Acharya Prashant (AP): What is leadership?
Questioner (Q): The quality to lead others.
AP: Why must I be interested in leading somebody? Don’t I have my own life to live? Why must somebody be interested in following me? Doesn’t he have his own intelligence?
Q: Sir, leadership is also taking initiative.
AP: Taking, Initiative, you take initiative. For example, you take initiative to speak right now, showing leadership, right? Which is wonderful. Where are followers in this? But yes, looking at you, others may know that this is possible. One person is asking a question, and that may open up the possibility for others as well. Now you didn’t want followers, did you? When you spoke these words, did you want followers? But your words may just happen to inspire somebody.
Leader doesn’t care about followers. Followers come on their own if they have to.
The leader is happy living his own life. However, they may be another condition, where the followers may be necessary. For example, I want to wage a freedom struggle and it becomes meaningful only when lot of people participate in it, only when there is a huge crowd. Here, I may look to mobilize public opinion. Here, I may want that others may know what I am trying to say. So that there is a great mass of people who are crying out for freedom. In that case, yes, I will look at other people, I will try to say a few things to them.
