Monday, November 4, 2024

Jim Mattis, a retired Marine Corps 4-star general and former Secretary of Defense of the United States, offers the following advice:

"We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven't read hundreds of books, you are fuctionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren't broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is 'too busy to read' is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way."

What Mattis is speaking to is we must take learning and self-discovery serious. To mirror what Bizmarck said,

"fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others."

Yes, we learn from experiences we're in. But we'd be procrastinating by not cracking open a book or one

hundred of them. We don't have to be leading troops into battle. It's about leading ourselves, day to day, in the things we face.

To conclude with a line from Harry S. Truman, "not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers."