The Valences Of A Masterpiece Called Leadership

Identify yourself with the image of a distance that no one will ever go to, without getting lost in a euphoria of total success.

Here is a man who, being driven by a great idea, but misled by vague information (and which turned out to be utterly inaccurate), set himself the ultimate goal of his life to discover the passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and thus be the first to find the way around the world. Thanks to his demonic will, he overcame the resistance of matter, found people to help him in his almost unfeasible plan, and through the power of suggestion of his idea gained a fleet from a foreign monarch — and how much he had to fight for it ! Then he led the fleet safely to the American coast, descending southward, farther than a navigator had ever been before him. He overcame the waves and storms of the ocean, suppressed the rebellion; no obstacle, no disappointment, had hitherto broken his fanatical faith, that he was no longer far from this step, that he must be very close to this goal of his dreams.

And just before the great victory, the sharp, deeply penetrating gaze of this lucid visionary suddenly darkened. It seemed that the gods, who did not love him, would blindly blindfold him. For on this day, August 24, 1520, when Magellan ordered his crew to remain in place again, thus losing two more months, he was in fact in the much sought after place. He had to traverse two more degrees of latitude, only a few leagues more, after the thousands and thousands of leagues he had traveled so far; It took him two more days of navigation after the three hundred days of searching, and his deeply troubled soul might have trembled with a shout of joy.

But – mockery and malice of destiny – the afflicted admiral does not know or sense how close he is to his goal. For two months, so long and empty, two months of distrust and worry, he waits and waits for spring at the mouth of this little river, waiting on this deserted and forgotten shore – like a poor wanderer caught in a blizzard, shivering from the cold, squatting in front of his own hut, without suspecting that he had to dig a little further, to move forward with just one step, and then he would be safe. Magellan sits in this wasteland for two endless months in vain, and he worries and wonders whether or not he will reach the pass – and only two days later the strait awaits him, which will bear his name forever ! Until the last moment, the man who wants to snatch the last secret from the earth must feel the torture of doubt, like the eternal Prometheus torn by the eagle’s claws.

Leadership: Can you yourself be the witness of an endless journey, as a pioneer of a path to self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment that you can only achieve when you do something that brings you closer to a goal that’s much too far away?

What I call the “inner genesis of an endless journey” (the genesis that is defined by the relationship between learning experience and the moral question, between anticipation and innovation, between influence and creative assimilation), can be interpreted from another perspective, that of a possible correspondence between the “inner language” of a distance in which you can disappear at any time and the spiritual plane of an anonymous existence.

And, like any long journey, un largo camino a ninguna parte , Fernando Magellan showed a triple joy: anticipation, achievement, remembrance. When you do something amazing and think that “this is how you are”, you are made to look into great distances, to probe them and to make new discoveries, you have no reason to choose differently in a similar situation in the future. Is it not so? In fact, every great deed has the taste of a distance you would like to reach, and not just to reach a place unseen by anyone, but to make it worthy of being perceived by you as an act of great faith.

Magellan gave a telling example of how far you can go when you are free to roam the whole world under the banner of superiority in faith, meaning man’s ability to strongly believe in an absolute hidden in an “invisible reality”. But to be free means, above all, to be responsible to yourself in a mission without much chance of success, as if you were facing a borderline situation, under the pretext of a revealing event that has never happened before or that has to do with the religious symbolism in your life.

It is about controlling the situation in which the end result cannot be predicted, and at the same time it is about some eventual circumstances perceived by you as perfect for a future left in God’s care, not about some logical arguments about your presence in a desolate place. The light that does not accompany anyone’s steps, and the dream of a distance in which you can disappear, can form an unimaginably vast horizon, beyond which various trials of great faith are possible, trials of fire that no one ever thinks of.

Leadership is the dream of a distance in which you can disappear without a trace, only to grasp with the naked eye a horizon beyond which no one else can see “the value of a hand given by God.”

The Valences Of A Masterpiece Called Leadership can be of two kinds: a valence of the euphoria of the feeling of power and intangibility obtained from the position of an observer who zigzags along the time axis. And a symbolic value of existence, characterized by a sign of divine presence. A leader makes these two valences the triumph of his mission on earth.

* Note: Stefan, Zweig - Magellan, Tineretului Publishing House, 1955.