Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

This one is going to be a little more spiritual than perhaps you might be used to from me.
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan M. Sorrells
Host of the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast!
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Jesan Sorrells:

Hello. My name is Jesan Sorrells, and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, Shorts. There's no co host on these Shorts episodes. We have extended the time on these shorter episodes from five to six minutes to fifteen to twenty minutes for this season. This is so that these Shorts can serve as introductory episodes released ahead of our weekly longer form episodes.

Jesan Sorrells:

But don't worry, I will still let you know my observations, ideas, thoughts or rants about the literature, philosophy, psychology, and even the theology of leadership. Particularly as we prepare for the restoration of leadership and leadership principles during the next historical high in America. Why these episodes? Well, because listening to me talk about leadership for now around fifteen-twenty is still better than reading and trying to understand yet another business book. Even that business book that you bought with that famous person's name as the author, but you haven't applied any of the principles from that book to your leadership practices, at least not yet.

Jesan Sorrells:

So walk with me a little bit today. This is gonna be a little bit more religious than maybe you might be used to. Technology changes, social mores change, attitudes change, and even situations in the material world change over the long course of history. But people, weirdly enough, remain depressingly the same. Well, they remain depressingly the same if we, as human beings, lack the appropriate perspective on the long tail development of human behavior.

Jesan Sorrells:

We all argue the origins of such behavior, whether those origins lay in society or deep in the individual. But the fact is no one would want to go back in time to live under the tender mercies of the behaviors of people who ruled the Roman Empire. This is no one in a postmodern and spiritually denatured Europe of our current era wants to return to the era of pagan Christian or even post Christian kings. Just as no one in a culturally shamed and culturally confident lacking, secular United States wants to live genuinely in the period of the native peoples of either North or even South America. No one does.

Jesan Sorrells:

The paradox of human behavior is also the paradox of the future, and the paradox of the future is that we laud the past as a place that seems halcyon and paradisical, except for, of course, things like comfort, freedom, material wealth, and long or short term health. And in our always doom ridden present, we living in the present typically fail to imagine that the future might somehow be better. Or even worse, we imagine that the future will be a place where the people there will conform to what we in the present, which would in essence be their past, liked or didn't like without, of course, complaint or drama or feedback. L. P.

Jesan Sorrells:

Hartley opened his 1953 book, The Go Between, which eventually we'll read on this podcast with this immortal line, quote, the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. But the inverse is true as well. The future is a foreign country. They don't even know us there.

Jesan Sorrells:

So what are we to take from all of this? This idea about how we perceive changes in human behavior and the paradox of the future. Well, the big thing I think that we should take in our current era where we are consumed by presentism, where everything is happening always in the now, the thing we should take from understanding such paradoxes is that despair in and of itself is a sin. It is a sin because it invites into the heart of man the demons of lust, gluttony, greed, vanity, pride, sloth, envy, and wrath while driving out the one thing we actually need. Well, one of two things we actually need, faith and hope.

Jesan Sorrells:

I wanna talk about hope, though. Hope is fragile. It always is. Even the writer of the book of Hebrews understood this fact when he proclaimed that, quote, we have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. Hebrews six nineteen.

Jesan Sorrells:

Jesus Christ is the anchor of that hope. That's what he's talking about, of course. But in order to have that hope, well, we must do something old school. We must do something that we are loath to do. We must repent of the behaviors that bind us to our sins, that bind us to our paradoxes, either of the past or of the future, that bind us to our blindnesses, to the blessings that have been granted to us from above while still battling endlessly the thorns and thistles that dog us relentlessly from below.

Jesan Sorrells:

Or another way of putting it is that the presence of hope, the cultivating of hope, provides us as humans with perspective. The absence of hope leads inevitably to navel gazing and managed decline. Does having hope mean that we are naive to the work of changing our perspective on the future or the present? No. Of course not.

Jesan Sorrells:

However, hope enables us to continue to actually get up and engage in the battle every day that acts beyond survival, acts of relationship restoration and rebuilding genuinely require. In order to reconstruct Chesterton's fence, you know, the boundaries that keep hope alive, or to rebuild Chesterton's lamp out lamp post, you know, that thing that gives light for hope to live in, as we talked about in Shorts episode number two nine number two thirteen, we need to first have hope. Hardheaded, undeniable, and nonnegotiable hope. Now there are those of you who will listen to my voice who know me, and you will wonder at why I'm talking about hope. You may even call me hypocritical.

Jesan Sorrells:

And, yes, I have been full of despair. I have been full of pessimism. I have been full of cynicism. I have done all of the things that you are doing. I have been caught in a doom loop.

Jesan Sorrells:

I have doom scrolled and doom cycled, which is why I can tell you I can tell you the practical ways to restore hope because I've had to do those things myself. At a practical level, here's another question for us or another thought. How do we as humans in a society like The United States, which this is a paradox here for us to confront from the view of other places where material hope is not nearly as evident, we seem so fat and so wealthy and so unconcerned about anything. But from the perspective of people who are inside of The United States, we seem riven with cultural chaos, bereft and in spiritual decline, and floating or drowning maybe in moral intemperance. How do we, as humans in this society, which presents so many paradoxes externally and internally, how do we deal with the reality of despair at a practical level?

Jesan Sorrells:

How do we do the things that I've done? Well, the first practical thing to do, and this is going to sound revolutionary, is to stop doom scrolling. Delete the social media apps on your phone. Close the door to your office at work more often. Mute the notifications on your phone, stop answering meaningless emails, bring more of your attention, first in small drips and then in great floods, back to the texts of literature that can challenge you.

Jesan Sorrells:

Not one of those things is hard. Not one. What is hard, however, is committing to not reinstalling the apps, not opening the door on your office. What is hard is committing to not unmuting the notifications on your phone and letting it all back in or answering meaningless emails. Such commitment, the commitment to not go back once you have gone forward, takes willpower, and the modern world, hell, the postmodern technological landscape is designed in The United States to drain us of that willpower.

Jesan Sorrells:

The thing that neuroscientists can't find in the brain and that psychologists say doesn't exist in the mind, but which every algorithm relies on wearing down one interruption, one notification, one dopamine driven impulse at a time. Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. Look, just like water on a rock, the rock stops getting eroded by the water first by being moved away from the water source, and then by building up a tougher, thicker layer of sediment that can resist the wind or any other form of erosion that may come along later on. Building up that layer of sediment requires willpower, combined with hope in the future based on, quite frankly, faith in the atoning power of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. If we don't have that faith, and if we refuse that faith because it's too hard to put aside all of our despair, because the blanket of it comforts us in a dopamine flood or a dopamine drip, then we will succumb to the various despairs of the day, and we will be constantly surprised, but not surprised by joy as Chesterton would want us to be.

Jesan Sorrells:

But instead, we will be constantly surprised by irony, cynicism, and hopelessness as the spiritual rulers of this chaotic era inevitably want us to be. And my question for you, my pugilistic rebellious question for you is this, why should we allow those forces to win, quote unquote, this world or even the future? And well, that's it for me. Are you ready to elevate your leadership journey through exploring the wisdom of the ages? Subscribe to the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast on all major podcast platforms, including Apple iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube Music.

Jesan Sorrells:

You can also find us everywhere else podcasts are available. If you find value on our episodes, please leave a five star review on Apple, Spotify, and of course YouTube. We need those reviews to grow, and it is true way to help other leaders and lovers of literature discover this show. And thank you for your support.