The Art of Leadership

Chapter 30. Be Unfailingly Kind

DJ and I play Destiny. I’ve only met DJ once in real life, but most weeks he and I and a dozen or so other regulars are sitting on our respective couches, desks, chairs, and bean bags tackling the various parts of this gorgeous first-person shooter game.

You can play much of Destiny by yourself. There are daily missions on various planets where you can find and kill the bad guys and then collect the loot. There are daily strikes where you are paired with two random strangers to run a slightly harder mission where there is no need for formal communication, just the collective firepower of three players versus one player. Finally, there are raids. These are complex, longer missions requiring multiple people who are actively communicating and coordinating. This means someone—however subtly—needs to lead the group. In my ideal raid, DJ is the leader.

While this chapter is going to talk a lot about Destiny, it’s really about leadership. See, in the many hours I’ve spent listening to DJ walk the raiding group through Venus’s Vault of Glass or Crota’s End on the Moon, I’ve learned the power that comes with DJ’s leadership style: he’s unfailingly kind.

Regarding Colorful Personalities and Opinions

If you’ve ever read YouTube comments, you know that public spaces on the internet attract humanity’s most colorful personalities and opinions. While I completely respect your right to have an opinion, I am not interested in your colorful agenda during my precious ...