when the initial high of inspiration gives way to the realities of manifestation. But it’s also important to realize that we can experience peace on earth, deep peace, right here, right now. Horses do it every day. People all too often ignore this crucial, life-sustaining factor, reducing heaven to a deferred reward. Perhaps that’s why Gaudí hid out in a pauper’s ward after regaining consciousness, waiting for the end rather than fighting against it. Floating in the pure white light of a wider perspective, he was honored; 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.
Mass Transit
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 of opposites 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 bestselling 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 motivating large 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, nuanced thinking.
The solution involves a simple division of labor, you might say, but history has proven otherwise. Shrewd, charismatic managers and entrepreneurs have been known to prey upon brilliant yet socially awkward artists and inventors, whose ideas get diluted in the process. This kind of relationship, at its most benign, becomes codependent as the visionary loses touch with worldly concerns while his business partners neglect to further develop their own creative capacities. And both sides of this human equation are susceptible to the Sacrifice Syndrome as ambitious ideas face innumerable hurdles along the way, demanding visionaries and more practical leaders alike to break through the pressures, prejudices, and habits of the status quo on their way to creating lasting, meaningful change.
Finally, there’s the ultimate, arguably supernatural challenge: ensuring that the vision remains healthy after your poor worn-out bones are buried in the ground. Gaudí’s cathedral currently faces a threat more insidious than Catholic-hating communists: public transportation. One proposal involves construction of a subway nearby, which architects fear would damage the basilica over time. Another plan would turn the church into a train station. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to hit Gaudí with a tram. The assault of mass transit continues unabated nearly a century after his death.
These possible compromises to Sagrada Familia’s integrity illuminate one crucial aspect of managing individual and group needs over the long term. Not only do leaders have to convince colleagues, investors, and employees to buy into significant ideas, but at some point these innovators must also inspire a much larger public to support the vision as well. Whether in business, politics, art, or religion, initiating significant change is a lot like trying to overhaul an entire railway system while runaway trains continue to speed through it. No matter how defective the current model, people en masse resist the inconvenience and uncertainties of innovation with the hostility you’d expect them to reserve for immediate threats to their survival. Heated debates over public health care in the United States provide a glaring example. The average working man or woman isn’t trained or even encouraged to engage in cathedral thinking. And really, why should people be willing to sacrifice their own hard-earned comfort without an injection of the same 220-volt shot of inspiration that got the original innovator going? Acting as both lightning rod and transformer is part of the skill and thrill — and inevitable burnout — visionary leaders must learn to manage if they plan to achieve anything consequential.
Sacrifice and Renewal
As Mother Teresa once inscribed on the wall of her children’s home in Calcutta, “If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies; Succeed anyway. . . . What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway.” Pull this off, and you hit the PhD level of leadership development. Or maybe we’re talking sainthood here. Yet even those of us still working on the necessary prerequisites for great leadership — inspiration, innovation, communication, and emotional and social intelligence — need to understand how to navigate what Boyatzis and McKee call “the Cycle of Sacrifice and Renewal” if we plan to align our God-given talents and hard-won knowledge with long-term goals.
In the old pyramid-building days, slave labor ensured that generations would be conditioned through dominance and demoralization to act as drones for an agenda they were forced to support. This system, active in the United States less than two hundred years ago, “evolved” into the assaults on mind, body, and spirit that factory workers endured regardless of the lip service paid to their status as free men and women. Labor laws and unions protecting workers eventually emerged. Yet once you graduate to a significant leadership position, particularly one with entrepreneurial elements, the rules change. There are no government regulations to protect you. You must suddenly learn to advocate for yourself while also organizing, motivating, and inspiring others. To raise the difficulty level, some people will rave enthusiastically about whatever mission you represent while covertly undermining some aspect of the plan, often unconsciously, sometimes for reasons even they don’t understand. As the vision expands and takes on a life of its own, you must constantly modify your
