“One source of a leader’s strength comes from having some degree of reflective ability,” General Mattis says. He cites Kipling’s poem “If,” which begins: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you … “Solitude allows you to reflect while others are reacting,” he says. The leader who neglects to step out of the sweep of events, to contemplate from whence they came and where they might go, finds himself merely “blown from one thing to another.” But the leader who steps outside events is a leader who can change them. “If you use solitude to draw on your
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