Seth Kahan on Leadership // Monday Morning Mojo
Pushing the Frontier
The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick . .  . In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself. . . Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe . . . The fact is, that here is a new product . . .
The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Frederick Jackson Turner
Read for the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893

Those who spend their time on the edge find themselves changed by it. They are not just pushing into new territory. The untamed territory infiltrates their being and transforms them into explorers. They become more than civilized seekers who want to know the boundaries of knowledge. While there they cannot help but imbibe the wild, digest it. Eventually it becomes them and they become it in some measure.

This is the fate not just of people living in the region between settled and unsettled country, but entrepreneurs who extend their businesses out into new areas, growing the market with their efforts and taking on new jurisdiction over which they can exert their authority.

What boundary will you stretch this week?


The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer.
-
Heinz Pagels
Read Seth's Regular Columns VisionaryLeadership.com
Follow Seth
Seth Kahan - Visionary Leadership
PO Box 380 Glen Echo, Maryland, USA, 20812
Tel: 301.229.2221 | Email: Seth@Visionaryleadership.com
� 2010 Seth Kahan. All rights reserved