Being president is like running a cemetery: you've got a lot of people under you and nobody's listening.
Interpretation
Being in a leadership position often feels isolating, as your concerns may go unheard by those you lead.
This quote by William J. Clinton humorously expresses the challenges of leadership, particularly in a high-stakes position like the presidency. It suggests that, while leaders have many responsibilities and people looking to them for guidance, they often feel disconnected and unheard, much like a caretaker of a cemetery who oversees many yet lacks engagement from the living.
In practice
A motivational speech on the challenges of leadership at a business summit.
You know, there was a recent poll which said that young people in the generation of the students here felt it was far more likely that they would see a UFO than that they would draw Social Security... It's very important you understand this. Once you understand this, you realize this is not an episode from the X Files, and you're not more likely to see a UFO if you do certain specific things.
When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly...When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.
For too long we've been told about 'us' and 'them.' Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that 'they' are the problem, not 'us.' But there can be no 'them' in America. There's only us.
There is a huge body of business evidence now showing that energy savings give better service at lower cost with higher profit. We have to tear down barriers to successful markets and we have to create incentives to enter them.
Demand that your government pays more attention. It's immoral that people in Africa die like flies of diseases that no one dies of in the United States. And the more disease there is, the more political unrest there will be, leading to more Darfurs, which the U.S. will have to pay to fix.
I was not elected to produce a pile of vetoes.
No president is well-served by groupthink or by everybody singing from the same sheet of music they think he's on.
When you disarm your subjects, however, you offend them by showing that either from cowardliness or lack of faith, you distrust them; and either conclusion will induce them to hate you.
The one thing I was always told is you absolutely have to tell truth to power. Whether you're a second lieutenant working with a captain and a lieutenant colonel, or a four-star general working with the Office Secretary of Defense and the White House, the decision makers have got to have ground truth.
If you see your company culture as a family, you don't want to fire someone just because their short-term performance is not good. If you do, even the people on your team who are excellent performers will look at what's going on and say, 'Someday you might fire me too.' You'll lose everyone's trust.
A leader is someone who helps improve the lives of other people or improve the system they live under.
The common belief that coaches must be abusive to be successful is a myth. Research shows that if you find a task fun, you'll perform better. If more coaches took . . . a Golden Rule approach to coaching, treating their players the way they themselves would like to be treated, fewer athletes would drop out of sports in their teens, and more athletes at every level would be happier and more satisfied.
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