The Wisdom of Maya Angelou

In this interview with Alison Beard in Harvard Business Review, author Maya Angelou talks about how she learned courage from her mother: “I realized that one isn’t born with courage. One develops it by doing small courageous things – in the way that if one sets out to pick up a 100-pound bag of rice, one would be advised to start with a five-pound bag, then 10 pounds, then 20 pounds, and so forth, until one builds up enough muscle to lift the 100-pound bag. It’s the same way with courage.” 

Angelou also talks about what she learned from watching her mother and grandmother run businesses: “That it’s wise to be fair, and it’s unwise to lie. That doesn’t mean tell everything you know. Just make sure that what you do say is the truth. There are people who say I’m brutally frank, but one doesn’t have to be brutal; one can tell the truth in such a way that the listener really welcomes it.”

She shares what she does about writer’s block: “I sit on the hotel bed with a deck of cards and play solitaire to give my ‘little mind’ something to do. I got that phrase from my grandmother, who used to say, when something surprised her, ‘You know, that wasn’t even on my littlest mind.’ I really thought that there was a small mind and a large mind, and if I could occupy the small one, I could get more quickly to the big one. So I play solitaire.”

Finally, she’s asked about what she’s learned about leadership from her encounters with Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama: “A leader sees greatness in other people. You can’t be much of a leader if all you see is yourself.”

“Life’s Work: Maya Angelou” an interview by Alison Beard in Harvard Business Review, May 2013 (Vol. 91, #5, p. 152), http://hbr.org/angelou 

From the Marshall Memo #482