Getting It

"Those who understand about the common bond between man and animal, I don't need to explain it. Those who don't, well, they just don't get it."
Dean Richardson

"I get it."
Barrack Obama

Did anybody else think of Dean Richardson when Barrack Obama told us he "got it?" I did and I find the comparison interesting.

Both are clearly intelligent men, leaders in their field and good communicators. Neither wears their heart on their sleeve, yet both are compassionate, insightful and remarkably consistent. Richardson may be a little more brash than Obama but both men, I think, are self-confident and assured. They know what they can do and sometimes seem surprised that anyone doubts them. It's not arrogance. It's genuine surprise because if they say they can do something, they usually can.

I remember asking Dean if he was confident that he would be able to put Barbaro's leg back together again. "If I couldn't have repaired it well enough so that he could walk on it, then I probably wasn't going to wake Barbaro up," he told me. And while his residents gasped when they saw the inside of Barbaro's leg looked like a bag of ice chips, Dean told me he had seen others that looked as bad. "They only gasped because they had never seen that before," he said.

You can't be a leader without confidence in your abilities to succeed. That is a sure way to get others to follow. And while some people do that with force and flourish, I think Richardson and Obama do it by example. They set the tone in their actions and expect others to rise to their level.

I don't think there is yelling or berating on their part if you don't make the grade; only deep disappointment because they knew, or thought they knew, you could do better.

And that in the end is great motivation. Randy Pausch, in his amazing last lecture, talked about being blown away by his first class of virtual reality students and asking his mentor what to do when the first assignment comes in far ahead of anything you expected. "Set the bar higher," was the response and it worked.

I think Richardson and Obama "get it" on a lot of levels, so much so that they don't feel the need to spend time on how or why they arrived at that insight. It is more important to both of them to use that knowledge to improve conditions for others.

And that, I think, we should all get.