"If you want others to follow you, learn to be alone with your thoughts."
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Lecture "Loneliness and Leadership" was delivered by William Deresiewicz to freshmen at the US Military Academy at West Point in October 2009 and originally published in The American Scholor.
Transcript of the speech
The title of my lecture may seem contradictory. What does loneliness have to do with leadership? Loneliness means being alone, and leadership requires the presence of others - the people you lead. When we think of leadership in American history, we’ll probably think of Washington at the head of the army, or Lincoln at the head of the nation, or Martin Luther King at the head of the movement — people with many people behind them. And when we think of loneliness, we tend to think of Toro, a man lonely in the forest, who keeps a diary and communicates silently with nature.
Leadership is what you have to learn here - qualities of character and intelligence that will make you suitable for commanding a platoon, and besides that, perhaps a company, a battalion, or, if you leave an army, a corporation, an institution, a government department. Loneliness is the least of all, especially as cadets. You don't even have the opportunity to just be alone physically, let alone the opportunity to be alone with your thoughts. Yet I firmly believe that loneliness is one of the most important ingredients in true leadership. This lecture will try to explain why.
We need to start by talking about what leadership really is. I just spent 10 years teaching at another institution that, like West Point, loves to talk a lot about leadership, at Yale. An educational institution that some of you might go if you didn't get here and some of your friends might go. And if not Yale, then Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and so on. These institutions, like West Point, also see their role in leadership training, continually encouraging their students to be leaders among their peers and among future leaders in society. Indeed, when we look at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all of our other major institutions - senators, judges, CEOs,college presidents, etc. - we find that the vast majority of them come from the Ivy League and its collegiate institutions or military academies, especially from West Point.
So when I was teaching at Yale, I started to wonder what leadership really is. My students, like you, were energetic, educated, intelligent and often extremely ambitious, but was that enough to make them leaders? Most of them, as much as I loved and even admired them, definitely did not seem like leaders to me. I wondered if it means being a leader simply by having achievements or success? Does getting top marks make you a leader? I didn't think so. Great cardiac surgeons, great writers, or great baseball players can excel at what they do, but that doesn't mean they are leaders. Leadership and ability, leadership and achievement, leadership and even excellence must be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership is irrelevant. And it seemed to methat this must be especially true of the perfection that I saw in the disciples around me.
You see, things have changed since I went to college in the 80s. Things got much more complicated. You have to do a lot more now to get into a better institution like Yale or West Point, and you have to start much earlier. We only started thinking about college in junior high, and perhaps each of us had a few extracurricular activities. But I know how you guys feel now. It's an endless series of hoops to jump through from a very young age, maybe as early as high school. Classes, standard tests, extra classes at school, extra classes outside of school. Exam preparation courses, admission trainers, private tutors. A couple of years ago, I was on the admissions office at Yale College. The first thing an admissions officer did waspresenting a personal file to the rest of the committee — this was reading out what they call “bragging” into the language of the admissions committee — a list of the student's extracurricular activities. Well, it turns out that a student who had six or seven extracurricular activities already had problems. Students who entered - in addition to excellent grades and the highest marks - usually had 10 or 12.
So I saw beautiful children around me who had been taught to jump with a world class hoop. Any goal that you set them, they can achieve. Any test that you give them, they will stand with honor. They were, as one of them put it, "excellent sheep." I had no doubt that they would keep jumping through the hoops and doing great tests and moving 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 can really take them far in life. They will return for their 25th reunion as partners in White & Case, or as a primary care physician at Mass General, or as an assistant secretary at the Department of State.
This is exactly what places like Yale do when they talk about leadership training. Teaching people who are making a big name for themselves in the world, people with impressive titles, people that the university can boast of. People who have achieved success. People who can climb to the highest rung in the hierarchy that they want to join.
But I think there is something completely wrong and even dangerous in this idea. To explain why, I want to spend a few minutes on the story about Heart of Darkness, which many of you may have already read. If you haven't read it, you've probably seen Apocalypse Now, which is based on it. Marlowe in the novel becomes Captain Willard, played by Martin Sheen. Kurtz in the novel becomes Colonel Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. But the novel is not about Vietnam; we are talking about colonialism in the Belgian Congo three generations before Vietnam. Marlowe, not a military officer but a captain of a civilian ship and merchant marine, is directed by the company that runs the country by charter from the Belgian crown to sail deep up the Congo River to find a manager who has taken refuge in the jungle and has gone mad.as Colonel Kurtz does in the film.
Everyone now knows that the novel is about imperialism, colonialism, race relations and the darkness that lurks in the human heart. At a certain point, when I was teaching the novel, it became clear to me that it was also about bureaucracy - what I called hierarchy a minute ago. After all, the Company is just a company with rules, procedures, titles, people in positions of authority, and people fighting for power like any other bureaucracy. Just like a large law firm or government department or, for that matter, a university. Just like the bureaucracy you're going to join - that's why I'm telling you this. The word bureaucracy has a negative connotation. But I do not mean anything bad in any way, I just describe whatthat the US Army is a bureaucracy and one of the largest and most famous bureaucratic systems in the world. In the end, it was the army that gave us, among other things, the necessary bureaucratic abbreviation "snafu": "the situation is normal: everything is bad", or "everything is bad" in a more decent version. This comes from the US Army since World War II.
You should know that once you are empowered, you will join the bureaucracy, and no matter how long you stay in the army, you will operate within the bureaucracy. While the military is in many ways different from all other institutions in society, in this respect they are the same. So, you need to know how the bureaucracy functions, what behavior - what character - it encourages and what it punishes.
So, back to the novel. Marlowe walks up the river, as Captain Willard does in the film. First, he gets to the Outer Station. Kurz is at the Inner Station. Between them is Central Station, where Marlowe spends the most time and where we can best get a glimpse of bureaucracy in action and the people who have excelled at it. Marlowe's description of the Central Station Master, Big Boss:
He was an ordinary person in color and facial features, mannerisms and voice. He was of medium height and normal build. His eyes, usually blue, seemed to be surprisingly cold ... Otherwise there was only an indefinable, weak expression on his lips, something was hidden behind it, a smile - not a smile - I remember that, but I cannot explain ... He was an ordinary merchant, from a young age who worked in these parts, nothing more. They obeyed him, but he did not inspire either love, or fear, or even respect. He was troubling. That's all! Anxiety. No unequivocal mistrust, only anxiety and nothing more. You have no idea how effective such ... power can be. He had no genius in organization, initiative, or even order ... He had no education, no intellect. His position came to him. But why? He created nothing,but he could maintain a routine - that's all. But he was great. He was so great in this that it was impossible to say what could control such a person. He never gave out this secret. Perhaps there was nothing in it. This suspicion made me think.
Pay attention to the adjectives: banal, ordinary, ordinary. There is nothing special about this person. Around the 10th time I read this passage, I realized that this is the perfect description of someone striving to thrive in a bureaucratic environment. And the only reason I figured that out was because it suddenly dawned on me that this was the perfect description of the bureaucratic boss I was a part of, the chairman of my academic department - who had the same smile as a shark, and for sure the same ability to make you worry as if you were doing something wrong, only she was never going to tell you what exactly was wrong. I am very sorry to say this, but the head of my department had neither genius in organization, nor initiative, nor even order, nor special education, nor intelligence,nor any distinctive features, like many other people you will meet when you negotiate the bureaucracy of the army or, for that matter, any institution to which you end up giving your talents after the army, be it Microsoft or the World Bank. As Marlowe says, the ability to keep a daily routine and her position came to her - why?
This is indeed the great mystery of bureaucracy. Why is it so often that the best people get stuck in the middle, and the people who manage things - the leaders - turn out to be mediocre? Because it is usually not perfection that lifts you to the highest point. What lifts you to the top is your talent for maneuvering. Kiss people above you, kick people below you. Satisfy your teachers, please your bosses, choose a strong mentor and saddle him until it's time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Get along by walking together. Be who other people want you to be, so it finally feels like you, like the head of the Central Station, have nothing at all inside. Don't take stupid risks trying to change the way something is done, or wonder why it's done this way. Just maintain a routine.
I tell you this to warn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and find yourself in an environment where conformity is rewarded in the first place. I am telling you so that you can decide to become a different type of leader. And I tell you this for another reason. When I thought about all these things and put them all together - what kind of students I had, what kind of leadership taught them, what kind of leaders I saw in my own institution - I realized that this is a national problem. We have a leadership crisis in this country, in every institution. Not only in the government. Check out what happened to American corporations in recent decades, when all the old dinosaurs like General Motors, TWA, or US Steel fell apart. See what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years.
Finally - yes, I know I'm here on thin ice - look what happened during the first four years of the Iraq war. We're stuck. It was not the fault of the privates, non-commissioned officers, or junior officers. It was the fault of the top leadership, be it military, civilian, or both. We didn't just win, we didn't even change direction.
We have a leadership crisis in America because our overwhelming power and wealth earned by previous generations of leaders has made us complacent, and we've spent too long preparing leaders who only know how to maintain a routine. Those who can answer questions but don't know how to ask them. Who can achieve goals, but do not know how to set them. Those who think about how to achieve something, but not about whether it is worth doing it in the first place. We now have some of the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at doing one particular thing, but who are not interested in anything other than their area of expertise. What we don't have are leaders.
In other words, we have no thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for a country, for a corporation or college, for the army - a new way of doing business, a new way of looking at things. In other words, people with a vision.
Some people will say, "Great." Tell that to the kids at Yale, but why tell that to the kids at West Point? Most people, when they think of this institution, assume that this is the last place anyone would like to talk about creative thinking or developing independence of mind. It is, after all, an army. It is no coincidence that the word “regiment” is the root of the word “regimentation”, that is, “regiment” and “regulation”. Surely you who have come here must be absolute conformists. There must be people who have bought into the way things are and are not interested in changing them. Not one of those young people who think about the world, think about big problems, doubt authority. If you were like that, you would go to Amherst or Pomona. You are at West Point to be told what to do and how to think.
But you know that this is not true. I know that too; otherwise I would never have been invited to speak to you, and now I am even more convinced of this after spending a few days on campus. To quote Colonel Scott Krawczyk, your course director, in a lecture he gave last year English 102:
From the earliest days of this country, the model for our officers, which was built on the model of citizens and reflected democratic ideals, had to be different. They had to have a democratic spirit with independent judgment, the freedom to evaluate actions and express disagreement, and a crucial duty never to put up with tyranny.
Especially now. Anyone who has been attentive over the past few years understands that the changing nature of war means that officers, including junior officers, are required more than ever to be able to think independently, creatively and flexibly. Apply a range of skills in a changing and challenging situation. Lieutenant colonels who essentially act as governors of Iraqi provinces, or captains who are at the head of a remote city somewhere in Afghanistan. People who know what to do more than just follow orders and take routine actions.
See the most successful, most famous, and arguably the best soldier of his generation, General David Petraeus. He is one of those rare people who rises through the 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 is, in the world. He holds a PhD from Princeton. But what makes him a thinker is not that he has a doctorate, or that he studied at Princeton, or even that he taught at West Point. I can assure you from my own experience that there are many highly educated people who cannot think at all.
No, what makes him a thinker and a leader is that he is able to think through everything on his own. And because he can, he has the confidence and courage to stand up for his ideas, even if they are not popular. Even when his superiors don't like them. Courage is the physical courage that you all have in abundance, and there is another kind of courage - moral courage, the courage to stand up for what you believe in.
It was not always easy for him. His path to where he is now was not straightforward. When he led Mosul in 2003 as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, he developed a strategy that he later formulated in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual and then applied it throughout Iraq, which angered many people. He is far ahead of the leadership of Baghdad and Washington, and the bureaucracy does not like this kind of thing. Here he is, just another two-star, and he implicitly but loudly said that the leadership was wrong in how it fought the war. Indeed, at first he was not rewarded. He was tasked with training the Iraqi army, which was considered a blow to his career, a dead-end job. But he stubbornly held on to his weapons, and he was ultimately acquitted. Ironically,one of the central elements of his counterinsurgency strategy is precisely the idea that officers must think flexibly, creatively and independently.
This is the first half of the lecture: the idea that true leadership means the ability to think for yourself and act according to your beliefs. But how do you learn to do this? How do you learn to think? Let's start with how not to learn to think. A study by a group of researchers from Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The researchers wanted to find out how modern college students could multitask much more efficiently than adults. How do they do it - the researchers wondered. They found that the answer, which they were by no means expecting, is that they don't. The heightened cognitive abilities that the researchers expected to find, the mental abilities that would enable people to efficiently perform multiple tasks at the same time, were simply not there. In other words,people cannot efficiently perform multiple tasks at the same time. And here's a truly amazing result: the more people perform multiple tasks at the same time, the worse they are, not only in terms of other mental abilities, but also in terms of multitasking itself.
One of the differences between this study and others is that the researchers did not test people's cognitive performance when they performed multiple tasks at the same time. They divided the group of subjects into high and low multitasking multitasking and used a different set of tests to measure the types of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in each case, people performed worse on the tasks. They were less likely to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information and ignore the latter. In other words, they were more distracted. They were less successful in what might be called "mental archiving": keeping information in the correct conceptual cells and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were less organized. Even worse waswhat defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
In short, multitasking isn't just about not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. To think means to concentrate on something long enough to develop an idea of it. Not learning other people's ideas or memorizing a lot of information, although this can be helpful at times. Develop your own ideas. In general, think for yourself. You just can't do it in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook posts or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I believe that my first thought is never the best thought. My first thought is always someone else's, it is always what I have already heard about this, always the generally accepted opinion. I only come to the original idea by focusing, sticking to the question, being patient, allowing all parts of my mind to be used. Letting my brain make associations, make connections, take me by surprise. And often even this idea is not very successful. I also need time to think about it, make mistakes and admit them, make a false start and fix it, get over my impulses, defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next task.
I used to have students brag to me about how quickly they write their work. I would tell them that the great German writer Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom it is more difficult to write than for others. The best writers write a lot slower than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at about a hundred words a day - half of the passage I read to you earlier from Heart of Darkness - for seven years. T.S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever created, wrote about 150 pages of poetry in his 25-year career. That's half a page a month. It's the same with any other form of thought. You think best by slowing down and concentrating.
This is the third time I use this word while concentrating. Concentrate. You may think that this lecture is about both concentration and loneliness. Think about what this word means. This means pulling yourself together, not letting yourself be scattered all over the place in a cloud of electronic and social data. It seems to me that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube - and just lest you think that this is a matter of generations, television, radio, magazines and even newspapers - all this is ultimately just an elaborate excuse to get away from yourself. To avoid difficult and disturbing questions that a person asks himself. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe what I was taught as a child? What do the words I live in really mean - words like duty, honor and country? Am I happy?
You and members of other military academies have a unique position among students, especially today. Not only do you know that when you graduate, you will have a job, but you also know who your employer will be. But what happens after you fulfill your obligations to the army? If you don't know who you are, how do you know what you want to do for the rest of your life? Unless you are able to listen to yourself, that quiet voice within that tells you what you really care about, what you really believe - really how these things can evolve under the pressure of your experience. Students everywhere are agonizing over these questions, and while you may not be doing it now, you are only putting these thoughts off for a few years.
Maybe some of you are suffering because of them right now. Not everyone who starts here decides to end up here. This is not surprising and not cause for shame. You are going through the toughest training that anyone your age can have, and you are dedicating yourself to a work of great responsibility and mortal danger. The very strictness and orderliness that you duly obey here naturally tends to lose touch with the passion that brought you here in the first place. I've seen exactly the same things at Yale. It's not that my students were robots. Quite the opposite. They were supremely idealists, but the overwhelming burden of their practical duties, all the hoops they had to jump through, often made them lose sight of those ideals.Why did they do all this at all.
Therefore, it is perfectly natural to have doubts, questions, or even simple difficulties. The question is, what are you doing with them? Do you suppress them, distract from them, pretend that they do not exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you choose to do this, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas cannot be found on Twitter, Comedy Central, or even The New York Times. They can only be found within oneself - without distractions, without peer pressure, alone.
But let me be clear that being alone doesn't always mean introspection. Let's return to the Heart of Darkness. This solitude and concentration saves Marlowe amid the madness of Central Station. When he reaches the place, he discovers that in the steamer, which was supposed to sail up the river, there is a huge hole, and no one is going to help him to repair it. “I let him run,” he says, “this papier-mâché Mephistopheles” - he is not talking about the boss, but about his assistant, who is even worse, since he is still trying to climb his way up the hierarchy, and who is delirious this. You can think of it as the Internet, the ubiquitous public opinion chatting with you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week:
I let him run, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried to pierce him with my index finger, I would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt ...
It was a great comfort to turn from this guy into ... shabby, twisted, destroyed a steamer in a tin can ... I've done enough hard work to make myself love her. No influential friend would serve me better. She gave me a chance to open up a little, to find out what I can. No, I don't like to work. I would rather sit back and think about all the great things that can be done. I don't like work, not a single person does, but I like what it has - the chance to find myself. Your own reality is for you and not for others, it is something that no other person can know.
"A chance to find yourself." Now the phrase "find yourself" has gotten a bad rap. It envisions a liberal arts college graduate with no purpose, an English language specialist who has been to places like Amherst or Pomona, who is too spoiled to find a job, and spends time staring into space. But here is Marlowe, the sailor, the captain of the ship. You will not find a more practical, stubborn person. And I have to say that Marlowe's creator, Konrad, spent 19 years in the merchant marine, eight of them as a ship's captain, before becoming a writer, so it wasn't just some artist's idea of a sailor. Marlowe, like everyone else, believes in the need to find yourself, and the way to do it, he says, is work, work alone. Concentration. Climb aboard this steamer and spend several hours without interruptionto give it shape. Or build a house, or cook a meal, or even write a university paper, if you really invest in it yourself.
"Your own reality is for yourself, not for others." Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your reality. Here's another problem with Facebook, Twitter, and even The New York Times. When you use these things, especially if you do it all the time, as people do now — both the elderly and the young — you are constantly bombarding yourself with other people's thoughts. You marinate yourself into conventional wisdom. In the reality of other people: for others, not for yourself. You create a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether you are thinking about yourself or something else. This is what Emerson had in mind when he said that “the one who should inspire and lead his people should be protected from traveling with the souls of others, from living, breathing, reading and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of his opinions.” Note,that he uses the word "lead." Leadership means finding a new direction, not just putting yourself ahead of the herd heading towards the cliff.
So why is reading books better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you need to put aside a book, if only to think about what you are reading, about what you think about what you are reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote this thought about it much more carefully. The book is the result of his loneliness, his attempts to think for himself.
Secondly, most of the books are old. This is not a flaw: this is what makes them valuable. They oppose the conventional wisdom of today simply because they are not of today. Even if they simply reflect the conventional wisdom of their time, they say something different from what you hear all the time. But the great books, the ones that you find in the curriculum, that is, the ones that people kept reading, do not reflect the conventional wisdom of their time. They say things that have the lasting power to destroy our habitual ways of thinking. They were revolutionary in their day and they are still revolutionary today. And when I say “revolutionary,” I consciously mean the American Revolution, because it was the result of just that kind of independent thinking. Without loneliness - loneliness of Adams, Jefferson,Hamilton, Madison and Thomas Payne - there would be no America.
So, solitude can mean introspection, it can mean concentration of concentrated work, and it can mean constant reading. All of this will help you get to know yourself better. But there is one more thing I'm going to include as a form of solitude, and it seems counterintuitive: friendship. Of course, friendship is the opposite of loneliness, it means being with other people. But I'm talking about one kind of friendship, in particular, deep friendship in an intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted conversation with another person. Not talking on Skype with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend's room, listen to music and study. This is what Emerson meant when he said that "the soul surrounds itself with friends so that it can enter into greater self-discovery or solitude."
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways to talk to yourself is by talking to another person. Another person you can trust, another person you can open your soul to. Another person with whom you feel safe enough to allow you to admit certain things is to admit that which you would not otherwise be able to admit. Doubts you shouldn't have, questions you shouldn't ask. Feelings or opinions that will make you laugh at the group or reprimand the authorities.
This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in as you form it. But it takes as much time and patience as solitude in the strict sense of the word. And our new electronic world destroyed it just as badly. Instead of one or two real friends with whom we can sit and talk for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” with whom we never speak, instead we just bounce one-line messages to them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.
I know that all this is not easy for you. Even if you've thrown away your cell phones and turned off your computers, the harsh conditions of your training here will leave you too busy to find loneliness in any of these forms less than very difficult. But the main reason you need to try is exactly what the job you are training for is required of you.
You've probably heard about the hazing scandal at the US Naval Base in Bahrain that was in the news recently. Awful, offensive things, in which the whole unit participated, was allegedly organized by the head of the unit, a senior non-commissioned officer. What are you going to do if you encounter a similar situation in your unit? Do you have the courage to do the right thing? Do you even know what's right? The Code of Conduct is easy to read, but not easy to put into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people who report to you, or the trust of your fellow officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you are not a commander, but you see that your superiors justify what you think is wrong?
How will you find the strength and wisdom in you to challenge an unreasonable order or question a faulty policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a dead soldier? How do you find words of comfort that are more than just empty phrases?
These are truly huge dilemmas that most other people will never face in their lives, let alone 23 years old. It's time to start preparing for them. And the way to do it is to think about these issues - morality, mortality, honor - so that you have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting for you to face them in practice is like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to fire your weapon. When the situation arises, it will be too late. You need to prepare for this in advance. You already need to know who you are and what you believe: nothing the army believes in, nothing your colleagues believe in (this may be just a problem), but what you believe in.
How can you know this if you have not consulted with yourself alone? I started off by noticing that loneliness and leadership seem to be contradictory. But it seems to me that loneliness is the very essence of leadership. The position of a leader is ultimately extremely lonely. No matter how many people you consult, you are the ones who have to make difficult decisions. And in moments like this, all you have is yourself.