Library of Wisdom
Hard-earned lessons from lives shared by choice — every card donated deliberately by its author, with the whole life behind it. The Library is young; it grows one life at a time.
4 cards from 4 lives on leadership & mentoring.
Leadership & mentoring · Friendship & community
On running a lab
A lab is a family you choose every funding cycle, which concentrates the mind wonderfully. I hired for curiosity over polish, fed people at every defeat, and enforced exactly one commandment: bad news travels fastest. The postdoc who tells you the experiment died on Tuesday is worth three who manage your mood until Friday. That rule, I am told by alumni who now run companies and households, ports everywhere. Make it cheap to bring you the truth and you will be rich in the only currency management actually runs on.
To someone younger: Make it cheap to bring you bad news. Everything else is decor.
— Dr. Priya Sharma · Immunologist — thirty-four years at NIH, BethesdaDemonstration
Leadership & mentoring · Friendship & community
Shepherding people smarter than you
My congregation held schoolteachers, two surgeons, a federal judge, and Sister Alma Pettiford, who corrected my Greek from the third pew for thirty years and was usually right. A young preacher thinks the call is to be the smartest voice in the room, and the room will let him think it just long enough to embarrass him. The shepherd is not smarter than the sheep — that was never the job. The job is staying out in the weather with them. Authority you demand lasts a season. Authority they hand you for standing in the rain lasts forty-four years.
To someone younger: Be the one who stays out in the weather. The rest is borrowed.
— Rev. James E. Caldwell · AME Zion pastor, forty-four years — Richmond, VirginiaDemonstration
Work & calling · Leadership & mentoring
Work done all the way
I wound wire eight hours a day and then poured coffee for thirty years, and people my daughter's age sometimes get a face on like that's a story about settling. Let me straighten you out. There is no small work. There's work done all the way and work done partway, and you can tell which one a person does in about four minutes, and so can everybody else, and that — not the job title — is what they're saying about you at your funeral. I poured coffee all the way. Ask anybody.
— Dorothy "Dot" Jablonski · Wire-winder, diner owner, fed every kid on Cherry StreetDemonstration
Leadership & mentoring · Regret & forgiveness
On firing a friend
I waited eighteen months too long to fire Danny, because he was my friend, and I called the waiting loyalty. It wasn't loyalty. It was cowardice with better PR, and everyone underneath him paid the bill for it. When I finally did it, he said the thing I still carry: "You let me fail in front of everyone for a year and a half." Firing him was right. The waiting was the cruelty.
To someone younger: The kind thing and the comfortable thing are almost never the same thing.
— Marcus Reyes · Built a freight company for nineteen years, then sold itDemonstration