Book 184 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Pass the Ball!

Book – Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About The Business of Life by James Kerr

Book Description:

When the going gets tough, the tough start changing. Difficult times call for different solutions.

In his global bestseller, Legacy, James Kerr goes deep into the heart of the world's most successful team, the New Zealand All Blacks, to help understand what it takes to bounce back from adversity and still reach the top. It is a book about leading a team or an organization - but, more importantly, about leading a life. The kind of life that you want to lead.

In today's volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment, personal leadership has never been more relevant and Legacy goes to the heart of how great leaders - and we are all leaders - 'reboot' and reframe their future. It is a truly life-defining read that addresses the big questions - values, vision, mindset and purpose - that, when answered, build the foundation for resilience, excellence and sustained success.

Champions do extra. They sweep the sheds, follow the spearhead, and keep a blue head.

They are good ancestors and plant trees they'll never see.

Reflection:

Well, If I could have written a book summarizing just about everything I’ve learned about humanity and culture over the past 2 years of this Year of Magical Learning journey, thousands of pages of my own personal writing and reflections working ideas out in my mind, hundreds of hours of conversations with my ClubAny co-founder, and 200+ books…Legacy would come pretty damn close!

Legacy does a magnificent job of describing the fundamentals and foundational elements needed to establish a sustainable and thriving culture where meaningful work and meaningful relationships can develop and can be replicated for generations. While it was written about the All Blacks, the nickname given to the New Zealand National Rugby team, it could have been written about any timeless culture that is built on values, meaning, and purpose that can stand the test of time.

This stuff works, because this stuff isn’t just stuff…it is humanity! We really aren’t that complex! We all simply want to do work that matters to us with people that matter to us. It is really that simple, and that hard at the same time.

This book was recommended to me by a professional acquaintance of mine on LinkedIn. We’ve never met in person and only had a handful of zoom conversations because the companies we work for have a business relationship. We barely know each other, however, that didn’t stop her from reaching out and sending me this book as a recommendation to add to my list for the YOML journey. She said her boss recommended it, she loved it, and thought I would enjoy it as well.

I can’t tell you how much I loved this and made me feel like all this work is worth it. I told her that I would immediately download it, added it to my list, and here we are.

I’ve been posting these Year of Magical Learning reflections on LinkedIn and Twitter since this journey began. I was a very hesitant to share in the beginning because none of this made any sense, especially on a channel like LinkedIn. People just don’t do what I’m doing on LinkedIn for fun. There always must be some ulterior motive if you are going to invest this much time into doing something like this project and sharing it on social media.

Well, there is an ulterior motive, and it is to PASS THE BALL!

Pass the ball, leaders set the stage to build more leaders. This is one of the catchy little quips that the author used throughout Legacy. He really hammered the rule of 3, mantras, anchoring, and repetition in his writing. You know what…it worked as it reminded me about what this whole journey is really all about.

I put an insane amount of work into this Year of Magical Learning journey for exactly this reason. Emilia passed the ball to me with the lessons she showed me, and now I’m doing my job to pass the ball to others with the lessons I’ve learned in my own journey. This journey is a portion of my own legacy, and something I am proud to share with others.

It wasn’t always this way. I didn’t begin this journey with this whole thing in mind, in fact, the exact opposite. The first 30-50 books I read on this journey were purely selfish. I was in pain and hurting after the passing of my daughter. Luckily for me, I had an angel in my corner that kept me going, inspired me, and helped me to discover who I wanted to be, how I wanted to live my life, and what my purpose was on this Earth through our journey together.

As I kept reading, and got to books 50-80 on this journey, I started to feel a little weird about all the new knowledge I was learning. You can only be selfish for so long and I knew it was time to do something different. I recently heard that you can either be a river or a swamp in life. Rivers take in fresh water from another source and transport it to another location. Swamps only take in water and never release it causing stagnation.

During books 50-80, I started to feel like a swamp and I needed to open up a channel to release some of this water downstream that had been building; I started writing reflections about what I’ve learned on this journey to break the dam. Then I started turning them into blog posts, then it moved to social media posting, and now Trieu and I are making a daily podcast all to be a river and PASS THE DAMN BALL!

Look, I know that we all have a selfish gene in us, and I can’t claim this is all about Passing the Ball. You’d be 100% right. A lot of this journey and learning was 100% selfish and a certain portion will always be selfish as it aligns to my values, gives me a dopamine hit, and I feel good about it each day. However, here is why humans are special, once we’ve had our fill, for some reason we inevitably look to Pass the damn ball onto others to share and encourage them to join in the fun or begin their own adventure. It is one of our superpowers!

Well, I’ve officially had my fill and it is time to Pass the Ball through this Year of Magical Learning Journey. If it can help anyone in anyway, that will be well worth all the work that was put into this journey. I hope you enjoy and keep sending those recommendations if you are following along.

Question: If you’ve had your fill, how are you passing the ball onto others?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - Legacy: What the All Blacks Can Teach Us About The Business of Life by James Kerr