I’ve been thinking about leadership lately.

Many children’s programs are designed to foster leadership skills. Why? Does this imply that everyone should have leadership skills? That everyone should be a leader?

This interests me because for the longest time, I never felt like a “Leader”. I didn’t have anything in common with “Leaders” I saw. It didn’t resonate.

But I’ve realized the answer is yes. Everyone should learn leadership skills.

Even if you have no aspirations to start a company or lead a nation, leadership is everywhere.

It’s obviously present on smaller scales — in local organizations, communities, and workplaces. And even if you don’t aspire to be at the top, in any non-trivial organization, it’s still leadership all the way down. Even if you explicitly reject managing people, you can still find yourself as a leader — for example, being a skilled individual specialist carries leadership in its own way.

But less obviously, as soon as you start any kind of project or endeavor of any kind — guess what, you’re now a leader. Any kind of pursuit creates an opening for a leader. By default, the creator fills the role.

Examples of endeavors:

• Starting a family
• Co-creating a relationship
• Organizing a party
• Planning a trip
• A creative practice

Without leadership, you can only ever be a “leaf” node, at the end of the chain. Without leadership, you can only ever be a consumer, a viewer, an audience member.

Even if you never start any endeavor, at the very least, you are the leader of your own life. (Which, by the way, is a creative project.)

So, yes, everyone should have leadership skills — not because everyone “should” be a leader, but because everyone already is.