Leading Quietly.

Although I’ve had this book on my shelf now for a few years now, I am just getting around to reading it.

The book is called Leading Quietly by Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.
And the following is an excerpt I would love to share with you on today:

Consider the view of Albert Schweitzer, a man who, by any standard, was a truly heroic leader. In his late twenties, Schweitzer abandoned two promising career paths – one as a musician, the other as a theologian – that would have led to a comfortable, settled, and secure life.

Instead, he became a medical missionary and spent most of his life serving lepers and victims of sleeping sickness in central Africa. His decades of hard, lonely, and sometimes dangerous work were rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, and Schweitzer used the funds from the prize to expand his hospital. He worked there until his death at the age of ninety.

Schweitzer changed many lives and inspired countless others. Yet in his autobiography, he wrote these words about the role of great individuals in shaping the world:

Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition.

The latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean.

When a Nobel Peace Prize winner tells us to ‘rethink and even devalue the role of great figures in human affairs,’ as emerging leaders, we may need to take note. Schweitzer compares their efforts to “foam” and instead praises the “small and obscure deeds” of others less known.

We may be living in a time when the impact of the loud will rarely outlast the impact of the quiet.

Related posts:

1. On Tour.
2. Christmas Sabbath.
3. Absalom.
4. Without Faith.
5. Intentional.

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