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Friends,
The leaders I most admire share one trait. They have never stopped being students. They have decades of experience and they carry it lightly. They know what they know, and they are honest about what they don't. The day a leader is sure they have figured it out is the day they stop being worth following.
That's the lesson I want to close this series with, and I want to tell you how seven marathons made it visible to me.
Why marathons taught me this
If you'd told me at the start line of the 2001 Marine Corps Marathon (or, really, at the finish line) that I was beginning a twenty-four-year curriculum on leader development, I would have laughed at you. I was a captain trying to finish my first marathon. I wasn't thinking about lessons. I was thinking about Mount Suribachi.
And yet, looking back, every one of the seven marathons I've run taught me something I hadn't known going in. Not from the running itself. From the paying attention. The race was the occasion. The lesson was the residue.
The Marine Corps Marathon taught me that the mistakes are the tuition. Fulda taught me what experience is for. San Antonio taught me that consistent work produces capacity. Dallas taught me that the right time isn't coming, so set the big goal anyway. Boston taught me to look up while I'm running. None of those lessons were available to me in advance. Each one arrived when the race that carried it arrived.
Then Louisville
My seventh marathon was the Kentucky Derby Festival Marathon in Louisville, April 2025. Ten years after Boston. It was a bad race, in the way races sometimes are. I finished it, and I haven't signed up for another one since. It may well be the last marathon I run.
And even so, even on a hard day in what may turn out to have been the last race of a long arc, I came away with something I hadn't known going in. The arc wasn't done teaching me, even at the end.
Never Stop Learning
If twenty-four years of running and seven marathons could still produce a lesson I hadn't known I needed, then there is no point at which a leader gets to be done learning. Not at year ten. Not at year twenty-five. Not after the championships, the promotions, the speaking engagements, or the corner office. The next lesson is already on its way. The question is whether you'll be open to it when it arrives.
I don't think this is the lesson most experienced leaders want to hear. The reward for putting in the years is supposed to be that you finally know what you're doing. The reward for accumulating wisdom is supposed to be that you get to dispense it. We earn our authority by having paid for it. So we are forgiven, more or less, when we start to act as though we have arrived.
But the leaders who keep getting better across decades are not the ones who arrived. They are the ones who refused to. They stay students. They ask questions in rooms where they could be giving answers. They take notes when a younger person makes a point. They go back to physical therapy when their body tells them something they didn't want to hear. Their humility is not performed. It is a discipline they keep practicing because they understand what happens to leaders who stop.
And what happens is this: the moment a leader is sure they have figured it out is the moment the next lesson stops being available to them. Not because the lesson isn't there. Because they're no longer the kind of person it can reach. The arc keeps going. They stop moving along it.
That's the warning I want to leave you with. The discipline of lifelong learning gets harder, not easier, the more experience you accumulate. The leader with thirty years in has to work harder to stay teachable than the leader with three. Pride is the occupational hazard of seasoned leadership. Humility is the only thing that keeps the arc open.
One last word, and a question
This series has been a thank-you of sorts, to the seven races and twenty-four years that taught me a lot of what I think about personal leadership. I am grateful for them. I am also aware that whatever I think I know is provisional, and that the next race, if there is a next race, will probably teach me something I haven't yet understood. I hope I'm ready for it when it arrives.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being on this arc with me for the past six weeks. I'll see you next week, back in the usual range of leadership topics. But not before I leave you with this.
What have you stopped being curious about? What part of your craft have you started to believe you've figured out? And what would it look like to become a student of that thing again?
Talk soon,
Ian |
