I gave my neighbor a copy of The Island of Misfit Leaders. He read it straight through and texted me what it had meant to him, which is the kind of message that makes the whole enterprise of publishing worth the trouble. Then he sent me something else. He had come across a meme online, and it sent him straight back to the illustration in the book, the one where the ostriches become swans.
Look at what the mirror is doing. From where the horse is standing, the swan's body disappears behind its own, so the reflection is not a horse and a bird. It is a horse with wings. A pegasus. I sat there and cried.
Anyone who has read The Island of Misfit Leaders will know why. Eight leaders wash up on a gray island after being pushed out of organizations that could not hold them: Truth, Logic, Passion, Candor, Merit, Industry, Conscience, and Unity. Trailing them everywhere is a flock of miserable, hunched-over ostriches, because, as Passion explains, every one of them has been ostracized. Ostrich-ized. It is not a very funny joke, but it is an accurate one.
At the end of the book, when those eight finally stand on the summit and say out loud who they actually are, the birds begin to change. Their feathers whiten and lengthen, their necks curve, and they rise into something none of them saw coming. They were never ostriches. They were swans who had been told they were ostriches, and it took the entire climb, plus each other, before a single one of them could see it.
What undid me about that image is the geometry of it. The horse cannot see its own back. No amount of straining or self-examination is ever going to show it what is standing there. It takes a mirror, and it takes another creature willing to climb up and hold its wings out, before the horse gets to look at itself and find out what it looks like in flight. The wings are borrowed. The revelation is not.
I have spent a good part of my professional life on that exact question, and I can trace the reason back to one scene in one movie. In Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill is at the bottom. The cabinet is maneuvering against him, Halifax wants terms, the army is stranded at Dunkirk, and the man history now treats as inevitable is sitting in his own bedroom looking like someone who has already lost. King George VI comes to see him, unannounced. He does not bring a strategy or a war plan. He says four words: "You have my support." Then he tells Churchill that whatever the rest of them may think, nobody in Britain dreaded his appointment the way Adolf Hitler did, and that from here the two of them will work together. Churchill admits there are very few people with whom he can speak frankly. The King answers, "Perhaps now we have each other."
That is the hinge of the whole film. Everything Churchill goes on to do- the speeches we still quote, the refusal to negotiate, an entire nation talked into standing- comes after a man walked into his room and told him he was not in it alone. You can watch the air and the blood come back into him on screen. That scene sent me into doctoral research on follower self-efficacy, and it is the same scene that gave me the Advocates chapter of SPARK. Bandura gave us the term for what is happening in that bedroom: collective efficacy. The more capable and confident the people around you, the higher your own belief in what you can pull off. It is the research language for standing on the shoulders of giants. We gain and grow based on who we know.
In SPARK: 5 Essentials to Ignite the Greatness Within, the A stands for Advocates. They are the helpers, anointers, cheerleaders, truth tellers, prayer warriors, and accountability partners who make up your core tribe, the ones who believe in you well before you have given them sufficient evidence. The word I keep coming back to is the Air Force one. Advocates are your wingmen. A wingman cannot fly your airplane for you and cannot take your controls, yet nobody goes up without one, because the entire purpose of having one is that somebody is out there watching the piece of sky you cannot see. We do not need a whole army. One other human being willing to fight alongside us for our success is usually all it takes.
My father said you will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read. As a publisher, I lean on the second half, because books are what I do all day long. The older I get, the more convinced I am that he weighted those two halves equally on purpose. My neighbor is both halves of that sentence standing in one place. He read the book, and he is the person I met, and it was him, not the book, who held the wings up where I could finally see them.
There is a second gift here, and it is the one that takes longer to appreciate. Wings do not merely lift you over the thing that was blocking you. They change what you are able to see. In the book it is Logic who names it: deflection keeps us at the base of the mountain, never rising to the clarity that altitude provides. Down on the ground, the obstacle fills your entire field of vision and looks permanent. Get up a few thousand feet and it becomes a feature of the terrain, with a whole country visible on the far side of it. Every fourth-class cadet at the Academy has to recite High Flight from memory, so a great many of us carry Magee's line about slipping the surly bonds of Earth around for life. Notice that he slipped them. The ground never let go and the gravity never changed. An advocate does not remove any of that either. They loosen its hold long enough for you to get airborne, and from up there the stumbling blocks turn out to be terrain.
I write about vigilance a great deal, and I am not retiring from any of it, yet a life spent entirely on watch is a thin life. Some people show up and hand us back to ourselves, and that deserves equal airtime.
It took a neighbor with a phone and a picture of a horse to show me my own back. That is not embarrassing to admit; it is the point. Nobody sees their own wings, which means the person who has read every book on the subject needs an advocate exactly as much as the person who has read none.
So this one is for my neighbor, who read a book I wrote and then handed back something better than a review. He did not tell me the writing was good. He showed me what it had done, which is the one thing no author can see from where she is standing. He almost certainly has no idea he did anything at all, because advocates rarely do. The swan is not thinking about the mirror; it is simply standing where it is standing with its wings out.
Now be one. Somewhere near you is a perfectly good horse with no notion of what is possible. You do not need a title or a plan or the perfect words to say. You need the willingness to climb up and stand close enough for someone to finally see what they look like with wings on. You have my support. That is all it took. That is all it ever takes.
