Twenty Years On: Steve Irwin’s Lesson in Enthusiasm

A note to young leaders.

Twenty years ago today, a stingray did what decades of crocodiles could not.

Steve Irwin was just forty-four.

It’s fashionable to lament the lost decades of the prematurely dead, but the more useful question is what they managed to compress into the decades they had.

Steve’s answer was enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is the most underrated leadership virtue – not least because it risks looking ridiculous. Calm is cooler. Irony is safer.

Steve didn’t care. He had enthusiasm in quantities that embarrassed the rest of us into feeling more than we ever planned to feel.

In Year 10, my son was asked to write a poem on “the relationship between man and nature.” He chose Steve Irwin. I share it here, not simply as a father’s indulgence, but as evidence that a man who died twenty years ago is still out there recruiting young leaders.

Vale Steve Irwin.

—

The Hunter’s Ray
by Immanuel Geha

He traced the glide of liquid lace,
Spectral kites cleaving tide,
Two dancers in the water’s sweep,
Soft-dappled in a sunlit space,
Syncopated in unscripted chase.

No claw, no tooth, no fang, no roar,
No flicker of a vengeful eye,
Only the whip of a reflex arc,
A shard, a blade, fate alone foresaw,
Fixed him, drifting, in breathless awe.

This is the dirge the deep composed,
Salt-warm requiem of barbèd notes,
That he who pressed the wild so close,
Should find his heart by love exposed,
And struck by what he loved the most.

Damn it, Steve,
that it should end like this.
You would’ve laughed, I think, to learn the twist:
That death, for you, should’ve had the grace
To cast a crocodile for your final chase.

Do it again, Steve,
no one minds.
Hold a snake up gently to our blinds
And half-drawn lives – all that energy, that voice.
Turn the sound up. As if we had a choice.