Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.

Servant leadership teaches us that you have to lay your cards on the table.

In order to serve its purpose, a vision has to be a shared vision.

People who cannot invent and reinvent themselves must be content with borrowed postures, secondhand ideas, fitting in instead of standing out.

The crucible is a dividing line, a turning point, and those who have gone through it feel they are very different from the way they were before. Believing that they have been transformed or have transformed themselves, those who survive the crucible (and many don't) are more confident, more willing to take future risks. That new self-confidence is grounded in the belief that he or she has done something hard and done it well.

Without character, there is no credibility; and without credibility, there is no trust.

The capacity for "uncontaminated wonder," ultimately, is what distinguishes the successful from the ordinary, the happily engaged players of whatever era from the chronically disappointed and malcontent. Therein lies a lesson for geeks, geezers, and the sea of people who fall in between.