Solitude and Leadership Reflection Paper hi I want you write a reflection piece which is reflection paper. I wt you wo write two to three pages. I want you

Solitude and Leadership Reflection Paper hi I want you write a reflection piece which is reflection paper. I wt you wo write two to three pages. I want you to write like English Second language please. I upload you the document and write reflection paper ( piece). Please do it very well write like englsih second language Solitude and Leadership
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
By William Deresiewicz
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 ex!cellence 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 exper!tise. 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,
constan…
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