Follow... (unpublished post from 2012)

Not many of us are natural born leaders. On the other hand, not many of us are natural born followers either. And I don't mean following a crowd like a herd of sheep kind of follow (because we seem to be pretty good at that, aren't we?), but following a particular leader and submitting to his/her leadership kind of follow.

In fact, I think we all want to be our own leaders. Or, to put it in another way, we don't want to be forever looking at someone else's back. After all, the view at the front is always much better.

I once gave myself a challenge: to test how long I can stay behind a car on a stretch of road given we were both travelling at or under the speed limit. I can tell you, it didn't last very long. The car in front of me wasn't slow, nor was he driving poorly in any way. There was no reason for me to overtake him, and yet, be it lack of patience or the fact that I just wanted a better view, I eventually ended up overtaking anyway. And the view was great! There was no car in front of me to obscure my view (not that it really did), and even though I travelled at the same speed as before, it meant I was no longer following the car that was in front of me.

Granted, this probably is a fairly poor example of the point that I'm trying to make. Yet I do not think the mentality of not wanting someone ahead of us is foreign to any human being. Admittedly, we don't really like rules, or maybe we just don't like the rules that someone else has made up for us. We don't want to be pushed to travel at someone else's pace. We just want to do things our way, as we see fit. And when great minds think alike, you get a following. Not following a particular leader, but just a set of ideals or ways of doing things.

Having said all that, we know for a fact that there has been, and still are, plenty of leaders that are worthy of following. 

Find them, or be one of them.