Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage

In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu—the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others. Ubuntu sees people less as individuals than as part of an infinitely complex web of other human beings. It is the idea that we are all bound up with one another, that me is always subordinate to we, that no man is an island.

Richard Stengel spent two years with Mandela and has now published a book on the fifteen lessons on life, love and courage that he gleaned from the great man’s life. The book itself is worth reading but the few snippets below give a glimpse of the greatness of the man. First the lessons:

Courage is not the absence of fear

Be measured and calm at all times

Lead from the front and the back

Look the part

Have a core principle

See the good in others

Know your enemy

Keep your rivals close

Know when to say no

It’s a long game

Love makes the difference

Quitting is leading too

Its always the both

Find your own garden

Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s learning to overcome it. None of us is born courageous, he would say; it is all in how we react to different situations. He loved to quote Shakespeare: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.” A coward might select that passage to give the impression that he was courageous, but for Mandela the passage is not bravado, but a simple statement of reality. Pretend to be brave and you not only become brave, you are brave.

Mandela sees almost everyone as virtuous until proven otherwise. He starts with an assumption that you are dealing with him in good faith. He believes that, just as pretending to be brave can lead to acts of real bravery, seeing the good in other people improves the chances that they will reveal their better selves. It is extraordinary that a man who was ill-treated for most of his life can see so much good in others. In fact, it was sometimes frustrating to talk with him because he almost never had a bad word to say about anyone. He would not even say a disapproving word about the man who tried to have him hanged. It is not that Mandela does not see the dark side of someone like John Vorster; it is that he is unwilling to see only that.

He knows that no one is purely good or purely evil. We were talking one day about a prisoner who had been a rival of Mandela’s on Robben Island and who had actually put together a list of grievances about Mandela. When I asked him about the fellow, Mandela did not address the man’s hostility but said, “What I took from him was his ability to work.”

He chooses to look past the negative. He does this for two reasons: because he instinctively sees the good in people and because he intellectually believes that seeing the good in others might actually make them better.

By behaving honorably, even to people who may not deserve it, he believes you can influence them to behave more honorably than they otherwise would

But Mandela believes in and takes emotional risks. He goes out on a limb and makes himself vulnerable by trusting others. We sometimes do that by confiding in others we don’t know well. Yet we rarely equate risk with trying to see what is decent, honest, and good in the people in our daily lives.

He had always appealed to people’s minds, but he knew that his ultimate victory would only come when he won over their hearts.

“The liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear.”

The time of your greatest triumph is the time when you should be most merciful.

Mandela would say we need to do a better job of expecting the expected, that we often do not prepare for those things we know are likely to be coming.

Mandela is not a man of maybes. He may be silent. He may be evasive. He will sometimes delay and postpone and try to avoid you. But in the end, he will not tell you what you want to hear just because you want to.

He almost always saw both sides of every issue, and his default position was to find some course in between, some way of reconciling both sides. In part this came from his deep-seated need to persuade and win people over, but mostly it came from having a nonideological view of the world and an appreciation for the intricate spider’s web of human motives..

Trust is a foundation of leadership. We trust that a leader is honest, able, and has a vision of where to go.

As he would say, you must reflect the goal in the way you seek it. He would sometimes quote Gandhi: “Be the change that you seek.” Mandela was tolerant of everything but intolerance. He would never discriminate in his goal to end discrimination. A noble goal should not be pursued by ignoble means.

Mandela’s example shows the value of forming as complete a picture as possible before taking action. Most of the mistakes he has made in his life came from acting too hastily rather than too slowly. Don’t hurry, he would say; think, analyze, then act.

“It is absolutely necessary at times for the leader to take on independent action without consulting anybody and to present what he has done to the organization.”

In his life, Mandela has often changed his mind when circumstances change. To him, that is simple common sense. When he sees what he regards as the inevitable, he will alter his point of view.

When Mandela became president, he presided over cabinet meetings in the same way. He did his best to see that opposing views were aired, if not always adhered to. He almost always spoke last, and more briefly than anyone else.

He was impressed by the way Lincoln used persuasion rather than force in managing his cabinet. He once told me an anecdote he recalled about Lincoln talking someone out of being in his cabinet and ended by saying, “It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it is their own idea.”

Since boyhood he had understood that collective leadership was about two things: the greater wisdom of the group compared to the individual, and the greater investment of the group in any result achieved by consensus. It was a double win.

Samuel Johnson once said there was nothing more relaxing than concentrating on a pleasant task that engages the mind but does not tax it too much. For Mandela it was his love of gardening.

In many ways, Mandela’s greatest act of leadership was the renunciation of it.