"We live in a cacophonous age, swarming insects of noise and interruption buzzing about — e-mails, text messages, cable news, advertisements, cell phones, meetings, wireless Web connections, social media posts, and all the new intrusions invented by the time you are reading this," writes Jim Collins in the foreword to this book by leadership experts Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin. The authors quote Dwight Eisenhower's definition of leadership as "the art of getting people to want to do what must be done."
The capacity to be alone can foster periods of great creativity and positivity. Kethledge and Erwin depict the value of solitude in the lives and work of Dwight Eisenhower, Jane Goodall, T. E. Lawrence, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Aung San Suu Kyi, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pope John Paul II. They used times of solitude to find clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage.
Reading these profiles, we get a clearer picture of the ways in which being alone can serve as a catalyst to our imagination, our resilience, and our moral depth.
