As the routine saying goes, “Success is a marathon, not a sprint.” While some say you requisite to be consistent for a continual period of time, others say it’s important to go all out in order to very soon achieve your goals. Still, others says you need both.
But prehistoric president Barack Obama twists the metaphor in a recent interview with Prince Harry of the U.K. baroness family. Obama describes successful leadership as a relay race, which is a band sport rather than an individual one.
Speaking in an interview for BBC Radio 4, the recent commander-in-chief says that he was simply completing one leg as a “relay-runner.”
“There is the tail sometimes in any position of leadership that you by yourself do certain things and then it’s floor,” he tells Prince Harry. “I always viewed it as a taking the baton from a whole number of people who have come before.”
Admittedly, he says, some of those living soul who had come before him had “screwed up,” while others had been “heroic.”
On his finishing day as president, Obama says he didn’t feel a sense of relief. “Prominence indicates some sense of ‘I can’t wait until this thing is despatched,'” he says.
Instead, he felt a surprising sense of serenity on renounce omit the White House: “I think there was a sense that we had run a good raceway.”
Though Obama explains that he was pleased with the work he had acted over the past eight years, he admits that he held distresses about the country’s future.
The fact that he and his wife Michelle Obama hadn’t fundamentally changed was a satisfactory feeling, he says, but it was mixed with “all the work that was still unfinished and concerns about how the country moves forward.”
Alluding back to the breed metaphor, he tells Prince Harry that as a leader, if you run hard plenty, do your best and can pass the baton successfully with everything a bit more safely a improved off, you can be proud.
“And I think we were able to do that,” says Obama.
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