Launching a Leadership Revolution by Chris Brady & Orrin Woodward

Author:Chris Brady & Orrin Woodward [BRADY, CHRIS]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: BUS000000
ISBN: 9780446408813
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2007-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

Active Learning: Theodore Roosevelt “A Campaign of Self-Transformation”

He was born into wealth in the eastern United States in the “Silk Stocking” district. But he was feeble (once referred to as a “pitiful specimen”), suffered incessantly from asthma, had tiny little legs, and was routinely picked on by bullies. When he was still a preadolescent boy his father said to him, “You have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”

Then one day he happened across a poem titled “The Flight of the Duchess” by Robert Browning, which described a young duke as:

The prettiest little ape

That ever affronted human shape.

All that the old Dukes had been without knowing it

This Duke would feign know he was, without being it.

As he told an interviewer toward the end of his life, that poem and the image of himself contained in its words propelled him into action.

Theodore Roosevelt’s father assembled a “home gym” for his timid, delicate son, and the son went to work with vigor. Already interested in learning and having recently discovered that much of his clumsiness was due to his need for eyeglasses, the young scion also turned up the intensity of his self-education to a feverish pace that would continue throughout his life.

It wasn’t long before young “Teddy” was gaining strength and confidence in himself. His personal diary shows a noted decline in sicknesses following that period, and in the month of August of 1871 he appears to have managed an entire month of good health, his longest such period in years. He began climbing mountains and swimming in icy rapids, and discovered his keen interest in natural science. He read tirelessly, causing one friend of the family to call him “the most studious little brute I ever knew in my life.” But as an incident would show him, young Theodore Roosevelt had a long way to go. In his own words:

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