What are You Intentionally Beholding?

I’m on a bit of a tirade in this Leading Thoughts and I openly admit it. Let me explain.

This past week, out of utter frustration with what I’ve seen on screens of late, I tweeted this: “I’m growing weary of movies and television shows in which there’s not one character you admire or want to emulate, not one who inspires. It wasn’t always this way.”

I wrote this because I was both saddened and incensed by the fact that nothing in the TV shows or movies I had seen recently made me better or stirred me to anything noble. Instead, if I allowed it, they would all have diminished me, wearied me, discouraged me, and embedded images in my soul I did not need.

Well, I obviously hit a nerve with this tweet. The response was overwhelming. In addition to the online agreement, friends called and said they couldn’t agree more but didn’t know what to do about it. They asked for advice. I’m going to give some here.

The overriding principle I want you to remember as a leader is this: “You become what you behold.” Sure, there is light entertainment that doesn’t shape you much, but overall you are made into what you keep before your eyes, what you devote your time to viewing.

An example. I’ve written a number of men’s books. In one of them I included a list of “Man Movies” to get men started in the direction of capturing their use of media for the cause of noble manhood. You wouldn’t believe the response. Watching these movies after they had read my book—Mansfield’s Book of Manly Men—helped them go beyond words on a page to the creation of a culture in their homes. They drew their friends into it, their sons and sons-in-law. They found powerful movies that illustrated many of the values I had explored in the book.

It changed them. It gave them models. It gave them language and images and stories with which to discuss noble manhood with other men. Lives were changed.

Once I sat down on an airplane and had the man next to me—forgetting that he had not introduced himself yet—turn to me and say, “You know, I loved your list of movies but you left a few out.” He then began to tell me his favorites and how they changed him. Only later did he realize he had been so excited about the movies when he saw me he hadn’t told me his name.

Here’s the rock solid truth. You aren’t made better by watching Yellowstone, but you are made better as a leader by reading David Nasaw’s Andrew Carnegie. You aren’t made better by watching hours of contentious debate about the economy on cable news scream fests. You are made better by watching high-quality documentaries about economics and you are made better by reading Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson or Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics or Michael Lewis’s The Big Short.

You get the point. Watch Apollo 13 for lessons about leadership, not HBO’s Succession. Watch Seabiscuit for some fun—and historically true—illustrations about how a team works, not Squid Game.

You become what you behold. So what are you intentionally beholding on a regular basis that makes you a better leader? In our deluge of media, you have to be intentional if you’re going to be great.