My fractured foot and the cold weather has provided me with plenty of time to do some things I have been wanting to do. Over the years I have made it my routine to journal quotes, quips, thoughts during sermons or lessons. As I read over my entries for 2011, I was impressed by the quality of the content. It seemed a shame to just write stuff down and never share it. So I created a new blog to post my notes. I am calling it “Pew Notes”. You can see it HERE.
Solitude and Leadership
If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
By William Deresiewicz
From a lecture delivered to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009.
We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don’t have are leaders.
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.