I feel compelled to share with you the lecture “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz. One of my best friends forwarded it to me a few months ago, and I’ve re-read it many times, thinking about its main argument. Some background first. The lecture was given to the plebe class (freshman cadets) at the prestigious United States Army Military Academy at West Point. The lecture itself focuses on the the importance of thinking to push oneself beyond today’s valued characteristics of commonplace and conformity. While Deresiewicz gave the lecture within the context of the real world and the military, most of the lecture and its key point are applicable to all of us who aspire to something more.
One of the main points is that our entire system, from education to corporation, has generated an incredible class of high performing conformists. This was a point echoed by Seth Godin in Linchpin, which I reiterated in a separate post about becoming drones. I quote Deresiewcz below as he talks about young people from the perspective of a Yale admissions officer a few years ago. It’s particularly telling because it spares none of the top professions today:
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.
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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.
We live in a system that churns out intelligent drones who create massive societal problems. Instead of generating true value for the world, they’ve destroyed economies in the name of creating shareholder value or personal gain. In essence we’ve trained generations of bright people on how to game the system to maximize their own gain (again, our own fault for elevating wealth as an aspirational value system) at the huge detriment of those who cannot. Yes, the Goldman’s and Carly’s of the world are labeled as leaders in the sense that they are so successful at fleecing their way to unimaginable personal wealth while creating so little, if not outright negative, real world value.
Deresiewicz argues that thinking and reflection, what he loosely labels as solitude, as a major way to develop personal leadership. While I explicitly warned against the distractions of thoughtless media in the previous mentioned posting, a year later things have become harder with the explosion of social media. My identity as a technologist, pits using these tools in trying to understand and improve against falling to their addictive cheap calories to the brain. It’s easy to slip between experimentation and mindless consumption. I must keep reminding myself that ideas or thoughts of deep value, require a level of thought and work that cannot be generated quickly.
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/we often succumb to mistaking conventional wisdom for original thought. After reading the same convincing argument from multiple sources over a period of time, it’s easy to assimilate it and claim as my own, without performing the sufficient work to challenge that thought, testing it with real research, and deeper thinking. The scariest part of this process is how unconsciously it occurs.
Along the same lines, my personal challenge in thinking about technology’s place in the world is rising above all that input and generating original ideas that sprout from the varied connections. As efficiently as I consume ideas from the best (which is absolutely necessary), the hardest step is still that of origination, inception if I may loosely borrow that term.
To close, if you’ve missed the essay, I highly recommend spending a chunk of time and reading it in one session. And then practice the introspection it touts. It will help you figure something out, either about the world, or yourself.
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