Inspirational Leadership Requires Character

When You’re Authentic, You Can Call Your Shots

by Michael D. Hume, M.S.

Look behind the curtain at the background of any media personality, and you’ll see things they don’t want you to see. Scandal. Weakness. Tragic mistakes and, for lack of a better word, “sin.” So it’s beyond refreshing – it’s downright weird – when a star not only pulls back the curtain, but gives you a guided tour of the skeletons in his closet.

One media personality caught my attention about three years ago, principally because everyone (and I mean everyone) was against the guy. Entire well-funded organizations had come into existence with the sole (or main) purpose of discrediting and slandering him. Any guy in the media who’s so reviled by everyone else in the media, I reasoned, must be worth getting to know.

Turns out this guy had risen from humble beginnings, born the son of a baker in the state of Washington, and was now the center of one of the world’s biggest media empires. And he, like all of us, was far from perfect. He’d been an alcoholic, and kind-of a nasty person. But unlike most of us, this guy’s flaws didn’t come to the attention of the public because others “told on” him. No, he made it his business to talk often about his disastrous past… and about the lessons he’d learned, and the new start he’d been given.

He made his points in a way that was often bombastic and off-putting. That said, after listening to him on the radio and watching him on television for just a few days, I realized he rarely said anything with which I could substantially disagree. He believed in God, in America as founded, and in such crazy concepts (these days) as personal responsibility, hard work, and entrepreneurship. He was able to predict nearly every major crisis the world’s seen in the past several months (because, as he says, he understands history)… but his message was always one of hope and optimism. We can, and will, overcome all this. That was what he had on offer.

His television program shattered all records in his time slot, despite an unbelievable amount of resources leveraged against the sole object of ruining him. He was at the very top of the media world. And today, at the top, he walked away from it all. He resigned his lucrative television franchise, did his last live show on Fox News, and deliberately stepped off into the unknown to, as he puts it, stop “admiring the problem” and “waiting for someone else to lead.” We’ll see him on the internet, as I understand it.

Glenn Beck. The very name makes liberals cringe – just as they’ve been taught to do. But as Beck himself would say to the millions he’s inspired, the liberals don’t surround us. We surround them. And if you’re one of the people who “hates” Beck (which, in my experience, means you’ve collected your opinions from the likes of Jon Stewart and have never actually seen or heard much of Beck himself), you can rejoice that he’s no longer the focus of a top-rated TV show. But don’t party for long. He’s far from gone. And millions of fans will follow him anywhere.