many Jews developed acute intelligence because they were per-
petual exiles. The stranger in a strange land sees more and sees
fresh. Being on the road not only requires the full deployment
of one’s self, it redeploys one, tests one’s strengths and weak-
nesses, and exposes new strengths and weaknesses. Our two
most sophisticated Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and
Benjamin Franklin, were inveterate travelers, and both spent
much time in Europe. Those who travel farther from home
learn even more.
Alfred Gottschalk learned the outsider’s lesson at an early
age: “I came to America as a refugee. I had no identity, or only
a negative identity. I was Jewish. I was German. I dressed
funny. I couldn’t speak the language, and I was poor—finan-
cially. But I graduated from Brooklyn Boys High with a 92 av-
erage, and I played football. I became independent very early.”
As leaders have traditionally been travelers, they’ve also tra-
ditionally had rich private lives. They’ve been Sunday painters,
poets, even chefs, and they’ve always made time to reflect.
Joseph Campbell, the world’s foremost authority on mythol-
ogy, told Bill Moyers in an interview shortly before his death,
“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, when you
don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you
don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe
anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a
place where you can simply experience and bring forth what
you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative in-
cubation. At first, you may find that nothing happens there.
But if you have [such] a sacred place and use it, something
eventually will happen.”
Whether one chooses a daily retreat or a formal sabbatical,
one has access to one’s soul, to one’s imagination, and one can
On Becoming a Leader