Leadership
Choose Your Own Path. Lead Your Own Life
INSIGHTS › LEADERSHIP › NEVER FOLLOW THE CROWD
Never Follow the Crowd
Leadership Begins with Leading Yourself
For much of my life, I never thought of myself as a leader. I simply had difficulty following. I never felt particularly comfortable belonging to groups, clubs or institutions. Perhaps that began early. I moved frequently as a child. Friendships changed. Environments changed. I learned that security couldn’t always come from belonging to the same group.
Later, this became part of my professional life. I didn’t build my career by following a predetermined path. I followed curiosity. And conviction. Sometimes that brought success. Sometimes failure. And quite often, it meant walking alone.
Leadership is not about getting people to follow you. It begins with having the courage not to follow everybody else.
CHAPTER 1
Never Belong to the Club
Throughout my career, people invited me to join clubs, organisations and professional circles. Some of them could probably have helped my career. But I rarely felt comfortable defining myself through a group. I wanted to remain free to disagree. Free to change direction. Free to leave.
That independence has a price. Belonging gives you security. Independence can create loneliness. But I learned early that I preferred the uncertainty of my own path to the comfort of following somebody else’s.
Belonging gives you security. Independence gives you freedom. Rarely do you get both.
CHAPTER 2
Intensity Is My Operating System
There is one word people who know me have used throughout my life: Intense. I never knew how to do things halfway. When I worked on an advertising campaign, I wanted to understand the product completely. If I was advertising a bath product, I wanted to sit in the bath and experience exactly what the customer experienced. When I worked on Coca-Cola or another major brand, the problem stayed with me until I believed I had found the right answer.
Sometimes that intensity exhausted the people around me. Sometimes it exhausted me. But it also became one of the engines of my life.
I was never someone who entered the water halfway.
CHAPTER 3
Find Your Own Answer
Advertising taught me something important about rejection. A client could reject my idea. A campaign could lose a pitch. Someone could choose another solution. Of course, I wanted to win. But eventually I realised that my deepest satisfaction came earlier. It came at the moment when I could say: This is my best answer.
If the client rejected it, I could live with that. Perhaps they didn’t understand it. Perhaps I hadn’t explained it well enough. Perhaps I was simply wrong. But rejection stopped mattering the way it used to.
Rejection hurts much less when you know you gave the problem your best answer.
CHAPTER 4
Reinvent Before You Have To
My professional life never followed one straight line. I started as a young copywriter in Linz. Then came advertising agencies. Creative direction. Management. Entrepreneurship. International agency partnerships. Direct marketing. Product placement. Medical advertising. Mail-order businesses. Publishing. Branding. Brand auditing. Books.
Some businesses lasted. Others disappeared. Some succeeded. Others didn’t. But I never wanted yesterday’s success to become tomorrow’s prison.
Never Applied
A book about an unconventional career and the freedom to choose your own path.
CHAPTER 5
Success Can Kill You
One of the most important lessons of my entrepreneurial life came from a business that didn’t fail because nobody wanted it. The opposite happened. It became enormously successful. And that success created its own problems.
Growth requires capital. Organisation. Systems. People. Discipline. Sometimes an entrepreneur creates something that grows faster than the organisation behind it. We celebrate growth as if more were automatically better. It isn’t.
Failure can destroy a business. Success can do exactly the same. That experience changed the way I thought about entrepreneurship forever.
The Ecco Story
The story of a business that grew too fast — and the lesson that success can be as dangerous as failure.
CHAPTER 6
The Bliss of Struggles
A long career inevitably contains failures. Bad decisions. Rejections. Businesses that disappear. People who disappoint you. Money that is lost. Plans that don’t work. For years we are taught to avoid these things. Later I began to understand something else.
Struggle creates something success cannot give us. Resilience. Every time life doesn’t end after a failure, fear loses some of its power.
Eventually I wrote a book about this idea: The Bliss of Struggles. Because perhaps the goal isn’t to create a life without struggle. Perhaps the goal is to become someone who is no longer destroyed by it.
The Bliss of Struggles
Why struggle builds resilience — and how it shapes a meaningful life.
CHAPTER 7
Becoming a Beginner Again
Later in life, I entered completely different worlds. Meditation. Yoga. Hypnosis. Coaching. Psychology. Human consciousness. I trained as a meditation teacher. I travelled to Switzerland for extensive training in hypnosis and coaching. I practised hypnosis. I worked with clients. I attended seminars and congresses. I studied different teachers and approaches.
In some of those environments, I probably seemed like an alien. The businessman had entered a very different world. But that was precisely what fascinated me. After decades of experience, I was a beginner again. And I discovered that one of the greatest dangers of experience is believing you no longer need to learn.
One of the greatest freedoms in life is being willing to become a beginner again.
CHAPTER 8
Freedom Is Not Selling Your Time
I could have turned this new knowledge into another career. Coaching. Hypnosis. Therapy. Individual clients. But eventually I asked myself a simple question: Do I really want another profession that requires me to sell my time?
The answer was no. I had spent decades trying to create independence. Why would I exchange that for another calendar filled with appointments?
So I stopped. Not because the experience had been wasted. Quite the opposite. Everything I had learned about meditation, yoga, hypnosis, psychology and human behaviour became part of something else. My writing. I didn’t need another profession. I had found another way to share what I had learned.
Leadership begins long before anyone follows you. It begins when you have the courage to follow your own conviction — and the freedom to change direction when that conviction changes.
FINAL REFLECTION
Lead Yourself First
Looking back, my life appears less like a career than a sequence of reinventions. Copywriter. Creative. Entrepreneur. Agency owner. Publisher. Brand consultant. Brand auditor. Teacher. Student again. Writer.
For a long time, I thought leadership meant leading other people. Today I see it differently. The person we have to lead first is ourselves. We have to know when to persist. When to fight. When to ignore the crowd. When to admit we were wrong. When to begin again. And eventually, when to let go.
Leadership isn’t stubbornly following the same road forever. It is having enough independence to recognise when another road has become yours.
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