I’ve been thinking a lot about drive and dedication; passion and the desire for perfection; success and sacrifice. These are all things that I qualities that I think leaders need to embrace. However, I also think that they can also hinder a leader if not balanced by perspective. It is the line between the two – the one weight that keeps the scale from tipping – that I have a hard time defining.
I’ve been questioning this more and more as I continue to work in the theatre department to an excessive extent. I am driven to take on every possible opportunity because I want the experience. I want to learn the elements of theatre so that I can make myself more saleable and successful. But sometimes I am too driven and I take on too much. I take on so much that I can’t possibly put enough time in to each task to make it the best it can be, so my drive for success, in a way, cancels itself out.
But also, the intensity of my commitments and my resulting schedule is my choice. I chose to take on the opportunities; therefore it is my responsibility to do well no matter what it takes. I will come in early and stay late and I won’t ever let my team down. I make sacrifices so that my team can succeed and the projects get finished. It’s not always fun, and the end product isn’t always perfect, but it’s enough. In the end, I’m not sure whether my actions are good or bad. Although I am not necessarily completing my best work, I am learning and growing with each responsibility that I take on.
However, I also believe I take the idea of drive for leaders to an extreme. You don’t have to do everything to be driven; you don’t have to do nothing to be lazy. I started recognizing this as we struggled to reschedule class after so many people tried to skip the Friday heading in to spring break.
My first irritation with the situation was that it was necessary at all. We were all informed very clearly at the beginning of the year that Roberts Fellows is to be our top priority. We all know that we have class on Fridays. And yet…people scheduled over top of class and simply thought they would be excused. Some situations I understood – for other educational programs like Clinicals or Student Teaching Seminars that are mandatory and can’t be made up, exceptions have to be made. But in other cases, I think skipping class was an inconsiderate choice on the part of the other students. But that wasn’t what really irked me.
After realizing that we were never going to find a time that we could all meet, a suggestion was made that we should consider sacrificing something in order to make time. All well and good. But the only students agreeing to make sacrifices were the same students who had actually planned to be in class on today. The dedicated students inconvenienced by the cancellation that was out of their control were being further inconvenienced as the original students seemed to be refusing to budge. Talk about a lack of drive or sense of responsibility towards the group.
What frustrated me was that the Roberts Fellows was to be the group for which I didn’t have to sacrifice in order to pick up slack; the group of similarly driven and dedicated students that would put in equal effort in order to achieve to a level that met the expectations of the University—and this was not seeming to be the case.
But I suppose, when you think about it, we are all so involved on campus and in the workforce that we may not be able to make sacrifices. There are some things that simply require your attention and you have no choice. So perhaps the other students were experiencing a situation similar to my work in the theatre – a situation in which they commit and commit and commit to the point where something needs to be sacrificed, and yet, you can’t sacrifice anything without inconveniencing your teams.
So where is the line? I’m still uncertain.
I’ve been questioning this more and more as I continue to work in the theatre department to an excessive extent. I am driven to take on every possible opportunity because I want the experience. I want to learn the elements of theatre so that I can make myself more saleable and successful. But sometimes I am too driven and I take on too much. I take on so much that I can’t possibly put enough time in to each task to make it the best it can be, so my drive for success, in a way, cancels itself out.
But also, the intensity of my commitments and my resulting schedule is my choice. I chose to take on the opportunities; therefore it is my responsibility to do well no matter what it takes. I will come in early and stay late and I won’t ever let my team down. I make sacrifices so that my team can succeed and the projects get finished. It’s not always fun, and the end product isn’t always perfect, but it’s enough. In the end, I’m not sure whether my actions are good or bad. Although I am not necessarily completing my best work, I am learning and growing with each responsibility that I take on.
However, I also believe I take the idea of drive for leaders to an extreme. You don’t have to do everything to be driven; you don’t have to do nothing to be lazy. I started recognizing this as we struggled to reschedule class after so many people tried to skip the Friday heading in to spring break.
My first irritation with the situation was that it was necessary at all. We were all informed very clearly at the beginning of the year that Roberts Fellows is to be our top priority. We all know that we have class on Fridays. And yet…people scheduled over top of class and simply thought they would be excused. Some situations I understood – for other educational programs like Clinicals or Student Teaching Seminars that are mandatory and can’t be made up, exceptions have to be made. But in other cases, I think skipping class was an inconsiderate choice on the part of the other students. But that wasn’t what really irked me.
After realizing that we were never going to find a time that we could all meet, a suggestion was made that we should consider sacrificing something in order to make time. All well and good. But the only students agreeing to make sacrifices were the same students who had actually planned to be in class on today. The dedicated students inconvenienced by the cancellation that was out of their control were being further inconvenienced as the original students seemed to be refusing to budge. Talk about a lack of drive or sense of responsibility towards the group.
What frustrated me was that the Roberts Fellows was to be the group for which I didn’t have to sacrifice in order to pick up slack; the group of similarly driven and dedicated students that would put in equal effort in order to achieve to a level that met the expectations of the University—and this was not seeming to be the case.
But I suppose, when you think about it, we are all so involved on campus and in the workforce that we may not be able to make sacrifices. There are some things that simply require your attention and you have no choice. So perhaps the other students were experiencing a situation similar to my work in the theatre – a situation in which they commit and commit and commit to the point where something needs to be sacrificed, and yet, you can’t sacrifice anything without inconveniencing your teams.
So where is the line? I’m still uncertain.
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