In my effort to define leadership I made a long list of qualities and realized they were all independent of each other, and involved separate skills.
Saying someone is a good leader is like saying they’re a good basketball player. Of course you can break it down into smaller constituent skills, of course some good leaders/players have different strengths among those skills, but at the end of the day it’s useful to talk about the concept as a whole, too.
And lacking a solid, commonly accepted definition doesn’t mean something isn’t real. Is happiness real? You can make all the same critiques of that as a concept.
And lacking a solid, commonly accepted definition doesn’t mean something isn’t real. Is happiness real?
There’s the word/concept I was looking for. I’m so glad you asked.
Happiness is absolutely not real. In fact, that was the first or second “umbrella concept” that I started to break down, along with intelligence. I know what joy, gladness, serenity, pleasure, optimism, adoration, pride, excitement, satisfaction, and gratitude are. They never occur or exist all together at once, but that is what the idea of “happiness” implies: that there’s one dial that’s either high or low.
After thinking about happiness, I don’t believe I know what it means anymore, and I’m actually glad I don’t, because my life makes more sense and is more affirming after breaking it up into its component parts.
I’m not about to go out and say that every word and concept is flawed and should be dissolved. Only a few of them, and they tend to be broad ideas with relatively simple words that we are taught very early on, and have lots of synonyms.
Saying someone is a good leader is like saying they’re a good basketball player. Of course you can break it down into smaller constituent skills, of course some good leaders/players have different strengths among those skills, but at the end of the day it’s useful to talk about the concept as a whole, too.
And lacking a solid, commonly accepted definition doesn’t mean something isn’t real. Is happiness real? You can make all the same critiques of that as a concept.
There’s the word/concept I was looking for. I’m so glad you asked.
Happiness is absolutely not real. In fact, that was the first or second “umbrella concept” that I started to break down, along with intelligence. I know what joy, gladness, serenity, pleasure, optimism, adoration, pride, excitement, satisfaction, and gratitude are. They never occur or exist all together at once, but that is what the idea of “happiness” implies: that there’s one dial that’s either high or low.
After thinking about happiness, I don’t believe I know what it means anymore, and I’m actually glad I don’t, because my life makes more sense and is more affirming after breaking it up into its component parts.
I’m not about to go out and say that every word and concept is flawed and should be dissolved. Only a few of them, and they tend to be broad ideas with relatively simple words that we are taught very early on, and have lots of synonyms.