Real Leadership: 9 Simple Practices for Leading and Living with Purpose

CHAPTER 6

Mortality

Develop a Peaceful Core

A peaceful mind generates power.

—NORMAN VINCENT PEALE

One of my father’s favorite authors was a turn-of-the-century Massachusetts writer named David Grayson. Actually, that was his pen name. When he wasn’t escaping into the peace and quiet of his pseudonym, “Grayson” was a famous journalist named Ray Stannard Baker.

Back in the early 1900s, Stannard Baker was a very important man, a newspaper reporter for the extremely influential McClure’s magazine and one of a group of writers, known as the “muckrakers,” who took on crooked politicians and industry barons. At the end of World War I, he served as ...