It’s a sacrifice. Leadership is not about you. Healthy leadership understands the price required to steer and pursue the purposes not of an individual, but of a collective entity, a team, a business, a group, a party.
Leadership is a function with a high personal cost.
If you succeed, you reap the rewards of association with something much greater than yourself. You see the fruit of hard labour. You experience the elation of a result greater than the sum of its parts.
This is what we see when we consider leadership, the end result.
We would be wise to consider the processes that create it.