Solitude and Leadership

“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.”

Deresiewicz gives his definition of solitude (being alone with one’s thoughts) and his thesis (solitude is necessary for leadership). He also highlights the importance of his address by emphasizing the role of leadership in the lives of his listeners. Furthermore, he acknowledges the second apparent contradiction in his speech, that the cadets have little opportunity for the solitude he endorses. This paradox again functions to engage the audience awaiting his solution.

“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 ex­cellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning.”

“Solitude and Leadership” proposes leadership reform in America. Deresiewicz first challenges current conceptions of leadership, those that equate it with success or advancement. He argues that aptitude and leadership are not the same and that leadership must have a distinct meaning.

“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.’”

Although speaking of his time as a professor at Yale, Deresiewicz is describing students at all elite universities, including West Point, who successfully navigate the academic system by meeting admissions requirements and passing exams. He uses the metaphors of “hoop jumpers” and “sheep” to describe this type of person who learns to advance through conformity. This is a powerful prompt for the cadets to begin reconsidering their ideas of success and its relationship to leadership.

“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.”

Deresiewicz introduces his critique of how advancement occurs in a bureaucracy. He groups all major American institutions under this term, citing universities, law firms, and government agencies as examples. However, he also personalizes the discussion for his audience, focusing on the relevance of the argument to the cadets’ futures in the army.

“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.”

The adjectives noted are from a passage in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in which the protagonist describes his boss. Deresiewicz uses the narrative as an analogy to illustrate that bureaucracies reward conformity, not independence. He emphasizes that positions of authority are given to individuals who maintain routines rather than improve them.

“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.”

Having illustrated that positions of power are achieved through bureaucratic “hoop jumping” rather than leadership ability, Deresiewicz reaches his conclusion that America lacks true leaders. The idea is central to his speech, as he advocates reform in leadership training, and he delivers the claim through dramatic language.

“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.”

Deresiewicz contrasts bureaucratic management with his idea of true leadership, which he introduces here. As opposed to following procedures or maintaining routines, leaders can originate new ideas and put them into practice. Again, Deresiewicz tailors the concept for his audience, specifically referring to leadership in the army.

“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.”

Deresiewicz here refers to General David Petraeus. The anecdote of Petraeus challenging his superiors allows Deresiewicz to illustrate his definition of a leader. In addition to the ability to think independently, a true leader must have the “moral courage” to defend personal beliefs, just as Petraeus developed and defended innovative war strategies in Iraq.

“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.”

Having established thinking as essential to leadership, Deresiewicz begins explaining what thinking is and how to achieve it. He stresses concentration, focus, and patience as keys to developing an original idea. As he does often in his speech, he challenges some common conceptions of an important term; here forms of studying are excluded from the concept of thinking.

“So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.”

As he frequently does, Deresiewicz addresses concerns or doubts his listeners may have, which is an important tool in maintaining trust as a speaker. Deresiewicz acknowledges that introspection can be difficult, involving painful and troubling questions that make distractions, like various forms of media, appealing. This introduces a key tenet of the speech: Independent thinking requires solitude.

“Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom.”

For Deresiewicz, solitude means a deliberate separation from conventional wisdom. He repeatedly refers to electronic media as a hindrance to independent thinking because of its constant flow of opinions from other people. He emphasizes this point with figurative language, using the image of marinating. Deresiewicz holds that solitude provides both space from other people’s opinions and time to focus on one question or subject long enough to formulate an original idea.

“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 other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation.”

After arguing that thinking requires solitude, Deresiewicz introduces four types of solitude: introspection, independent work, focused reading of books, and friendship. The sustained conversations between friends that he endorses are contrasted sharply with quick exchanges via electronic media. The equation of friendship and solitude is another apparent contradiction, which exemplifies the types of new associations that result from independent thinking.

“Waiting until you have to confront them [difficult questions] in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it’s too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.”

Deresiewicz has conceded that introspection can be difficult and that the cadets have very little opportunity for solitude. Still, he stresses the importance of implementing his proposal immediately, saying the cadets need to engage in independent thinking before they are faced with dilemmas as leaders. The dramatic imagery of entering a firefight unprepared underscores his sense of urgency.