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Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

I can't upvote this more. Leadership comes from confidence, confidence comes from expertise, expertise comes from learning and practice. Confidence without expertise is hollow; leadership with hollow confidence and no expertise is quite dubious. A certain guy who likes to golf comes to mind.

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If you look at schools, especially elite ones, there's a strange desire for all the kids to become leaders. Nobody questions it, I don't know why. I guess the school thinks it's useful to be associated with some future leaders?

The thing is leadership ought to be like you say. Some kind of competence that allows you to help a group of people complete some kind of task.

But let's be honest. The kids want to be student council president because it's prestigious. They grow up and then they want to be CEO because it's prestigious and well paying. They pay lip service to the idea of helping a team, but really, we know they don't care all that much. It's ass backwards, people want to be leaders because {prize} and then they think about how to get there. Sometimes we get lucky and they conclude that they need to climb the ladder by being competent (this fails a lot due to pyramid structures and politics), but often they just figure out that to seem competent, you have to shout a lot about how competent you are.

Schools, especially elite ones, often see their purpose as creating/fostering leaders out of the pool of potential that they’ve curated.

> If you look at schools, especially elite ones, there's a strange desire for all the kids to become leaders.

Those schools maintain their status and position by ensuring their alumni become leaders. Thus it is to their advantage.

Which brings us to the bigger picture... we live in a Darwinian word of evolve-or-die, strongest-will-survive. Thus passing on to our children the skills of leadership are part of this same desire for our children to thrive.

That sounds more like a Lamarckian metaphor than Darwinian one.

> Nobody questions it, I don't know why.

Money. In our society it pays more in average to be a leader.

On the why it pays more, I’d posit leaders are closer to the money source so get more negotiating power as they have more information.

> ...so get more negotiating power as they have more information.

Information is certainly part of it (thus why we have NDAs), but so are relationships/connections, particularly in B2B or the startup world where CEOs have to sell the company to investors.

Leaders leverage their network. A network of leaders is a massive and capable network.

Also empathy and altruism. You have to care about how everyone is doing and how the whole group feels.

You can make a point like this without getting politics involved because it inevitably cheapens the discussion.

How’s that comment is political?

I assume you’re talking about this guy? https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AP11061802...

Edit: Lol. I love the downvotes. I mean, who are you talking about? Tiger Woods? Jack Nicklaus? Or were you dragging politics into this just to make a cheap shot? If so, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Trump has played 308 rounds of golf since becoming president in 2017. Obama in his 8 years in office had played 333.

Easy now... let’s not bring facts into this discussion.

My bad, I should be more careful around trump supporters, I know they’re allergic to facts.

Interestingly, in Trump's book How to get Rich he recommends taking up golf as a means to becoming successful.

It seems a stretch to assume he actually wrote any of the books with his name on the cover. Ghostwriters are cheap, and writing takes time.

That’s not a dig, it just seems like a poor ROI.

Probably true. The book "The art of the deal" was ghostwritten. Here's a nice article about the ghostwriter (and how it haunts him): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/04/donald-trump...

Claims that he even read a single full book in the past few decades (with his name on the cover or otherwise) are not credible. They changed the briefing format to a few bullet points in a large font with lots of pictures, and he still doesn't bother to read them (Tillerson: he "doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things"). He stumbles and mispronounces words when slowly reading a few sentences on a teleprompter (also reportedly set to a much larger than usual font), commonly misreads a word or phrase and then ad libs a nonsensical embellishment to play the mistake off as intentional, and frequently goes entirely off script with visible relief to just speak off the top of his head. There is a deposition video where he flat refuses to read a few sentences of a contract out loud. When people ask him about what he is reading, he grimaces and deflects with an answer about being too busy.

The speculation that poor eyesight contributes to his functional illiteracy seems plausible.

It really helps the getting rich plan if you golf at your own resort, and charge the government to feed and house your entourage.

I would love a source on this. But even if true, that still paints Trump as the bigger golfer since Obama had 2x as many years to play essentially the same amount of golf.

> I would love a source on this.

https://thegolfnewsnet.com/golfnewsnetteam/2020/12/29/how-ma...

This article supports the numbers for Trump and adds additional information.

https://www.golfchannel.com/article/golf-central-blog/obamas...

The above article gives numbers for Obama.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-defends-golf-trips-fal...

This article compares them both as of the summer of their 4th year in office. Short summary, Trump played at about 2x the pace of Obama.

Obama played golf 113 times in his first term. Trump played 302. In the first 100 days of the presidency Obama played golf once, Trump played 19 times.

That was my point.

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