Leadership, Thinking, and Introspection

The American Scholar magazine published in their Spring 2010 issue a lecture given by William Deresiewicz to the plebe class at the United Stated Military Academy at West Point in October of last year.  The article, Solitude and Leadership, is excellent - - a must read.  Several highlights include the following:

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 to stand up for what you believe.

The first portion of the Deresiewicz lecture concentrates on the themes of thinking for yourself and acting on your convictions.  All organization want a leadership corps that thinks - - where flexibility, creativity, and independence are cornerstones of leadership in our rapidly changing worlds.  The second part of the lecture deals with learning how to think.  Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality - - which means concentration.  Deresiewicz writes the following:

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 one 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 went 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 suppose to ask.  Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.