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Leadership Workshop: Strenuous Life Leadership
Presentation by Brian Flanagan, October 27, 2009
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Click here to open a PDF copy of the workshop handout.
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Photo Essay
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 Brian Flanagan, Associate Director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential studies at GVSU leads a workshop titled "Strenuous Life Leadership." Mr. Flanagan's workshop examined the idea of self improvement in leaders through the works of Confucius, Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Adams. It took place on October 27, 2009, in the Kirkhof Center at GVSU's Allendale Campus.
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 "Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech in 1899 when he was Vice President of the United States in which he said, “I want to preach to you not the doctrine of ignoble ease but with the doctrine of a strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, labor and strife.” That was his message to Chicago, and uh, it is something that you learn through experience. In that speech, he also said that in this life we give nothing save by effort. Now, if you know anything about Theodore Roosevelt or read the great biography by Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, you will know that he got to his station in life through a very dedicated effort, through much strain, and that is where he got that insight. It wasn’t something he just came up with for this speech. It was a reflection of his life experience."
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 "Theodore Roosevelt, as a boy, was very sickly. He was so skinny that he couldn’t breathe. He had very bad asthma. It had to be dealt with virtually every day. His father had to get him out and ride him through the hills and try to get him up into the higher altitudes so he could breathe, and it was a real problem. At the same time, he was getting first rate education, so he was developing this great brain power, but he did not have the body to keep up with it. There was even fear that he might not survive or ever be able to thrive as a human being because he just did not have the strength. And so there was this defining moment in Roosevelt’s life where his father said to him, “Son, you have the mind, but you don’t have the body. You have to build the body.” And so this is where the insight came from. Starting the next day, Theodore Roosevelt worked out this very rigorous exercise program that he was going to go through and literally for the rest of his life, he exercised hard, even in the White House. And he did, he built the body. He was literally a body builder for the rest of his life. In the White House, he was famous for literally boxing staffers and was blind in one eye from getting hit by one of the staffers."
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 Brian's central thesis for the workshop was in the form of a question: "I want to start by asking, does anyone have other examples of this either in your personal lives, people you know or history? People who have really had a dedicated effort to building themselves, whether it is physically, intellectually, morally, because it is really something that would be considered to be part of the American experience or the American identity, this idea that we can build ourselves."
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Last updated: November 19, 2009, 9:10 AM
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