Main Street Magazine Spring '23

By Nick Schoenfield, art by Ember Nevins
So, leadership: what is it? Some might call it a skill, others
Listen to me now: leaders get blasphemed. It’s the natural
to end it or you get kicked down brutally. I got kicked down
breaks your ribs! At least, it broke my ribs. I don’t know how
probably aren’t very strong. Only nerds read magazines. But
to read another again. You ever go on dating apps like Tinder
this app?’ Well, that’s what I hope this article is for you. I
might call it an attribute, and some people are straight-up idiots.
way of things. And, if you get blasphemed, you either step up
once, physically and metaphorically. Let me tell you, that stuff
strong your ribs are, but if you’re reading a magazine they
hopefully by the time you finish this article you won’t ever need
and see people whose bios are like, ‘Give me a reason to delete
hope I give you a reason to burn your magazines.
Who am I to be telling you these things? I guess I should
introduce myself. My name is Nick, and I wrote this. It’s the best kind of article, the one
written by me. Why should I be explaining leadership to you? Well, I have many good reasons for that. The first is that I am college-educated. I went to college and studied microbiology
for a short time before dropping out to pursue my true passion of robbery. Yes, I’m a thief! I steal things! Do you think less of me because of that? Or am I just that much more of a bad
boy because I am standing up to the greatest authority around, the U.S. government?
I’m getting off track. How did I drop out to pursue robbery? I’ll explain. Microscopes are really valuable, you know that? I know because I broke one on the second day of my first
semester. The teacher ordered me to pay for them, and I dropped out to avoid the charge. Oops! It turns out that didn’t get rid of the charge, so I decided to use my passion for theft
in a productive way: I would steal a different, non-broken microscope and sell it to pay the fee for the one I broke. Some time after dropping out, I tried my hardest to sneak into the
classroom quietly. I put on a ski mask, leather gloves, and Doc Martens boots because they’re all black, the perfect hiding color. If you put a black thing on a black background, you
can’t see it. Don’t believe me? Try it at home. I’m not giving you evidence! If you want to verify anything I say in this article, do it on your own damn time. I have places to be! Anyway, I
tried robbing the school in my full robbery outfit, but when I burst into the room there was a class going on. Looks like I should have waited ’til night-time, or at least until after noon. Oh
well. At least I didn’t steal anything in front of witnesses. That was a close call!
Next week I tried robbing them again, this time at night. To avoid being recognized for the black outfit I’d been seen in the week prior, I wore a white outfit. That way if one of the people
who’d seen me in all black noticed me, instead of saying, “Isn’t that Nick?” they’d say, “That guy looks great” (I look great, for reference). So, I tried robbing them at night. I successfully
picked up one of the microscopes, but something came over me. I was feeling devious and eyed another microscope. One wasn’t enough—if I was going to be stealing, I wanted another
one. The first would be to pay off what I owed, the second would be to profit from. I decided then that I was turning to a life of crime. Call me Nick the Criminal.
I was on my way out of the classroom, when suddenly a police officer came up to me. “Are you Nick?” he asked. Obviously, I was, but should I have let him know that? This was actually
my first encounter with leadership, because my intuition told me I should try getting this police officer on my side by becoming his leader. Fun fact, this is actually where my whole
metaphor explaining leadership originated from: I realized in that moment that I had to become his leader. So, I analyzed him to see who he followed. He was wearing a necklace with a
cross on it, so he was a Christian—he followed God.
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