when in his 80s. These are men who earned their youth. It took
them 80 years to become young.”
I think what Fuentes was getting at was that, subject to all
the usual peer, familial, and social pressures, we lose track of
ourselves when we are adolescents. We become lost in the
crowd, more connected and responsive to it than to ourselves,
and so we lose our ability to create, because creation is the
province of the individual, not the committee.
But leaders, having achieved self-possession, have long since
recovered their creative powers, too, and have continued to
grow. We tend to think of growth in quantitative terms: heights
and weights. When our bodies stop growing, our minds stop
growing, or so we think. But, as the leaders I talked with have
shown in their own lives, our intellectual and emotional
growth doesn’t have to stall, nor should it. Leaders differ from
others in their constant appetite for knowledge and experience,
and as their worlds widen and become more complex, so too do
their means of understanding.
Dialectical thinking, a variation on the Socratic dialogue, is
one such means. It presumes that reality is dynamic rather than
static, and therefore seeks relationships between ideas, to aim at
synthesis. You might find it useful to think of reflection and per-
spective as two horns, with synthesis balanced between them.
Frances Hesselbein demonstrates synthesis as she describes
her approach to her work with the Girl Scouts: “First, you have
to figure out how to organize your job, the management of
time, what your responsibilities are. Second, you have to learn
to lead, not contain. Third, you have to have a clear sense of
who you are and a sense of mission, a clear understanding of it,
and you must be sure that your principles are congruent with
the organization’s principles. Fourth, you have to demonstrate
Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything