Solitude and Leadership — William Deresiewicz at West Point (2009)

"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.'"

On what Yale and its peers actually produce. The source of Deresiewicz's later book title.

"Excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it's time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along."

The selection mechanism. Read alongside Lewis's "Inner Ring" — it's the same engine, described from the administrative side.

"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."

The diagnosis. Technocrats without thinkers.

"I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea."

On thinking as a slow, recursive act. Cites Mann: "a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Joyce wrote Ulysses at 100 words a day.

"When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now … you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people's thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people's reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it's yourself you're thinking about or anything else."

Emerson, quoted inside: "he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men."

"A book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself. Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they're not from today."

On why old books beat the feed. A defense of the reading-as-solitude argument.

"Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. … Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 'friends' that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction."

Friendship reframed as a form of solitude — the kind that lets you hear yourself think by speaking aloud to someone you trust.

"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."

On Petraeus as an existence proof — "one of those rare people who rises through a bureaucracy for the right reasons" — because he could think things through for himself and argue his ideas when they weren't popular.