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Links 🔗
- Solitude and Leadership
Last week I've came across an interesting article on solitude and leadership. It argues for the importance of being alone, so you can silence the barrage of other people's thoughts and listen to your own and how that is correlated to being a great leader.
This article will be broken down into 2 parts, leadership crisis and thinking.
Leadership Crisis
- For years there's been a misconception on leadership, that is the more accomplished you are, the more successful you are, the more As you scored, you will be a great leader.
- But that idea is wrong. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even excellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning.
- The leaders that tend to prosper in institutional or bureaucratic environment often times have no ability to lead but just to keep the routine going.
- Why often times the leaders are mediocrities? That's because excellence doesn't get you up the greasy pole. What gets you up to the top is your talent to manoeuvre. Kissing up to people above you, kicking people below you, pleasing others. Jumping through hopes.
Thinking
- The idea of true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions.
- Thinkers are leaders. The ability to think things through for themselves and have the confidence, the courage, to argue for their ideas even when they aren’t popular.
- Your first thought is never your best thought. The first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what you’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom.
- It's only by concentrating on the problem without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude that you can arrive at an original idea.
- But there's a different kind of solitude and that's friendship. Solitude means talking to yourself and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is talking to other people.
- Having a long, uninterrupted conversation with a friend. One person you can trust, one person to whom you can unfold your soul. One person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.
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