Solitude and Leadership
William Deresiewicz — The American Scholar, 2010
Solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.
A lecture at West Point about why the most selective institutions produce the most compliant minds — and what genuine leadership actually requires. The answer is not more networking. It’s more time alone.
My title must seem like a contradiction. What does solitude have to do with leadership? Isn't leadership about being with other people? Isn't it about directing people, moving them, inspiring them?
But I want to argue that solitude—being alone with your thoughts, with no external input—is the very essence of leadership.
When I say solitude, I don't mean the kind where you sit in a hut in the woods for months on end. I mean the kind where you find yourself, regularly and deliberately, in a state of deep reflection. Where you think through problems on your own, without immediately reaching for your phone, asking friends, or Googling. Where you give your mind the time and space to work.
Here's the problem I see at the most selective colleges and universities. You are very good at what you're told. You're very good at executing. You're very good at figuring out what someone wants and then delivering it. You've been doing it your whole academic career.
But you've never been asked to figure out what you want. You've never been asked to think for yourself.
Real leadership means being able to think for yourself. And thinking for yourself means being able to face uncertainty—to sit with a hard problem, without any input, without any feedback, until you've worked it through for yourself.
I have a feeling that a lot of people have lost the ability to be alone with their thoughts. We're always checking our phones, listening to music, watching something. We're always being entertained, stimulated, or connected. But thinking requires none of those things. It requires the opposite: stillness and solitude.
Solitude means not being lonely. You can be solitary in your mind even when you're with other people. What I'm calling solitude is the ability to be by yourself with your thoughts—to resist the constant pull of other people's opinions, the validation of social media, the noise of the world.
The most important thing I learned from reading great literature—from reading great books—was that great authors don't tell you what to think. They show you the complexity of the world and trust you to think it through yourself. They give you the tools to think.
What you do in solitude, what you do when you think for yourself, is connect the dots. You take in information from a dozen different directions and you find the pattern. You hear a thousand different opinions and you figure out which one is right, and why. You are exposed to risk and uncertainty and you work out how to navigate them.
But this is only possible if you actually slow down. If you actually step back from the noise and busyness and connectivity of modern life and find a moment to think.
The capacity for solitude is also what enables the capacity for intimacy. If you can't be alone with yourself, you can't really be with anyone else either. You're just performing. But if you know yourself—if you've had the time and the stillness to think about who you are and what you believe—then you can have real relationships with other people.
Here's what I'm suggesting. Instead of checking your email or your social media feed, or reading the news, or doing something else that feels productive but isn't really—instead of all that, try spending time thinking. Thinking about what you believe, what you want, what matters. Thinking through problems and decisions from first principles rather than just going with what everyone else says.
Solitude is the condition in which you can think. Real thinking—not processing other people's thoughts, not reacting to stimuli, but generating your own. This is the source of real leadership.
Leadership is, fundamentally, the ability to think clearly under pressure. And thinking clearly under pressure is only possible if you've practiced thinking clearly without pressure—in solitude.
Solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself.