I think I have written about this before.

I'll confess two things right up front. One: I love telling stories, and yes, I tell them repeatedly. Give me a chance, and a story will come out. Two: My mind is terrible at retaining specifics. Worse, I'm too lazy to go back and find the details I've forgotten. This week, you're getting a front-row seat to both of these flaws. I’ll likely rehash old insights and stories, trusting that my embellished narratives will cover for my faulty memory.

So, here's a collection of seemingly random thoughts on leadership that hit me this past week.

Writing about the same broad topic every single week is genuinely tough. The writing itself is fine, but the well of fresh, creative concepts can run dry. I keep a running notebook of random ideas, hoping one might blossom into a full article. Now, I’m constantly analyzing everything—what I do, what I consume, who I interact with—searching for a spark of insight that connects to my beliefs, experience, and, most importantly, has value for you, the reader. Many reflections have merit, but they must also feel timely and useful. This process—writing, conceptualizing, and timing—is a complex layering of difficulty. The physical act of writing is the easiest; the thinking and organizing is harder; but considering the impact and influence is the absolute hardest. My strategy is to work backward: starting with that hard, complex, and vital element of impact, then moving toward the easier components of organizing and writing. I apply this exact approach to leadership. I try to lead with the end impact in mind, dedicating significant time to contemplating what my team and I will achieve. This isn't just about tangible results; it's about reputation, personal relationships, and our core values. Legacy is a foundational tenet of my leadership philosophy. You'd assume leading with impact guarantees smooth sailing and stellar results—and it does lead to success—but it also introduces real difficulties. Leading with impact has negative consequences. It can alienate some people, create stress for you and your team, have unexpected negative effects on promotions and outcomes, and, frankly, it can feel incredibly lonely at times. This week, I met with a student feeling utterly disconnected from their studies. It wasn't a lack of ability or a doubt about their career path. It was a missing sense of impact. They felt different from their peers; the conventional path to success their classmates were taking just didn’t resonate. They desperately wanted to recapture the sense of impact they had in high school. My advice was simple: embrace non-conformity. Stop trying to fit in and copy. Just do what you know works for you. I promised to check in after midterms to see how they’d begun to implement this.

Attitude. I have plenty of it—it’s been both the source of my success and my pain. But overall, my attitude toward work, colleagues, and success has been key to my strength as a leader. This week, I had a stark reminder of how critical mindset is to leadership. I had lunch with a former staff member who just started a new job. This man is immensely talented, with an uncanny ability to capture and communicate stories through media, matched by serious technical skills. But as we discussed his new role, he kept circling back to his attitude and behaviours. He knew his technical value was high, but he emphasized that his mindset and conduct would make him indispensable. His excitement wasn’t just about the tasks; it was about how his attitude would connect with the organization's desire for transformation—not just of the industry, but of the culture and the people within it. The daily tasks, he realized, are just the canvas for his real work: to lead, innovate, care, connect, and transform. Leaders see past the to-do list. They see that how tasks are done is the very arena where leadership is developed and demonstrated. Leadership isn't about authority, power, or position; it's about connection, engagement, and relationships. This conversation was a valuable reminder that for me to continue growing as a leader, I must stay laser-focused on the intangibles surrounding task completion. I need to model the attitudes and behaviours that generate success for others.

Nothing new here? I spent this past week gathering research for a project, which involved meetings with new people to draw out insights for co-creating a leadership development framework. To be honest, I went into it with mixed feelings. I was excited to meet new people, but I was also cynical, thinking, "Will I really get any new insights on leadership development?" I had mentally closed myself off. I spend more time thinking about leadership than most, probably more than is healthy, and I genuinely believed these people wouldn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Thankfully, I was very wrong. Right before the first discussion, I had a technical meltdown with my computer. Panic set in as the meeting time approached, and I couldn't even get the person's contact info to tell them I was having a problem. Two things happened that completely shifted my attitude and changed the outcome of these meetings. First, people helped me. Colleagues immediately dropped what they were doing to solve my crisis, doing so with genuine care and grace. One even followed up later that day, just to see if everything worked out. These are people I've worked with for a very short time. Care is rarely given, but when it is, its impact is oversized. The care I received changed everything: the computer was fixed, the meeting happened, my perspective was reset, and I knew that small act would have a positive ripple effect. The second factor was the person in that first meeting. It's rare in my professional life that I meet someone and think, "I would work for them." This person was one of those rare exceptions. Since leaving full-time work, I’m often asked if I’d go back. My answer is always: it depends on the boss. I've had good, bad, and a couple of truly terrible bosses over the years, but only one who was exceptional. That boss gave me autonomy balanced with accountability, and offered both praise and challenge in equal measure, always delivered with concern, care, and compassion. The person in this meeting reminded me of that exceptional boss. From the very first comment, I was hooked. I wanted to learn and understand. The combination of receiving care from my colleagues and immediately sensing care from the person I was meeting with opened me up to the benefit of newness. Maybe the information I received wasn't entirely novel, but it felt new, allowing me to see the familiar in a new light. This is crucial for innovation: it's rarely about completely new creations; it's more about incremental newness that transforms people and organizations. I'm grateful for those interactions; they reminded me that seeing new things requires a change in perspective. There is newness in most repetitive things we do, if we only open ourselves up to seeing it that way—or, in my case, if people help you see it that way.

What connects these three insights? Repeating tasks, behaviours, and attitudes can simplify life, demanding less energy, less risk, and offering more predictability. But repetition to the point of the mundane is toxic to your leadership. It makes you fear challenging the consensus. It creates a gulf between who you are now and the impact you want to make. Repetition degrades your attitude toward work. Just because you master a task through repetition doesn't mean you're creating value. True value comes from mastering the attitudes and behaviours that create success for others. Finally, if we ask for help and remain open to learning from others, we prevent repetition from blinding us to opportunity and innovation. The same thing, repeated over and over, has newness all around it, if only we change our perspective. Leadership is about repeatedly creating the conditions for others to succeed. If you can do that, I want to learn from you.