Opera Dress

Gordon Tootoosis, Aboriginal Canadian actor, activist, and band chief of Cree and Iyarhe Nakoda descent, as Cecil Delaronde in Canadian TV series Blackstone.

[image description: two stills of Gordon Tootoosis, captioned, “Leadership is about submission to duty, not elevation to power.” end description.]

This is one of the most profound statements on leadership I’ve encountered in a long time, and it really landed a hit on me. It’s difficult to discuss without getting a little weird about it, but for a long time I’ve been of the mind that the privilege of having a large readership implies the duty of giving back in specific ways – I just never thought of it in terms of leadership as submission to duty.