202112201317 The solitude of leadership

People think leaders are individuals with others looking to them for direction. People think solitude is something like Thoreau, alone at Walden Pond. What could solitude have to do with leadership?

Leadership is the qualities of character and mind that will make you fit to command a platoon or a company, a battalion or a corporation, a foundation, a department, a government.

Solitude is the ability to be alone with your thoughts.

Solitude is therefore one of the most important necessities of true leadership.

On the mistaken idea of making it to the top means you're a leader

Many people can be energetic, accomplished, smart, or ferociously ambitious, but is that enough to make them leaders? No. These types of things are encouraged and developed in our generation of world-class hoop jumpers — they're "excellent sheep". Many institutions that talk about leadership are really talking about this. They're talking about educating people to make big names for themselves with impressive titles that they can brag about. They're talking about training people to climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to. But this idea is wrong and dangerous.

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up the greasy pole is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. [...] Jumping through hoops.¹

People who thrive in a bureaucratic environment are commonplace, ordinary, usual, and common. They have no genius for organizing or individual initiative, no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at all, just the ability to keep the routine going.

On thinking for yourself

202109060816 Do your own thinking

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.¹

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.

The model for a leader should be to be different. They should be possessed by independent judgement, freedom to measure action and express disagreement, and the crucial responsibility to never tolerate tyranny.

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.¹

What makes a thinker — and therefore a leader — is precisely that they're able to think things through for themselves. They have the confidence — the courage, physical and moral — to argue for their ideas even when they aren't popular: even when they don't please their superiors.

True leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions.

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 about it. In short, thinking and developing your own ideas is thinking for yourself.

We need to give our brains a chance to make associations, draw connections, and surprise us with what they come up with. This is exactly what we're trying to accomplish in 202107272242 The Art of using a Zettelkasten. We do our best thinking by slowing down and concentrating. (202110052025 The quality of your decisions is the currency of leadership)

Thinking is about gathering yourself into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed into a cloud of electronic and social input.

On knowing who you are

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.¹

Our hoop jumping generation is intensely idealistic but often worn down by the overwhelming weight of practical responsibilities: all those hoops we jump through. It often makes us lose sight of what our ideals are. Why are we doing all this in the first place?

It's perfectly natural to have doubts, questions, or just difficulties. The question is what do we do with them? Do we suppress them, do we distract ourselves from them, do we pretend they don't exist? Or do we confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you do so, you'll find that the answers can't be found online, in a book, or from anyone else. They can only be found within ourselves, without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlowe believes in the need to find yourself just as much as we do. The way he says we do this is work — solitary work. Concentration. Climbing on the steamboat and spending a few uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Building a house, or cooking a meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it. (Is this the 202109091123 Flow state or 202109091124 Anti-flow state?)

Your own reality — for yourself, not for others¹

You are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people's thoughts (202109071331 Arthur Schopenhauer). 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 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 used 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.¹

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 tor 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.

Solitude can mean introspection or the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But solitude can also be found (somewhat counterintuitively) in friendship. This is only possible in the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person.

The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude. — Emerson, which work though?

Introspection is talking to yourself and one of the best ways to talk to yourself is to talk with another person (rubber ducking #thread). One other person you can unfold your soul to. 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 (202209091142 Notes are the fundamental unit of knowledge work, writing is important #thread).

On seeing it through

It's easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice.

What if you're not in charge 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?¹

These are the truly formidable dilemmas.

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. You need to know ahead of time who you are and what you believe, not what your organization or peers believe, but what you believe. How can you know that unless you've taken counsel with yourself in solitude?

The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one that has to 202104291526 Make the hard decisions. And in these moments, all you really have is yourself.