Peter Pan had a particular quality that the lost boys recognized before they could fully put it into words.
He genuinely believed that they were capable of things they had never attempted and were afraid even to imagine.
This belief was not based on evidence — it was simply how Peter saw people, with extraordinary and infectious confidence.
He assigned Tootles and Nibs and Curly to missions that were beyond what any of them thought they could accomplish.
And then he watched them go and succeeded because they could not bear to disappoint someone who believed in them so completely.
The courage he gave them was not something he manufactured or transferred — it was something he revealed that was already there.
A good leader does not create courage in people; they create the conditions in which existing courage can finally surface.
The lost boys followed Peter because he gave them courage.

Peter Pan's leadership of the lost boys works according to a principle that the best teachers and coaches understand well.
Courage is not distributed equally at birth, but it is distributed far more widely than most people ever discover in themselves.
The majority of people go through their lives not knowing what they are genuinely capable of under the right conditions.
Peter's genius as a leader was his complete and apparently unconditional confidence in people he had chosen to lead.
This confidence was communicated so consistently and so completely that it became, over time, the boys' own self-image.
They stopped thinking of themselves as frightened lost children and began thinking of themselves as Peter Pan's company.
The identity shift that this represented was, in practice, indistinguishable from an actual increase in courage and ability.
Peter gave them not courage itself but something arguably more valuable — the belief that the courage was already theirs.
The lost boys followed Peter because he gave them courage.