Touchdowns vs. First downs
Understanding the difference really matters.
First downs are not touchdowns. That is obvious.
No football team ever has won a game when they make progress down the field but never score any points.
On teams, first downs often can feel like touchdowns and be celebrated as such, but they’re not the same.
Touchdowns take courage. To say it’s done, shipped. To deliver and present. To go to market. To make a decision. To make the change. To be specific. To put it into the world and be on the hook for it. To commit and forsake all others. Courage.
First downs merely require making progress, gaining yardage, keeping the wheels turning. Whatever that loosely means.
To be sure, first downs are important. But only if they put us in position to take a real shot at the end zone and achieve the goal that actually matters.
Consequently, it’s REALLY important to REALLY understand what tasks are touchdowns and which ones are merely first downs. Otherwise, we’ll have spent our lives being busy, without actually making anything better.
Landing On Mars
I want you to come to Mars with me, any questions?
I’m forming a landing party and going to Mars. Will you come?
Full disclosure: I’m not actually going to Mars (shocker). But let’s play out this thought experiment as if I were.
Before making a decision you’d ask me a lot of questions, some would probably be these:
Are you serious?
Why are we going to Mars?
Are we coming back?
How are we going to make the journey safely?
Why are you asking me, and what would be my role in the mission?
Why should I trust you to make this happen?
When are we going and coming back?
If I agree to this, what do you need me to do now?
In organizations and community we ask others to go to Mars all the time. We just call them new “projects” or new “programs.”
Those new projects we want to start are not as audacious as actually going to Mars. But to those we want and need to bring along, it might feel as if it were.
And because it feels like going to Mars for them, we need to answer those questions and build up their trust in us before we ask them to enlist. If we don’t, we should expect them to say no, and they honestly ought to.
“Leader” is a title, leadership is taking responsibility
It’s not the title that matters.
I could prepare, read, study, interview experts, take a standardized test, get a degree, get a fellowship, and then get a placement and then take responsibility for something.
That would make me a leader. It is one path.
On the other extreme, I could take responsibility for something today that needs responsibility taken, and then take responsibility for getting better at it. Even something really small. Then I could do the same thing tomorrow, the next day, and the next day.
That would make me a leader today, and an even better leader tomorrow. That just puts me on the hook today, instead of 5 or 10 years from now.
Title or not, we’re not leaders until we take responsibility for something that needs responsibility taken. The second we take responsibility, we instantly become a leader.