The Power of the Herd Read Online Free Page A

he was inspired. And he was tired. Without a dose of horse wisdom to calm his mind, cheer him up, and carry him through the inevitable stress, his was a religion of turmoil, sacrifice, and strife.
    He had no choice but to suffer for his art.
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    Anyone who applies logic to visionary leadership is sure to blow a major fuse now and then. There are way too many paradoxes involved, countless pairs ofopposites you must juggle artfully, sometimes while in your underwear. Gaudí’s skivvies were held together with safety pins. His meals often consisted of lettuce with a bit of milk sprinkled on top. He was a very cranky guy at times. These are the kinds of facts that history books record if you do something significant. And the analysis that follows would be humiliating to a man who refused to have his picture taken. Was Gaudí pious, anorexic, accessing altered states through starvation, or so distracted by the details of creating a massive monument to God that he couldn’t be bothered with thoughts of food, clothing, and social niceties? (I suspect the answer is yes to all four options.)
    Selfless dedication to a calling results in behavior that appears alternately selfish and eccentric to family and friends. Part of the inevitable crankiness stems from trying to listen to your muse over the din of skeptics who don’t believe in what you’re doing, while you learn to set appropriate boundaries between yourself and people so enraptured with your vision that you’d never get anything done if you accepted all their dinner invitations. Of course, in Gaudí’s case, a good meal now and then would have helped. It’s hard to function when you’re obsessed, overworked, and starving. But even while dining with wealthy clients, the architect rarely strayed from a daily vegetarian regime so strict that most people would consider it a form of fasting.
    The willingness to relinquish personal comfort in service to a goal is so common among trailblazers of all kinds, even in corporate settings, that best-selling authors Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee have a term for it: the “Sacrifice Syndrome.” In Resonant Leadership, they characterize it as a counterproductive yet hard-to-resist trap that leaders fall into when they “sacrifice too much for too long — and reap too little.” Deeply religious, Gaudí also subscribed to the Catholic concept of “mortification of the flesh” at a time when early-twentieth-century painters and composers were romanticizing the idea of suffering for one’s art. And while we’re at it, let’s add the pressures of the visionary state itself. The muses don’t give a hoot about keeping your mortal body in optimal working order. When inspiration hits, it’s common to forget to eat or sleep for hours, even days, on end. And when inspiration fails, usually near some crucial deadline, a full-blown sleep disorder is on the horizon. With all these factors combined, Gaudí was lucky he lived long enough to meet a tragic end at seventy-four, let alone exhibit the endurance and clarity to continually raise funds for the cathedral while managing its construction and perfecting its revolutionary design.
    And here’s perhaps the most unwieldy paradox of all: new perspectives demand sensitivity, creativity, and time spent alone to take form, while the subsequent manifestation of any significant, long-term vision requires motivatinglarge numbers of people to pursue a common goal. A loner wandering around in that pulsating, open-nerve state may be able to mainline inspiration, but can he deal with the conflict, miscommunication, power plays, judgment, and politics of bringing his finest ideas to fruition? At the opposite end of the spectrum, intensely social people who develop a skin thick enough to let them navigate interpersonal and organizational dramas often lose connection to the very sensitivity that breeds inventive,