“Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.”

I see lessons about leadership everywhere – not just people in action, but books and movies leave huge impressions on me. I come from a family of avid readers and I know that so much reading has helped form my outlook about successful leaders – maybe more than official leadership development training I’ve had. In a class you can pick up the techniques, but in real life, the movies or in books you see it all in action – what works and what doesn’t. I’m constantly filing that information – it’s part of my continual personal and leadership development.

My sister and I have been talking about going back to some of the classics that we’ve either read along the way or NEVER read and I discover that #98 on the Modern Classics Best Novels (http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-novels/) is an old favorite: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach.

This was given to me by an old friend years ago – I copied much of it into my personal manager’s “reference guide” so I’d have easy access to the book’s reminders that made such an impression – and I still have that guide!

I pulled out some of the book’s lessons that I found especially meaningful:

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.

You seek problems because you need their gifts.

Learning is finding out what you already know.

Doing is demonstrating that you know it.

Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.

You are all learners, doers, teachers.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.

Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah. 

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

You teach best what you most need to learn.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.
You may have to work for it, however.

There’s so much more in this “little” book – it’s not the size of War and Peace, but it’s very powerful and it will make you think! Tell me what YOU think or if you’ve read the book.

Want more? Watch Richard Bach Quotes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywxHS43ZxEM