs produced a lavish banquet composed of multiple courses, served on golden plates and topped off by the most sumptuous cakes and delicacies. The Spartans’ grub was barley bread and pig’s-blood stew. When the Spartans saw the two meals side by side, they burst out laughing. “How far the Persians have traveled,” declared Pausanias, “to rob us of our poverty!”
“I will never punish an officer for daring too much, but only too little.”
We want action. We seek to test ourselves. We want friends—real friends, who will put themselves on the line for us—and we want to do the same for them. We’re seeking some force that will hurl us out of our going-nowhere lives and into the real world, into genuine hazard and risk. We want to be part of something greater than ourselves, something we can be proud of. And we want to come out of the process as different (and better) people than we were when we went in. We want to be men, not boys. We want to be women, not girls.
Grow Your Network
David Heinemeier Hansson
dhh.dk
This is a cool tech guy that has built a lot of really interesting things. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, author of "Rework", and much, much more. While I don't know him personally, he is a cool guy and always nice to keep an eye on whatever he is working on.