It’s also like being cool. It’s only true if other people say it about you and when you say it about yourself, the likelihood it’s true decreases exponentially.

This is a strange take. A natural leader is a leader without a title. They have they have the qualities needed to be a good leader. People gravitate to them because they have all the prerequisites and skills of leadership.

They lead people because of the relationship they have built without having to resort to institutional authority. This makes natural leaders better than a boss who is given a title sometimes without the attributes or even the skills of leadership.

Your take seems to be someone who is born a leader doesn’t necessarily have the skills. Like they are charismatic but don’t have good listening skills. These people are not natural leaders though. Natural leaders by definition posses the attributes and skills of leadership.

This is not saying every natural leaders has all the skills or attributes of leadership as that would be a ridiculous bar to expect. It really just feels like you could just say leadership is often confused with charisma.

My uncle was a sheep farmer and I can confirm, some leaders are just leaders because the ones following are very dumb

True that

I feel like almost every really good leader is someone who happens to have that “natural leader” quality, but also asks people for input constantly and is aware of their lack of judgement.

A little semi related aside: There is a fascinating story in “Most Secret War” of the author’s first meeting where Winston Churchill was running the meeting. One, Churchill came in in working clothes, the only one not wearing a suit, and everyone thought for a second that he was the janitor or something entering the wrong room when he walked in. He just didn’t carry himself like “the boss.” Once they all realized everyone stood up and he sort of waved it off and took his seat like nothing special. He had sort of anti charisma.

Once he started running the meeting, Jones said that Churchill had an almost supernatural ability to spot when Jones at least had something he needed to say. Somebody would say something that was wrong, Jones would carefully keep his face neutral because he was just some random low-level peon at this meeting and didn’t want to get in trouble, and the next thing that happened Churchill would say, “Jones, what do you think of that?” Basically he was at a grandmaster level of digging to get to the bottom of what was actually happening so everyone could make good decisions.

I don’t really know that much about any famous leaders through history, but it was just fuckin’ fascinating as a window onto how these decisions and plans actually get made, to some small extent.

Very true. They just have good social skills and or high charisma. You ever notice people love bad leaders though? Just look at any famous or notorious leader