Solitude and Leadership (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Solitude and Leadership (2010)

theamericanscholar.org

41 pointslazydon6 comments

Now that’s the third time I’ve used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

What an excellent speech. It certainly resonates with me as a recent graduate who can confirm many of the author's careful observations of my generation.

Overall a nice meditation and certainly all round good advice. I keep coming across this idea of the loneliness of leadership though. Perhaps necessary to the mood, I submit he skipped over the hard part.

The loneliness of leadership, to me, is quite different from solitude. I have felt most lonely when I'm most busy. It's a sense that there's no one left to help. You've delegated everything you can, you've set aside everything you can, and still the work keeps coming in, often from people who depend on you, not necessarily outside sources. This is where you realize maybe you overcommitted on a few things and you start wondering if maybe the straights got it right: maybe pursuing that new idea wasn't worth it. Just keep things going.

That's when you realize this leadership gig is harder than it looks. In your office at 1 am on Sunday when there's no one else. Maybe Steve Jobs wasn't so crazy calling people at oh-dark-thirty.

By comparison, solitude has come to me almost as a reward, a gift from others who commit to letting me be alone long enough to get some thinking done.

This is one of my most favorite essays and I think about it daily. I increasingly believe that modern workplace, with its emphasis on open space plans and team work, gradually develops groupthink that can be potentially destructive. [1]

It is not only the absorption of others' opinions. It is impossible to pause and critically evaluate thoughts for several minutes when not alone. Mistakes remain unidentified mainly because no one had a moment to discover them; conversely, they might get dismissed if their understanding requires larger amount of time. It is difficult to think for oneself. I work in a management/economic consultancy and see this every day.

How can "solitude" enter work?

[1] The Organization Man by William Whyte, a classic management book from the 50s, is a relevant resource for a critical analysis of a workplace along these lines.

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.

What great writing.

"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.”"

Sound observation. Hoop-jumping has it's place, yet leadership starts when the hoop isn't a hoop, but a flaming hole you have to climb. Leadership is demonstrating your understanding of risk, creating a plan others can follow and providing the necessary motivation to successfully execute.

Thank you for introducing me to this hitherto unknown.

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