The Greatest Leaders Are Formidable
A leader’s power comes from its formidability.
Since I arrived at Berkeley, I’ve had over 900 people apply to work at Reach Best, and I’ve hired 3 full-time employees and 20 interns. I’m 20 years old. Today, I can attract and influence hundreds of people, but I think it can be misleading to analyze the superficial accomplishments of my leadership today. I think it’s far more important to see what kind of leader I was at the beginning and what has remained constant.
Back in October 2021, I was halfway through my first semester at Berkeley and one of my high school friends asked me if he could do an internship with me, so I decided to try running my first Reach Best internship program. Many of the people around me, including my roommates, were telling me that I was crazy trying to recruit interns because nobody would want to work unpaid for an 18 year old freshman. I ignored them and for two weeks I marketed the link to my Google Form job application on Piazza, newsletters, and Instagram. I got 4 applicants.
The truth is that even though my friends thought the hard part was persuading people to apply, I knew from the beginning that my true test would be maintaining my interns working for the entirety of the 4 month project. I was going to lead people the same age or older than me, which can make asserting my authority awkward if they see me as being their equal or less. So I spent most of my time during the outreach weeks crafting the perfect internship plan, an onboarding session, training presentations, spreadsheet templates, and more. The internship turned out to be successful, the interns saying at the end that they were surprised at how professional everything was, and people started respecting me as a visionary and as a very capable person for my age. My power as a leader had increased.
What I understood that my friends didn’t was that it isn’t the perceptions who are outside your group that affect your power, but the perceptions of those inside your group that affect it. I now had 4 loyal fans who over the following 2 years continued to support me to the point where one of them invited me as an honorary guest speaker to talk about being a student founder to his club of 200 top Berkeley students. Thanks to my first internship experience I grew more formidable, which allowed me to attract and influence more people the next time, which has snowballed into the ability to inspire people in the hundreds. Formidability is what makes people believe in you and follow you.
The secret I’ve come to realize, however, is that formidability is beyond my control and it’s not something meant to be sought. Instead, I’ve focused on making sure I’m always inspiring myself. Because in the end, the best way to inspire others is to be inspirational.
~ Thanks so much for reading all this way!
If you want to connect on LinkedIn, here is my profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryusei-best-hayashi/
If you want to learn more about what I’m working on, you can check out my startup’s website here: https://reachbest.co/
Daily mindset reminder, “Only great things happen to me”.
