'Everyone is a Born Leader' is the Dumbest Thing I have Heard on Leadership

Authority comes from authorship. Authoring is an agonising, patient, laborious exercise. If you haven’t authored anything in life, you can only pretend to be an author or a leader, but may never have authentic authority; and most authority-hungry people do pretend. Sales oriented management and leadership books portray authority as something that we can buy from the market and wear. Yeah, most of us buy books and consume content that suits our profit and point of view. Don't pretend to be the author of something. It would be disgusting. Everyone is a born leader is the dumbest thing I have heard on leadership. It's a cheap imitation of great William Shakespeare’s lines in Twelfth Night, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”. He was referring to the unfathomable context and circumstances into which one’s life unfolds.

Christian scriptures repeatedly say, that Jesus spoke with authority, he worked with authority. Jesus authored a new era. He authored a new era of mercy, there is none who did not experience mercy from him. Jesus authored a new era of inclusivity, we find him discussing theology with a woman, a wayward woman, that too a pagan woman, in a sunny afternoon. Who of that time had such a sense of inclusive approach to spirituality? Right enough, everyone and everything obeyed Him, for he is the author of all life. One can't be a leader without followers. Perhaps the only thing one needs to be publicly called a leader is followers. And nobody heart-fully follows a tyrant and a pretender.

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