Table of Contents
G . P . PUTNAMS SONS
New York
to my wife, Elizabeth,
and our children,
Kristina, Spencer, and Angela
Foreword
The most important thing about the Paradoxical Commandments is that they work for many people. This is especially true of their author, Kent Keith. He walks his talk. It is his authenticity that makes this book so powerful for him and for all of us.
When I first met Kent, I didnt know that he had written the original ten Paradoxical Commandments, but now that I know it, Im not surprised. In the hours that we have spent talking about life and work, he has always emphasized personal meaning, and has always been clearheaded about where to find it. As a result, he has taken on some tough, high-risk assignments. He has also had the courage to break away from some traditional patterns of life and work.
After one of our longest talks, Kent walked away from prestige, power, and money to follow his heart. He left the presidency of a university to study, think, and be with his family. He emerged with an even stronger mission and purpose. And he emerged with this book.
For years, I have encouraged Kent to devote more time to writing and speaking. Now, in this book, he shares his thoughts and experience about something he has always been good atfinding personal meaning. His book is simple, eloquent, and profound. It will touch you in surprising ways. Most important, it will help you live a life that is rich in personal meaning. And that, as Kent explains, is the kind of life most worth living.
Spencer Johnson, M.D.
author of Who Moved My Cheese?
and coauthor of The One Minute Manager
Introduction
I was nineteen, a sophomore at Harvard, when I wrote The Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership. They were part of a booklet I wrote for high school student leaders titled The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council, which was published by Harvard Student Agencies in 1968. I revised the booklet and a new edition was published by the National Association of Secondary School Principals several years later. Somewhere around thirty thousand copies were sold in the late sixties and early seventies.
During the turbulent sixties, I was actively speaking at high schools, student leadership workshops, and student council conventions in eight states. I encouraged students to work through the system to achieve change. I didnt tell them that working through the system was easy. I told them that it took sustained effort, and that the sustained effort needed to be motivated by a genuine concern for others. I stressed that point because I had seen too many students start out with high hopes and high ideals, and then give up because they got negative feedback or suffered failure. If they really cared about others, they would have the strength to keep trying, even if things were tough.
I laid down the Paradoxical Commandments as a challenge. The challenge is to always do what is right and good and true, even if others dont appreciate it. Making the world a better place cant depend on applause. You have to keep striving, no matter what, because if you dont, many of the things that need to be done in our world will never get done.
I had heard lots of excuses, and I wasnt buying them. OKmaybe people are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. So what? You have to love them anyway. And maybe the good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. So what? You have to do good anyway.
The specific Commandments grew out of my own experience and observations of life. Several incidents that shaped the Commandments are described in the text. However, if there was a single experience behind the Commandments, it was the insight that I had as I walked into the stadium for the student awards ceremony at the end of my senior year at my high school. It occurred to me at that moment that I was so happy about what I had done that year, and I felt so good about what I had learned and whom I had helped, that I didnt need any awards. I had already been rewarded. I already had the sense of meaning and satisfaction that came from doing a good job. The meaning and satisfaction were mine, whether or not anybody gave me an award.
That realization was a major breakthrough for me. I felt completely liberated and completely at peace. I knew that if I did what was right and good and true, my actions would have their own intrinsic value. I would always find meaning. I didnt need to have glory.
For nearly twenty-five years, I continued working, speaking, and writing without hearing anything more about the Paradoxical Commandments. Then one day I got a call from Honolulu Police Chief Michael Nakamura. I was at a conference for police chiefs on the mainland, he said, and a speaker read the Paradoxical Commandments of Leadership by Kent Keith. Are you that Kent Keith? I said I was. A year later, a librarian at Chaminade University showed me a printout of the Paradoxical Commandments that she had found on the Internet, where it was being distributed to librarians. Months after that, Dr. Fran Newman, a faculty member from the University of Southern California, came to Honolulu to teach a course in USCs doctoral program. She passed out the Paradoxical Commandments in class, saying that she had used the Commandments as the opening theme for every graduate class that she had taught.
In September 1997, after Mother Teresa died, I was at a meeting of my Rotary Club. It is customary to begin each meeting with a poem, prayer, or thought for the day. That day, a fellow Rotarian commented on the passing of Mother Teresa, and said he wanted to read a poem she had written. As I stood there with bowed head, I heard him read something that I recognized. I went up afterward and asked him where he had gotten it. He said it was in a book about Mother Teresa.
The next night I went to a bookstore and started looking through the shelf of books about the life and works of Mother Teresa. There it was, on the last page before the appendices in a book titled Mother Teresa: A Simple Path, compiled by Lucinda Vardey. The poem was titled Anyway, and it was eight of the Paradoxical Commandments that I had written and published in 1968. The words were reformatted to look like a poem, but otherwise were the same. There was no author listed, but at the bottom it said: From a sign on the wall of Shishu Bhavan, the childrens home in Calcutta.
I stood there in the bookstore, chills going up and down my spine. It was an incredible moment for me. Something I had written thirty years earlier had made its way around the world to India, where Mother Teresa or one of her coworkers had thought it important enough to put up on the wall, to look at every day as they ministered to their children. I was deeply moved. I had great respect for the spirituality and work of Mother Teresa. I also knew something about childrens homes, because my wife and I adopted our three children from childrens homes in Japan and Romania.
A few weeks after the Rotary meeting, I dropped by to see my pastor, Rev. Don Asman, to share the news about the Paradoxical Commandments. I walked into his office and saw a copy of Mother Teresa: A Simple Path on his desk. He had just been given a copy. I opened the book, showed him the page, and told him the story. When I sent a copy of the book about Mother Teresa to my sister Mona in California, she passed it along to her daughter, Lisa, a teacher at a private high school. Lisa was surprised. She knew the Paradoxical Commandments. They were up on the wall in the teachers lounge.
