Striving Towards Excellence

-Karthik Gurumurthy

I’ve been reflecting on something profound: “If we have to lead, we need to learn.” We all know our first lessons came from home, with our mothers as our first teachers. But as we grew up and started learning from different sources, I think most of us made a crucial mistake—we graduated from those initial classes and moved on, missing some of the most powerful leadership lessons right in front of us.

Think about this: Doesn’t a mother think from her heart, not just her brain, when it comes to her children? Isn’t her love completely unconditional?

I’ve realized that great leaders operate the same way. Even when they have brilliant ideas in their minds, execution—which always requires people—is done through the heart.

There’s a quote that really hit me: “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” We might be geniuses, but people won’t follow us until they genuinely know we care about them. The most important quality in leadership isn’t intelligence or strategy—it’s truly caring.

The best leaders in any field care deeply about the people they lead, and here’s the thing—people can always tell when that caring is genuine versus when it’s fake or absent entirely.

When it comes to learning how to care, who could be a better teacher than our mothers?

It’s like searching for peace by traveling the world when we could find it by journeying a few inches inward to our hearts. We have the best leadership teacher right at home—we just need to start paying attention.

By learning to care, we learn to lead. The classroom was there all along.