Leadership, success and Forrest Gump

In his seminal work “To Have or To Be”, Erich Fromm spoke of the ‘having mode’ and the ‘being mode’. James March too speaks of the distinction between being externally motivated, working for specific ‘accomplishments’ or ‘good consequences’ versus following the energy arising from within one’s ‘identity’. According to March, cultivating, recognizing and giving one the freedom to dance with self-belief provides freedom to make mistakes and to appear fearlessly foolish. This trade-off between consequential thinking and identity thinking enables us to practice the ‘spiritual’ audacity of a Don Quixote or a Forrest Gump. Clarissa Pinkola Estes articulates, “Dwelling free means to follow the divine impulse, to live in a way that is not restricted to what others say and insist on, but to follow one's broadest, deepest sense about how to be, to grow, and live.” Moving with one’s self-belief and identity is not a debilitating unproductive space. The energy comes from the union of both passion and disciplined application. Remember Gump with his uncommon destiny of the unpredictable feather floating around him? Everything that Forrest does is with a sense of purpose—albeit, a differently-enabled identity, which is disarmingly self-validating of his shortcomings; yet preciously embedded with a dogged-discipline.

There is imagination, persistence, and joy as Forrest ventures out of his adolescent cocoon. An unusual imagination as he makes his choices when to run or pause. A persistence as he strives to fulfill his dharma toward himself, Bubba and Bubba’s family, lieutenant Dan, his mother, his love Jenny and his son Forrest Junior. There is visible confidence manifest in things he does like when he is running away from the bullies in school. It is through this experiencing of inner assurance that he is able to bring succor and joy in the lives of significant others.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes further describes this as “a journey to find a truer selfhood; one that cannot be easily corrupted by the outer world, or by time. The impulse fulfills a longing to unearth and reveal one's greatest and deepest shadows and gifts. It provides the balances required for a person to feel one thing especially—contentment”. In the outcomes of many myths, this neglected self so often proves to be the trove of heroic treasures—just right for the conflicts and courageous efforts needed to meet aggressive challenges and to give birth to the kinder, more tender, elegant and more strengthened self. Many a time our mindfulness wanders off, and makes us participate in dramas and in characters that are not related to our values of who we intrinsically purport to be to live heroic lives. We carry pretensions of superficial, quasi-cultural art and glamor-brands instead of elegance. Through this decadent lens we value people, food, things and qualify beauty. We tag talent and pleasure based on how much it cost, and exchange of crass favors and a crafty drift instead of empathetic values. There is a stench in the sweetness of Wilber’s ‘corporate flatland' that ‘professionals and business' often need to mask with artificially concocted benchmarks of ‘quality and goodness’. The timeless archetypes from the old myths that we invoke and connect to in life to negotiate its ups and downs have been almost erased by science, technology, and commerce. In our process to see our world homogenized in terms of currency, lingo, and corporate success stories, and cultural correctness, we sit smugly in our places of work and pleasure while machines slowly bore holes in the ozone layer. We are like Humpty Dumpty, set up to be felled without being put back together again. By shifting our cognitive bandwidth from the internal to the external, from us to me, from elegance to glamor, from health to wealth, from true happiness to indulgence and from kindness to crass indifference and cruelty, we defy our humanness. With a twisted and warped sense of success, we encourage, benchmark, celebrate and idolize the Peaky Blinders and Alfie Solomons of the world spouting unmatched philosophical eloquence devoid of intrinsic moral values. Are we ignoring the uniqueness of our mythos from where we derive our true spiritual strength? Are we ignoring the Don Quixotes and the Forrest Gumps in us? How do we reclaim ourselves from ourselves in order to fulfill our quest from that lie buried within most of us? As Jung questioned us, how do we cultivate the essential attitudes needed to support a quality life of the soul? Our answer may well come from a certain resilience to societal pressures that helps a person to become and to grow and live in the deepest and the most sacred sense.