On Solitude and Leadership + Weekly Takeaways
On Solitude and Leadership + Weekly Takeaways
Reflections on solitude
If you are not a subscriber, you are missing out accessing our subgroups, meetups, masterclasses by top CEOs, artists and investors. This week we are offering 20% discount on your subscription. Give it a try. Even if it helps you make 1 good career decision this year, the subscription will pay for itself many times over.
“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.” Walden
Henry David Thoreau didn’t write Walden as an exercise in withdrawal but rather as an enthusiastic endorsement of finding oneself in the company of one’s thoughts.
We are primed to connect with others, network, post online, build in public. There is pressure to be in touch with what is going on around us and it has some advantages. However, it also leads to a strange vacuum of original ideas. We are so in sync with others that we lose sight of our own selves.
The truth is that solitude and leadership and go hand in hand. Leaders have this challenge of listening to others, connecting with others, yet producing something different. That is only possible if they carve out time for quiet.
William Deresiewicz writes leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.
“How can you know that unless you’ve taken counsel with yourself in solitude? I started by noting that solitude and leadership would seem to be contradictory things. But it seems to me that 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.”
Solitude needs to be carved out in today’s work life. There will always be something to attend to, something to indulge in, something to put in place. Together they create an attention crisis that results in an originality crisis. We become the average of everything we get distracted by.
This is a useful piece of content to start.
Some useful bits of insights from Naval Ravikant to carve time for solitude:
“Meditation is the art of doing nothing. You cannot do meditation. By definition, if you’re doing something you’re not in meditation.”
1. You sit for at least 60 minutes first thing in the morning
2. Let whatever happens, happen
3. Repeat each day for at least 60 days
“Eventually you will get to a mental state of inbox zero, where now you’re just thinking about what happened yesterday. You’re kind of caught up and your mind is relatively clear and just your anxiety level goes down. You’re living more peacefully.”
Meditation helps carving the much needed quiet we need. We don’t need to complicate things by obsessing over doing it perfectly. The tradeoff is simple - create solitude or run the risk of thinking, doing, believing what everyone else around us does. To do more with your work life, do nothing for some time every single day.
Our essays for subscribers this week
Being a maximizer in every context will eventually burn you out. Be conscious of the decision fatigue that sets in when we need to make too many decisions. We need a simple operating system to channel our energy into decisions that actually matter. For everything else, being a satisfier works just fine.
If your career seems to be offtrack, what are things in your control?
Health
Relationships
Learning new skills
Building new networks
Experimenting with things you always wanted to do
Masterclasses to nourish your thinking
Rhodes Scholar Subhashish Bhadra on policy making in India
Fundamentals of Venture Capital with Accel Partner Manasi Shah
Book Recommendation
What’s our problem by Tim Urban
The book introduces a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment. With dozens of new terms and concepts and 303 drawings, it’s a toolbox for understanding our societies, our group dynamics, and our own minds. Here’s everything on all the pages
Afterthought: “In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.” Farnam Street
Have a great week ahead.
Your Network Capital Team