You Should Steal This
Please, borrow with pride.
THE SHORT VERSION: The best written material to help you improve in leadership, management, and life planning is free, courtesy of the US Military. Borrowing with Pride helps you take charge of your learning and development by connecting you to the writings, guiding your discovery, and provoking your thinking. Take it. Use it. Borrow with pride.
THE LONG VERSION:
“That’s a great idea, I’m going to steal it.”
Leadership. Management. Life planning.
Success, however you care to define it, is inseparable from demonstrated excellence in these three responsibilities. Everyone is seeking better ideas on leadership, management, and life planning.
We ourselves, our family, our professional colleagues, and our communities need us to be strong leaders, effective managers, and competent planners of our lives. It is our mission to continuously grow and improve within each of these three responsibilities.
But, our growth and improvement in these responsibilities are challenged in three ways:
As we grow more senior in our roles, less is invested by institutions and organizations for our personal improvement.
We must enable ourselves in our personal journeys of learning and development.As we learn and develop, we discover there are many competing, sometimes contradictory ideas as to the best styles and techniques for all three responsibilities.
We must find clear, unbiased sources of information and inspiration.As we age, the available time to learn, develop, read, reflect, and organize our thinking diminishes in the face of competing priorities.
We must create methods and time to fuel our learning and development.
Enabling ourselves in our personal journeys of learning and development reveals many winding paths we may follow, most lined with vendors and paywalls.
Coaches and authors do not give their leadership, management, and life planning perspectives (in the form of time or books) away for free because their job is to make money; your improvement is secondary. Coaches and books are tools but they are not solutions.
There are no shortcuts to personal journeys; we can leverage external support but we have to do the work ourselves.
Additionally, coaches and authors are selling opinions. Some are more trained than others, some more scientific than others, but ultimately, they offer opinions. Where should we look if we want to enable ourselves with clear, unbiased sources of information?
Ideally, a wildly successful, complex, global organization would have spent decades analyzing and articulating doctrines and techniques for better leadership, management and life planning…then we could just use those materials for information and inspiration.
Fortunately, the US Military has done that for us, and publishes them all for free on the internet.
When we appreciate our own agency in our learning and development, and understand that the best materials to support the journey are free and readily available, the final gaps to fill are A) the methods by which our learning and development are structured and B) the time we free up to do the work.
Borrowing with Pride exists specifically to help with connection to the best free materials and the methods to most efficiently use your time in your self-development journey.
The method: combine a ‘Bible study’ approach to consuming and applying military doctrine, techniques and processes in your life. This means suggested readings, questions for reflection, short mental exercises, and quick individual or small group activities to test applicability.
Each week, Borrowing with Pride will send two dispatches:
Study. On Tuesdays. Free to all subscribers. It will include 10-15 minutes of content and reading with questions for reflection (example: Small Team Leadership).
Guided Discovery. On Thursdays. Available to paid subscribers only. It will include 20-40 minutes of discussion on the Study content, combined with thought exercises, reflections, and activity prompts to thoughtfully and deliberately apply lessons to your personal and professional life.
There will be occasional additional dispatches on topics of general interest that fit with the themes of Leadership, Management, and Life Planning.
The focus is on the practical and not the tactical. The training provided will help you become more thoughtful and methodical, but it will not equip you for a life in the trenches (you must enlist for that!).
True to the title, you can borrow most everything provided with pride, and without payment. All themes and associated linked materials are free with an unpaid subscription. All reading materials are unclassified and provided by government through existing open source formats. Study dispatches are free.
But…a paid subscription will provide you with each Thursday’s Guided Discovery dispatch, which includes structured (but brief) analysis, thought-provoking questions, exercises, and discussion prompts (feel free to do this with a friend).
A paid subscription is access to rigor in your analysis and application of each week’s theme and serves as an accelerant to your success. Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
IN ADDITION TO STEALING THIS, YOU CAN SHARE IT:
If you want to try a paid subscription, for free, just think of three friends or colleagues that might appreciate this content and forward the reference onwards.
1. Share Borrowing with Pride. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.
2. Earn benefits. When more friends use your referral link to subscribe (free or paid), you’ll receive special benefits.
Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals
Get a 3 month comp for 5 referrals
Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals