Invictus and Leadership

• From the movie Invictus I have learned lots of different lessons about leadership that were portrayed by Nelson Mandela. In the beginning of the movie the audience sees Mandela get released from prison and then the movie cuts to him being inaugurated. There is lots of negativity shown by racist white people in the movie, but Mandela always keeps his head held high. In the first Rugby scene, Mandela enters the stadium to be greeted by many boo's and harassment. Instead of acting negatively he waves at the crowd with pride and smiles. He never once shows and form of weakness and even orders his body guard to smile when they are on duty. This is a good example of leadership because Mandela does not show weakness and always keeps his head held high. As the movie progresses Mandela finds out how to use the Countries love for rugby to his advantage to help unite the country and stop the racism and hate. This creativity he has shows how great of a leader he is. The challenge that Mandela faces in the movie is him getting ill from not having enough rest, and even when he is informed to stay in bed he goes out of his way to continue to support the team. All of these actions make Mandela a great leader, but one final action confirms how great of a leader he is. Instead of firing all of his staff when he becomes president he forgives them for what they did to him and spreads his forgiveness just moving on. This movie has shown me how Nelson Mandela has strived as a leader and the ethics and morals that he used to get there. 
• The leadership challenges in which I faced in my lifetime start at school. When was I was in 5th Grade I was elected into the student council as Class Judge which was a hard position to get. When I was in this position, my friends were also in student council and we often sat together discussing matters. One day an incident popped up which concerned a kid throwing a chair at the class president which was my good friend (Not sure if this was some form of 5th grade assassination attempt or something). The attacker was sentenced into court where it was my domain to choose his fate. My good friend who was the president told me that I should charge him to the highest degree which is completly off the scale of justice compared to the other punishments we had. The highest degree would mean a week without going into the playground. I believed that he deserved the more reasonable 5 hours of community service. The dilemma I faced was to either listen to my good friend or do the right thing. In the end I did the right thing and sentenced the kid to 5 hours of community service. Of course my friend was mad, but he got over it soon enough and the kid was taught his lesson.
• The second leadership challenge that I faced was actually just this year. This year I established the official investment club for my school where we invest real money and virtual money into stocks. I founded the club with a good friend of mine who was also very good in the financial and stock area. Once the club started we had lots of kid flood in to the room who were interested. After the first day of the club my friend and I realized that lots of kids in the club were not serious about what they were doing and really didn't have too much interest in the club at all. We had to make a choice between kicking those kids out of the club or tolerating them and letting them take up our time with their chatter. It was a hard choice because in the beginning we thought that we would be better off with more people in our club, but after lots of talking we decided to kick out anyone we deemed not serious. The club went down from around 15 people to 3 people. But us 3 were very serious about what we were doing and in the end succeeded and even placed in the top 10 of a country wide stock tournament. The leadership that my friend and I had to use here was to decided what to do with people that were not willing to make a commitment and in the end we made the right choice and got rid of all the extra weight that they made us carry.