LEADING BY EXAMPLE
My modest goal today is to inspire people to become better people, and I hope to do that with a politician, an athlete and a Hollywood film.
But first, I may have to contradict something I said last week. My main point in that column was that quitting can sometimes be a sign of strength, mainly because life is not always a game. Today, however, I’m going to acknowledge that when we do play games, we can learn lessons that might help make life better for everyone.
As you may have gathered from the picture at the top of this page, Nelson Mandela is the politician, former South African rugby captain Francois Pienaar is the athlete and Invictus is the film… although I chose to picture the real-life heroes instead of the actors.
Mandela was one of the greatest leaders, and possibly people, of all time, and evidently Pienaar was pretty good as well, but since I never met either of them, I’m going to assume everything that happened in Invictus was true… which, of course, it wasn’t. But the film tells a great story and I think the main messages are important today both for us and for future generations.
The first one was summed up in the scene when Morgan Freeman, playing Mandela, invited Matt Damon, playing Pienaar, to the president’s office for tea. After a bit of chit-chat about how difficult their jobs were, Mandela switched the topic to leadership and asked Pienaar how he managed to inspire his teammates to be better than they already were.
The Springbok captain answered: “By example; I always try to lead by example.”
Most of the rest of the film was dedicated to showing how Nelson Mandela had put that philosophy into practice in the early days of his presidency and how he had embraced forgiveness and reconciliation before asking the nation to do the same. The other leadership quality the main characters shared was the ability to keep their minds open.
The film depicted Pienaar as the driving force behind his mostly white teammates seeing themselves as representatives of the entire nation instead of just the white Afrikaners. And it quoted him saying, “Times change, so we have to as well,” as he encouraged them to learn the words to Nkosi Sikelel’ iafrika for the World Cup final in 1995.
Mandela, meanwhile, admitted in a televised interview that he and the other black inmates at Robben Island prison used to root against the Springbok rugby team during the apartheid era. But then he said that was no longer the case in the new South Africa. “If I cannot change when circumstances demand it, how can I expect others to?”
So, according to Invictus, skills such as leading by example that we can learn by playing games can be used to make our world a better place, and the games we play can be used to bring people together. And if we want other people to learn new tricks, we have to be willing to change ourselves first.
I like that. Which is why I’ve changed my mind from last week and decided that playing games can sometimes be a very inspirational thing.