Dear Student Leader,
Congratulations!
You’re now a student leader. Welcome to a world in which you can now help reshape for the better.
The prestige of your position can be exciting.
The responsibilities of it can be overwhelming.
FIRST, THE WORST PARTS
Congratulations on your difficult, thankless, and uncompensated position. If you’re a student leader, it’s likely that you work with other students who are also uncompensated, unprofessional, underqualified, unappreciative, inexperienced, or worse — but hopefully not — arrogant and entitled. It may feel maddeningly frustrating when you realize you’re essentially working at a non-profit start-up with almost no capital and entry-level workers whose inexperience and ineptitude results in you all frequently on the fringe of failing into non-existence.
If you’re the leader of a student organization — especially one restricted to your own school — you may have very little in resources. Your peers’ motivation may be fickle and their commitment could be fragile. And the one adult who was supposed to help you, your faculty advisor, may disappointingly not be as invested as you are in achieving your mission.
And you had no idea that’s what you’ve gotten yourself into or signed up for.
But that’s not all.
Your friends may also disappoint you somewhere along your journey. You may feel betrayed. Much of the work to successfully execute your ideas might be so difficult that it can derail you with doubt. You may feel depressingly lonely in pursuing your vision, in the number of people who you feel care about what you’re trying to accomplish and who work as hard as you.
Unfortunately, it could be all on you.
Not only that, whatever you thought you were good at, it won’t be enough to compensate for (i.e., hide) your weaknesses. Your weaknesses will be revealed to you and they’ll be in your face relentlessly, choking you if you don’t figure out how to effectively deal with them. Not only will it be painful, it will also hurt others and the change that you care about making.
All that will probably make you want to quit at times. But don’t. Don’t tap out until you wrestle away something worth keeping from your experience.
THE BEST PARTS
The good news is that you won’t get nothing out of it, not if you truly try.
The best part is that there is no such thing as failure. Okay, there is failure, but the only real failure will be:
- Not trying at all.
- Not learning from your failures, which are just mistakes.
Otherwise, there’s really no such thing as failure, only mistakes, things you tried that didn’t work out, and then you just learn from that and try to do better next time.
The more you try and succeed, the more confident you will become in your ability to figure things out despite having not known a single thing at first. Even if you “fail” and things don’t work out, you’ll also see that you survived and that, through your survival, you’re stronger than you think.
What is available to you and that will be of quality will vary. If you’re lucky, you will start out with more resources and connections than you possibly know what to do with, which can allow you to accomplish some interesting and meaningful things. If you’re unlucky, you will have to work harder to build the resources needed just to do something seemingly small.
However, you might still be lucky in the end. Not having much can sometimes lead to resourcefulness, which is creative.
Better to be the alchemist who can turn lead into gold rather than the gold owner who just sits on it.
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
— Arthur Ashe
The best part is that you and your team can surprise yourself, that despite all the worst parts of being a student leader you still ended up doing way more than you ever imagined, especially when you were at your most doubtful and discouraged.
So again, if you’re a student leader — whether that be President, Vice President, Treasurer, Executive Officer, Managing Director, Editor-in-Chief, Founder, Head of This or Head of That — congratulations! You have an opportunity to grow. You have a chance to see what you’re really made of and not just think you are. You get to lead your own learning process as you experiment with your own ideas and test what works.
In the long run, the stakes are low, and you get to learn for free, much more than any book can teach you through telling.
FOR STUDENTS WHO WANT TO LEAD BUT DON’T HAVE A POSITION
If you’re looking or waiting for a title before you start leading, it might be a while, especially if that’s your main reason not to. I’d like you to know that having the title of a leadership position doesn’t automatically make you an effective leader.
Still, titles can be nice. They do mean something. It increases the likelihood that people will follow you when you lead. However — and this is a reminder to those that do — simply having a title won’t take care of everything. That responsibility is yours.
A word of advice, you’re more likely to be elected for or given a title if you possess or cultivate the traits of good leaders through practice.
Some traits of good leaders are:
- Dependable and feel trustworthy
- Courageous even when feeling fear
- Organized instead of all over the place
- Proactive in moving things forward
- Caring in making others feel safe and supported
You don’t need a title to be any of the above. In choosing to do more than you are asked, you can achieve more than you imagined.
So student leaders, whether by title or not, please don’t give up.
You are more powerful than you think.
Sincerely,
Jason
Sometimes a teacher. Always a student.
Lucky to lead.
