The following is a summary of a lecture given by William Deresiewicz to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy in October of 2009. It is one of the greatest pieces I have come across that has challenged my thinking as a coach, a parent, a Christian, every aspect of my life.
Solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership.
What does leadership really consist of?
Being energetic? Smart? Ambitious? Are these things enough to make leaders?
Great heart surgeons, great novelists and great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn't mean they are leaders.
Observation--that great kids have been trained to be world class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you give them, they could pass with flying colors.
A pursuit of excellence isn't usually what gets you up the "greasy pole". What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it's time to stab him in the back. Jumping through the hoops. Getting along by getting along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, you have nothing inside you at all.
We find people in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. We have a crisis of leadership because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them. Who think about think about how to get things done, but not whether they're worth doing in the first place.
What we don't have are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, etc.--a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things, in other words, with vision.
A PHD doesn't mean you are a thinker. There are lots of educated people who are not thinkers. A thinker and a leader is able to think things through for themselves. And because they can, they have the confidence, the courage, to argue for their ideas even when they aren't popular. Courage; moral courage, the courage to stand up for what you believe.
True leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions. But how do you learn to do that? How do you learn to think?
You don't learn to think by multitasking. It's not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop and idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas,. In short, thinking for yourself.
Our first thought is never our best thought. The first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the pats of my mind come into play, that we arrive at an original idea. By giving our brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, often take us by surprise.
The great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about 100 words per day. T.S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets of our time wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25 year career. That's a half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
Concentrating. Think about what that word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. Questions we must answer--Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words like duty, honor, country--really mean?
"Your own reality"...for yourself, not for others. Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. With Facebook and Twitter you are constantly bombarding yourself with other people's thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people's reality: for other, not for yourself. Emerson said--"he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions." Notice that he uses the word lead. Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that's heading toward the cliff.
So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you're reading. What you think about what you're reading. A book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself.
Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they're not from today. Great books say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today. The American Revolution was revolutionary thinking. It was a result of precisely this kind of thinking. Without solitude--the solitude of Adams and Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison and Thomas Paine--there would be no America.
So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work and it can mean sustained reading. All of these can help you know yourself better.
Introspection means talking to yourself.
How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find the words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
The time to start preparing yourself for dilemmas is now. And the way to do it is by thinking through these issues yourself--morality, mortality, honor--so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting until you have to confront them in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it's too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe; not what others, or your boss believes, not what your peers believe, but what you believe.
How can you know that unless you have taken counsel with yourself in solitude?
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