RGHF Rotary Global History Fellowship

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Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Essays

• Section Home • Dr. Randy Pausch: My Last Lecture • Aspire to achieving the inspirational • Business unlike football • Child’s perspective best Dad’s Day gift one can get • In Defense of Flame and Air • Is “Finding Nemo” a parable • Two Sides to the Same Coin: Liberal and Conservative • Peace is like making a quilt: • Rain of Terror • What I Learned From My Cat • There seems to be no choice • Tying up loose ends • Those Who Never Follow • A win-win situation is required, with no place for losing •

Rules for Those Who Almost Never Follow

1. When breaking new ground, listen to everyone but follow no one. The problem of being a cultural leader is that you must set your own path with little or no help from others.

2. When in doubt, circle the wagons. In the history of settlers in America, when they were attacked or had problems that they could not solve they circled the covered wagons and looked out upon a hostile world. It is the same with any problem. You start with self and move out to the universe.

3. Luck comes to those who are prepared. You never know what you might need so it is best to prepare multiple ways to solve or approach anything.

4. If they give you lined paper, write (but across the lines if they do not tell you differently). Leaders are rebels who push the rules of a society and yet somehow stay within some guidelines or rewrite the rules for what the guidelines are.

5. Walking on new ground, tread softly at first and hold the hand of a friendly, experienced partner. Even though the path that you might take as a leader is new, there are those who have walked other paths who can help with small hints of how to trend.

6. Stop and watch the grass grow. You might learn something. Leaders tend to see the world from a satellite point of view. It is important to stop this at times to see from a close up point of view.

7. First you shoot the arrows and then you paint the targets. You cannot miss. Try an idea and see if it works. If it does, build something around it: a system, a product, a nation, an idea or an image.

8. When walking in the unknown, any path will do. You can begin in the middle, work backwards or forwards. If you do not know where you are going, any road will get you there. A cultural leader must embrace risk as a way of life. Creative thinking is not a linear process.

9. For a creative human being, it is just as important to forget as to remember. When building a new house, it is important to forget the frustrations of building the first one, without losing that data somewhere.

10.  Leave the door open since the future is sometimes the past. When creating something new, many cultural leaders go to the past for inspiration but not the immediate past: for instance, when thinking about 2003, go to the 1960s.

11.  May the beauty we love be what we do. If you do not create what you love, the outcome will be something that you or others cannot live with. Also remember that creating truth is beauty.

12. When you say, “My door is always open,” remember that you can go out as well as

inviting others to come in. When making a major change in what system is used or the outward appearance of the old system, go out and talk with those most closely effected.

13. When you are in a foreign place, remember that you are the foreigner. Also

keep in mind that anything or anyone or anyplace outside yourself is a foreign land.

14. When you are playing marbles with someone and you win all their marbles, give

back some marbles so that you have someone to play with tomorrow. This is a lesson learned from a capitalist with a conscience who made millions in business but always gave back to his world and community. As he recently pointed out, “If too few have too much and too many have too little, we do not have a sustainable society.”

15. When steel is placed beside gold, all becomes yellow. This is a saying in Mongolia

that deals with two strong personalities in a marriage but it can apply to many situations.

16. Cherish your roots. Because of the influences around you as you grow up, take the best

and leave the rest. You will always, somewhat, live where you have lived.  

17. Life is richer if lived broadly. Embrace new passions, new experiences and new vistas.

You will find that you grow as your base of experiences grows. When moving into the unknown, remember that if you learn to meet people and situations in life many other areas will take care of themselves.

18. If man tells you “No”, question it; if nature tells you “No”, listen closely. Mankind

can figure out ways to fly to the moon and beyond, but not jump off a building and expect to grow wings. Freedom is learning to fly by nature’s rules.

19. Don’t be afraid to go out on the limb. That is where the fruit is. This is a statement by

a Texas legend in poker, Dole Brunson, but it works for so much more in life. In fact,

Brunson’s definition of poker works for life situations also; when he says, “Poker is a game of incomplete information. Everyone catches luck. Good players play people.”

20. In any creative endeavor, risk is the business of the moment. In the arts, those who

never take risks may not fail in what they attempt but they never fly either. One must remember that so-called “failure” is just another “learning experience” (therefore it is not true failure).

“Birds fly in great sky-circles of freedom.

 How do they learn this?

 They fall,

 And having fallen; they are given wings.”   Rumi, 13^th century Islamic poet