Learning how to be a leader

"Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on ... you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

... [T]he big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; ... there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important ... All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself,  in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love. Think of this more, and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

... The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do His will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it beforehand."

Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters, ed. William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985), 294-297.