Philia joins me

One of my favorite writers of all time has a bunch of different characters that travel with him on his journeys. See, the books that this guy writes are all travel novels. And when I say novel I mean walking that incredibly thin line between non and fiction. The stories are absolutely 100% true, everything in them happened. But maybe they didn't happen exactly as described and definitely not always in the order described. And most certainly not with the same companion(s) over time. Because seriously, besides writers and professional travelers (see hippies and bad salesman) who has time to take months off and travel around the country? No one. So this particular writer's solution was to name a companion that would stay through the whole story but would represent the multiple real people that would travel with him.

I think I have that person (people) for my stories finally: Philia.

A writer, actor, speaker and car salesman (no, really) by the name of Mark Price has this on his website (markprice.com): Phillia, which means friendship in modern Greek, a dispassionate virtuous love, was a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity. In ancient texts, philia denoted a general type of love, used for love between family, between friends, a desire or enjoyment of an activity, as well as between lovers. This is the only other word for "love" used in the ancient text of the New Testament besides agape, but even then it is used substantially less frequently.

C.S. Lewis immediately differentiates Friendship Love from the other Loves. He describes Friendship as, "the least biological, organic, instinctive, gregarious and necessary of our Loves" - our species does not need Friendship in order to reproduce. He uses this point to explain that Friendship is exceedingly profound because it is freely chosen.

This is also where the city of Philadelphia gets its name: the place that loves you back, without expectation of reciprocity.

Hey Philia, welcome aboard and glad to have you with me...without expectation of reciprocity.

Influence as value

My friend Keith says that:

The number one rule of leadership is showing up.

It's not that bad of a rule really when you think about it. Part of being a leader is the ability to identify how people work together, what their needs are, what their skills are, what their challenges are. And then figure out a way to help them achieve their goals. All the while without making it about yourself.


And then I thought about this groundbreaking event I was invited to today. The pictures in the paper were of all these people that were so proud of their accomplishment. They all showed up. They were there and it was recorded in perpetuity by the media. But are they the leaders of the project? Maybe one or two, but definitely not the majority of them. So does the first rule of leadership still apply here? Or are these people that were just trying to create and develop influence? What were they doing there? Who were they helping? Whose goal was being achieved?

Then the other night we finished watching the movie, Atlas Shrugged. The point as far as I can tell is that there is nothing worthwhile that can be bought with influence. It was a terrible movie. I am not a film critic or even a film aficionado but I know bad when I see it...this was bad. But it directly took on the question of what role we allow others to play in the influence in our lives.

So the question is, "If just showing up a lot and being around is a way to become a leader, are you just buying influence by being the last man standing?"

Is that truly leadership? Is that of value? Is influence the same as leadership acumen? Not really sure here but I seem to have a lot of unanswered questions. Maybe next post will answer or maybe this just gets worse.