Rules for Living Life, Part 8

I recently had the opportunity to spend a few days studying the Battle of Gettysburg by walking around the battlefield with a military historian. The leadership training course I was taking centered on key individuals in the campaign and how their actions (or inactions) should guide me as a leader in my own organization.

Throughout the battle, leaders on both sides displayed a number of exemplary traits and we carefully examined the leadership trait they each personified.  As I step back to try and understand the entire battle, though, one overriding factor seemed to tie everything together. Serendipitously, it is my eighth Rule for Living Life: Be fearless and believe in your mission. David didn’t kill Goliath – his faith did.

If this is the first post in this series that you are reading, this is a series of blogs based on a set of rules for living my life that I developed by merging a set of secular rules together with my understanding of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. If you want to start at the beginning of this series, you can start here.

Without getting into the historical specifics, the concept of “mission” and the causal relationship between whether the mission was communicated and unquestioningly accepted and the leader’s success in the battle was tangible. For Robert E. Lee, the mission was to annihilate the Union Army: a mission that many of his staff could not support because their strategy in the War for Southern Independence was to defend their soil, drive the Northern Army from the Southern states, and secure a separated peace.  For General Meade, the mission was to defend his country from invasion, preserve the Union, and emancipate the southern slaves. His army supported him completely.

When pushed beyond physical and mental limits, it was their belief in the mission that gave the Union Army strength and resolve. Conversely, the lack of mission clarity and belief caused the Confederates to hesitate and stall. Their hesitation drove the desperation that ultimately resulted in defeat.

Examples of this causality are also evident in the lives of many other highly impactful people. When a person devotes themselves to a mission they believe in completely, the results they can achieve are awe-inspiring. Conversely, if you are dispassionate about something, it seems like the barriers expand exponentially and the energy reserves you have are never enough. Right?

But how do you know what your mission is?

I think the answer to that question is in the rule itself: be fearless. I believe that in each of our hearts we all have something we would do if truly fearless – something you would do if all obstacles were removed.

For me, that deep-seated desire is to be a writer.

In this series, we have discussed a few seminal moments in my life. One of the earliest was a radio commercial I heard when I was 13. In the commercial, a boy arrives at the gates of heaven after wrecking his car (it was a safe-driving public service message). The angel greets him and begins reassigning key aspects of his life to others due to his premature death.

“Okay, let’s see. Oh! You were going to be a famous author – you don’t see that one very often…” the angel says.

For some reason that resonated with me. And it still resonates with me.

Of course, as an engineer, I did nothing to learn how to become a famous author. I did not follow my path and I have never been fearless in pursuing that mission. But that voice has never left my head and that resonance has never left my heart.

Rule 8, like many of the other rules, relies on faith. The difference here is that the faith you have to have is faith in yourself.

Here again, the key is in the explanatory statement: David didn’t kill Goliath – his faith did. What this statement is intended to convey is the duality that you must have enough faith to step out of ranks to take on your mission and that you have the tools needed to face the challenge. It also subtly reminds me that failing to devote myself to a providential circumstance causes that opportunity to pass me by.

Tying this back to Rule 7, though, there is a dangerous corollary: just because you step up to face your mission, your idea of success is not guaranteed. Nowhere could provide a greater metaphor for this than the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. No one could articulate this better than Lincoln did when he gave his Gettysburg Address.

“It is rather for us to be here and take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”

Thousands of men confronted their Goliath on that battlefield and though they were not individually successful at staying alive, the campaign to end slavery progressed. And that was undoubtedly part of God’s plan. And today, their ghosts inspire new generations of leaders. That is immortality and maybe that was God’s plan, too.

Finally, there is a poster that always stuck with me. It is in the style of those inspirational posters but this one is a parody. On the poster is the image of a shipwreck with the saying: Mistakes; It could be that the meaning of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

That resonates with me as well. We do not get to choose our outcome but we do get to choose whether or not we participate.  

And remember: we’re all walking through a darkened city at night with a penlight. None of us are seeing more than a small piece of the landscape…