We Need a Mental Riot

We’ve heard the quote countless times: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

It’s often attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, but, as Time Magazine recently pointed out, King actually said it for the first time two years earlier in an interview with CBS’ Mike Wallace.

King never advocated violence, but he understood that the chaos sweeping America’s streets stemmed not from sudden bursts of anger, but from more than a century of oppression, inequality and unfulfilled promises. Until the country could transform itself, its destruction would persist.

It’s time now for us as leaders to participate in a riot of our own — a mental riot.

Our society creates us to be average. We go to average schools, live in average neighborhoods, hold average jobs, make average salaries, and ultimately, lead average lives.

We need to mentally riot against this. We need to throw out old ways of thinking. We need to chuck the labels that we have put on others and have placed on ourselves. We need to toss away people’s expectations, and we need to stop giving them to those around us. We need to tear down the mental fences we’ve put up as barriers to growth.

We need to mentally riot. We all have talents, abilities, skills and visions that stretch far beyond the horizons that other people can see. And yet, we capitulate to their expectations — playing the role they envision us in, not the one we’re passionate about. We can’t do the same to those we lead. We need to build people up, not box them in.

We need to mentally riot. We need to ask ourselves, “What if I’ve been wrong all these years?” We need to know history, not so we can repeat it, but so we can cite it and get better from it. We need to read what no one else is. We need to recognize what’s holding us back and run at it, not away from it. We need to compete differently. We need to be iconoclastic.

We need to mentally riot. It is incredibly difficult to recognize that the way we achieved something yesterday may not be the way to achieve it tomorrow. But true growth doesn’t come from persistent perfection. It’s recognizing shortcomings and adapting. The sooner we do this on our self-discovery journeys, the better off we’ll be — and the better off our teams will be.

Let’s shatter our old ways of doing things. Let’s discover what we know we’re capable of as leaders and let’s bring it out of other people. Let’s commit to being uncommon, and let’s commit to making others uncommon. Let’s pledge not to settle for average, and let’s pledge not to let others do the same.

It’s time that we mentally riot.

P.S. If you are in search of a book recommendation, our team at The Daily Coach highly recommends The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer. This landmark book in the field of social psychology is completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today as it delivers a visionary, highly provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

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