Solitude and Leadership
If you want others to follow, learn to be
alone with your thoughts
The lecture below was delivered to the
plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October
2009.
My title must seem like a contradiction.
What can solitude have to do with leadership? Solitude means being alone, and
leadership necessitates the presence of others—the people you’re leading. When
we think about leadership in American history we are likely to think of
Washington, at the head of an army, or Lincoln, at the head of a nation, or
King, at the head of a movement—people with multitudes behind them, looking to
them for direction. And when we think of solitude, we are apt to think of
Thoreau, a man alone in the woods, keeping a journal and communing with nature
in silence.
Leadership is what you are
here to learn—the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to
command a platoon, and beyond that, perhaps, a company, a battalion, or, if you
leave the military, a corporation, a foundation, a department of government. Solitude is
what you have the least of here, especially as plebes. You don’t even have
privacy, the opportunity simply to be physically alone, never mind solitude,
the ability to be alone with your thoughts. And yet I submit to you that
solitude is one of the most important necessities of true leadership. This
lecture will be an attempt to explain why.
We need to begin by talking about what
leadership really means. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution
that, like West Point, liked to talk a lot about leadership, Yale University. A
school that some of you might have gone to had you not come here, that some of
your friends might be going to. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT,
and so forth. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role as the
training of leaders, constantly encourage their students, like West Point, to
regard themselves as leaders among their peers and future leaders of society.
Indeed, when we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of
government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions—senators,
judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth—we find that they come
overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the
service academies, especially West Point.
So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale,
what leadership really consists of. My students, like you, were energetic,
accomplished, smart, and often ferociously ambitious, but was that enough to
make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I liked and even admired them,
certainly didn’t seem to me like leaders. Does being a leader, I
wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight
As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists
or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean
they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement,
leadership and even excellence have to be different things, otherwise the
concept of leadership has no meaning. And it seemed to me that that had to be
especially true of the kind of excellence I saw in the students around me.
See, things have changed since I went to
college in the ’80s. Everything has gotten much more intense. You have to do
much more now to get into a top school like Yale or West Point, and you have to
start a lot earlier. We didn’t begin thinking about college until we were
juniors, and maybe we each did a couple of extracurriculars. But I know what
it’s like for you guys now. It’s an endless series of hoops that you have to
jump through, starting from way back, maybe as early as junior high school.
Classes, standardized tests, extracurriculars in school, extracurriculars
outside of school. Test prep courses, admissions coaches, private tutors. I sat
on the Yale College admissions committee a couple of years ago. The first thing
the admissions officer would do when presenting a case to the rest of the
committee was read what they call the “brag” in admissions lingo, the list of
the student’s extracurriculars. Well, it turned out that a student who had six
or seven extracurriculars was already in trouble. Because the students who got
in—in addition to perfect grades and top scores—usually had 10 or 12.
So what I saw around me were great kids who
had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they
could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They
were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that
they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard
Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or
Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever. And this approach would
indeed take them far in life. They would come back for their 25th reunion as a
partner at White & Case, or an attending physician at Mass General, or an
assistant secretary in the Department of State.
That is exactly what places like Yale mean
when they talk about training leaders. Educating people who make a big name for
themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people the university
can brag about. People who make it to the top. People who can climb the greasy
pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to.
But I think there’s something desperately
wrong, and even dangerous, about that idea. To explain why, I want to spend a
few minutes talking about a novel that many of you may have read, Heart
of Darkness. If you haven’t read it, you’ve probably seen Apocalypse
Now, which is based on it. Marlow in the novel becomes Captain Willard,
played by Martin Sheen. Kurtz in the novel becomes Colonel Kurtz, played by
Marlon Brando. But the novel isn’t about Vietnam; it’s about colonialism in the
Belgian Congo three generations before Vietnam. Marlow, not a military officer
but a merchant marine, a civilian ship’s captain, is sent by the company that’s
running the country under charter from the Belgian crown to sail deep upriver,
up the Congo River, to retrieve a manager who’s ensconced himself in the jungle
and gone rogue, just like Colonel Kurtz does in the movie.
Now everyone knows that the novel is about
imperialism and colonialism and race relations and the darkness that lies in
the human heart, but it became clear to me at a certain point, as I taught the
novel, that it is also about bureaucracy—what I called, a minute ago,
hierarchy. The Company, after all, is just that: a company, with rules and
procedures and ranks and people in power and people scrambling for power, just
like any other bureaucracy. Just like a big law firm or a governmental
department or, for that matter, a university. Just like—and here’s why I’m
telling you all this—just like the bureaucracy you are about to join. The
word bureaucracy tends to have negative connotations, but I
say this in no way as a criticism, merely a description, that the U.S. Army is
a bureaucracy and one of the largest and most famously bureaucratic bureaucracies
in the world. After all, it was the Army that gave us, among other things, the
indispensable bureaucratic acronym “snafu”: “situation normal: all fucked
up”—or “all fouled up” in the cleaned-up version. That comes from the U.S. Army
in World War II.
You need to know that when you get your
commission, you’ll be joining a bureaucracy, and however long you stay in the
Army, you’ll be operating within a bureaucracy. As different as the armed
forces are in so many ways from every other institution in society, in that
respect they are the same. And so you need to know how bureaucracies operate,
what kind of behavior—what kind of character—they reward, and what kind they
punish.
So, back to the novel. Marlow proceeds
upriver by stages, just like Captain Willard does in the movie. First he gets
to the Outer Station. Kurtz is at the Inner Station. In between is the Central
Station, where Marlow spends the most time, and where we get our best look at
bureaucracy in action and the kind of people who succeed in it. This is
Marlow’s description of the manager of the Central Station, the big boss:
He
was commonplace in complexion, in features, in manners, and in voice. He was of
middle size and of ordinary build. His eyes, of the usual blue, were perhaps
remarkably cold. . . . Otherwise there was only an indefinable, faint
expression of his lips, something stealthy—a smile—not a smile—I remember it,
but I can’t explain. . . . He was a common trader, from his youth up employed
in these parts—nothing more. He was obeyed, yet he inspired neither love nor
fear, nor even respect. He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a
definite mistrust—just uneasiness—nothing more. You have no idea how effective
such a . . . a . . . faculty can be. He had no genius for organizing, for
initiative, or for order even. . . . He had no learning, and no intelligence.
His position had come to him—why? . . . He originated nothing, he could keep
the routine going—that’s all. But he was great. He was great by this little
thing that it was impossible to tell what could control such a man. He never
gave that secret away. Perhaps there was nothing within him. Such a suspicion
made one pause.
Note the adjectives: commonplace, ordinary, usual, common.
There is nothing distinguished about this person. About the 10th time I read
that passage, I realized it was a perfect description of the kind of person who
tends to prosper in the bureaucratic environment. And the only reason I did is
because it suddenly struck me that it was a perfect description of the head of
the bureaucracy that I was part of, the chairman of my
academic department—who had that exact same smile, like a shark, and that exact
same ability to make you uneasy, like you were doing something wrong, only she
wasn’t ever going to tell you what. Like the manager—and I’m sorry to say this,
but like so many people you will meet as you negotiate the bureaucracy of the
Army or for that matter of whatever institution you end up giving your talents
to after the Army, whether it’s Microsoft or the World Bank or whatever—the
head of my department had no genius for organizing or initiative or even order,
no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at
all. Just the ability to keep the routine going, and beyond that, as Marlow
says, her position had come to her—why?
That’s really the great mystery about
bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle
and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because
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 hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other
people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager
of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid
risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done.
Just keeping the routine going.
I tell you this to forewarn you, because I
promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in
environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you
can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other
reason. As I thought about these things and put all these pieces together—the
kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the
kind of leaders I saw in my own institution—I realized that this is a national
problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution.
Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in
recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S.
Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple
of years.
Finally—and I know I’m on sensitive ground
here—look at what happened during the first four years of the Iraq War. We were
stuck. It wasn’t the fault of the enlisted ranks or the noncoms or the junior
officers. It was the fault of the senior leadership, whether military or
civilian or both. We weren’t just not winning, we weren’t even changing
direction.
We have a crisis of leadership in America
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 how to get things done, but not whether
they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest
technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be
incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything
beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are
leaders.
What we don’t have, in other words,
are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can
formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for
the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in
other words, with vision.
Now some people would say, great. Tell this
to the kids at Yale, but why bother telling it to the ones at West Point? Most
people, when they think of this institution, assume that it’s the last place
anyone would want to talk about thinking creatively or cultivating independence
of mind. It’s the Army, after all. It’s no accident that the word regiment is
the root of the word regimentation. Surely you who have come here
must be the ultimate conformists. Must be people who have bought in to the way
things are and have no interest in changing it. Are not the kind of young
people who think about the world, who ponder the big issues, who question
authority. If you were, you would have gone to Amherst or Pomona. You’re at
West Point to be told what to do and how to think.
But you know that’s not true. I know it,
too; otherwise I would never have been invited to talk to you, and I’m even
more convinced of it now that I’ve spent a few days on campus. To quote Colonel
Scott Krawczyk, your course director, in a lecture he gave last year to English
102:
From
the very earliest days of this country, the model for our officers, which was
built on the model of the citizenry and reflective of democratic ideals, was to
be different. They were to be possessed of a democratic spirit marked by
independent judgment, the freedom to measure action and to express
disagreement, and the crucial responsibility never to tolerate tyranny.
All the more so now. Anyone who’s been
paying attention for the last few years understands that the changing nature of
warfare means that officers, including junior officers, are required more than
ever to be able to think independently, creatively, flexibly. To deploy a whole
range of skills in a fluid and complex situation. Lieutenant colonels who are
essentially functioning as provincial governors in Iraq, or captains who find
themselves in charge of a remote town somewhere in Afghanistan. People who know
how to do more than follow orders and execute routines.
Look at the most successful, most
acclaimed, and perhaps the finest soldier of his generation, General David
Petraeus. He’s one of those rare people who rises through a bureaucracy for the
right reasons. He is a thinker. He is an intellectual. In fact, Prospect magazine
named him Public Intellectual of the Year in 2008—that’s in the world.
He has a Ph.D. from Princeton, but what makes him a thinker is not that he has
a Ph.D. or that he went to Princeton or even that he taught at West Point. I
can assure you from personal experience that there are a lot of highly educated
people who don’t know how to think at all.
No, what makes him a thinker—and a
leader—is precisely that he is able to think things through for himself. And
because he can, he has the confidence, the courage, to argue for
his ideas even when they aren’t popular. Even when they don’t please his
superiors. Courage: there is physical courage, which you all possess in abundance,
and then there is another kind of courage, moral courage, the courage to stand
up for what you believe.
It wasn’t always easy for him. His path to
where he is now was not a straight one. When he was running Mosul in 2003 as
commander of the 101st Airborne and developing the strategy he would later
formulate in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and then
ultimately apply throughout Iraq, he pissed a lot of people off. He was way
ahead of the leadership in Baghdad and Washington, and bureaucracies don’t like
that sort of thing. Here he was, just another two-star, and he was saying,
implicitly but loudly, that the leadership was wrong about the way it was
running the war. Indeed, he was not rewarded at first. He was put in charge of
training the Iraqi army, which was considered a blow to his career, a dead-end
job. But he stuck to his guns, and ultimately he was vindicated. Ironically,
one of the central elements of his counterinsurgency strategy is precisely the
idea that officers need to think flexibly, creatively, and independently.
That’s the first half of the lecture: the
idea that 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?
Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a
team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The
investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to
multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it,
the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what
they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the
investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to
multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not
multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more
people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but
at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different
from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions
while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high
multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure
the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in
every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at
distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the
latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what
you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual
boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were
more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines
multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not
thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means
concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an 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. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a
time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or
fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is
never my best thought. My 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
parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving
my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise.
And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think
about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and
correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job
done and move on to the next thing.
I used to have students who bragged to me
about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that 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 a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you
earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of
the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of
poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a
month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by
slowing down and concentrating.
Now that’s the third time I’ve used that
word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as
easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think
about what the 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. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and
YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio
and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate
excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling
questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with
my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I
live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really
mean? Am I happy?
You and the members of the other service
academies are in a unique position among college students, especially today.
Not only do you know that you’re going to have a job when you graduate, you
even know who your employer is going to be. But what happens after you fulfill
your commitment to the Army? Unless you know who you are, how will you figure
out what you want to do with the rest of your life? Unless you’re able to
listen to yourself, to that quiet voice inside that tells you what you really
care about, what you really believe in—indeed, how those things might be
evolving under the pressure of your experiences. Students everywhere else
agonize over these questions, and while you may not be doing so now, you are
only postponing them for a few years.
Maybe some of you are agonizing
over them now. Not everyone who starts here decides to finish here. It’s no
wonder and no cause for shame. You are being put through the most demanding
training anyone can ask of people your age, and you are committing yourself to
work of awesome responsibility and mortal danger. The very rigor and
regimentation to which you are quite properly subject here naturally has a
tendency to make you lose touch with the passion that brought you here in the
first place. I saw exactly the same kind of thing at Yale. It’s not that my
students were robots. Quite the reverse. They were intensely idealistic, but
the overwhelming weight of their practical responsibilities, all of those hoops
they had to jump through, often made them lose sight of what those ideals were.
Why they were doing it all in the first place.
So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts,
or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with
them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend
they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If
you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not
to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times.
They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in
solitude.
But let me be clear that solitude doesn’t
always have to mean introspection. Let’s go back to Heart of Darkness.
It’s the solitude of concentration that saves Marlow amidst the madness of the
Central Station. When he gets there he finds out that the steamboat he’s
supposed to sail upriver has a giant hole in it, and no one is going to help
him fix it. “I let him run on,” he says, “this papier-mâché
Mephistopheles”—he’s talking not about the manager but his assistant, who’s
even worse, since he’s still trying to kiss his way up the hierarchy, and who’s
been raving away at him. You can think of him as the Internet, the ever-present
social buzz, chattering away at you 24/7:
I let him run on, this papier-mâché
Mephistopheles and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger
through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt. . . .
It
was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted,
ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make
me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given
me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like
work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be
done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance
to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other
man can ever know.
“The chance to find yourself.” Now that
phrase, “finding yourself,” has acquired a bad reputation. It suggests an
aimless liberal-arts college graduate—an English major, no doubt, someone who
went to a place like Amherst or Pomona—who’s too spoiled to get a job and
spends his time staring off into space. But here’s Marlow, a mariner, a ship’s
captain. A more practical, hardheaded person you could not find. And I should
say that Marlow’s creator, Conrad, spent 19 years as a merchant marine, eight
of them as a ship’s captain, before he became a writer, so this wasn’t just
some artist’s idea of a sailor. Marlow believes in the need to find yourself
just as much as anyone does, and the way to do it, he says, is work, solitary
work. Concentration. Climbing on that steamboat and spending a few
uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Or building a house, or cooking a
meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it.
“Your own reality—for yourself, not for
others.” Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own
reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The
New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the
constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are
continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You
are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality:
for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is
impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about
or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should
inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling 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. But 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.
Even if they merely reflect the conventional wisdom of their own day, they say
something different from what you hear all the time. But the great books, the
ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people have continued to read, don’t
reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They 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. And when I say
“revolutionary,” I am deliberately evoking the American Revolution, because it
was a result of precisely this kind of independent 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 help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going
to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive:
friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being
with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular,
the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one
other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the
same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and
studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself
with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”
Introspection means talking to yourself,
and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another
person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold
your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to
acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t.
Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask.
Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded
by the authorities.
This is what we call thinking out loud,
discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes
just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense.
And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of
having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a
time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just
bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not
friendship, this is distraction.
I know that none of this is easy for you.
Even if you threw away your cell phones and unplugged your computers, the
rigors of your training here keep you too busy to make solitude, in any of
these forms, anything less than very difficult to find. But the highest reason
you need to try is precisely because of what the job you are training for will
demand of you.
You’ve probably heard about the hazing
scandal at the U.S. naval base in Bahrain that was all over the news recently.
Terrible, abusive stuff that involved an entire unit and was orchestrated,
allegedly, by the head of the unit, a senior noncommissioned officer. What are
you going to do if you’re confronted with a situation like that going on
in your unit? Will you have the courage to do what’s right?
Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of
conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the
loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or
the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but
you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?
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 words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
These are truly formidable dilemmas, more
so than most other people will ever have to face in their lives, let alone when
they’re 23. The time to start preparing yourself for them is now. And the way
to do it is by thinking through these issues for 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 the Army believes, not what
your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.
How can you know that unless you’ve taken
counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and
leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that
solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is
ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many
people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And
at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
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