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The Story We Long For

Sometimes we don't realize what we need to hear, again and again.

There is a wonderful organization that invites me to speak every April to men and women who are enrolled in their leadership development program. Every year their invitation makes it clear that they want me to say the same things I said the previous year.

So I try to do what they ask. I use the same introduction, employ the same outline, tell the same stories, and even repeat the same joke or two in the warm-up phase of the talk.

I did this for the eleventh time just a week ago.

My presentation is about how a leader handles his occasional moments of failure. Sometimes I start by saying that I feel as if I have an earned-doctorate in this subject because there have been more than a few failure-moments over my seven decades of life. Most of them are the simple, everyday failures that don't even deserve a mention in my journal. But I go on to admit to the audience that there have been some bad experiences of seismic magnitude.

I usually relate the conversation I had with a New Yorker years ago ...

March
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