Profiles: Grow your ambition with your capabilities
Illustrated by profiles in John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln
Dear friends,
For most of my life, whenever I set off to do something, I aimed to be (not do) the best. During my brief stint with physics, I was consumed by the desire to emulate Richard Feynman. When I studied history, I daydreamed of eventually studying law at Yale like the Clintons. In short, it was like having a powerful GPS system but lacking the fuel to drive far enough.
My excessive self-expectations often led to frustration and impatience, hindering real and concrete personal growth. After all, progress takes time but self-doubt sprouts quickly. Therefore, I’d like to share with you two profiles in leadership to illustrate why we should grow our aspiration with our capabilities, not the other way around. Common sense can take years to learn.
Profiles in Leadership: Adams vs. Lincoln
In the last issue, we already observed that this problem is not immune to statesmen (Mrs. May) and visionary leaders (Ms. Ocasio-Cortez). The contrast between the growth of John Quincy Adams and Abe Lincoln effectively illustrates the advantage of growing aspirations with capabilities than growing capabilities with aspirations.
A life burdened by aspirations
John Quincy Adams was the son to John Adams, the second U.S. president and a Founding Father. Rumoured to possess the highest IQ among all U.S. presidents, Adams was appointed by George Washington as the Ambassador to the Netherlands at twenty-six and became a senator at thirty-six. Yet Adams suffered from his parents’ high expectations and felt inadequate throughout his life.
Campaigning in the 1824 presidential election, a stressed Adams wrote “I have more at stake…than any other individual in the Union”. That election turned out to be a deadlock between Adams and Andrew Jackson and the Congress would pick the president. Adams secured his presidency by winning the supporters of Henry Clay, another presidential runner-up. However, his immediate appointment of Clay as his secretary of state was accused by Jacksonians as a “Corrupt Bargain”.
That bargain was not his only miscalculation. Adams presented on his first annual address to Congress a program so ambitious that it bursted the capabilities he could blow—he asked for a full package of federally financed roads and canals, uniform weights and measures, the creation of a national university, a naval academy, and a national astronomical observatory. His great ideas, too ambitious and untimely, won him nothing but the certain fate of his single term in the White House. John Lewis Gaddis summarizes:
Great expectations inspired, pursued, and haunted Adams, depriving him, at critical moments, of common sense. Overestimations by others—which he then magnified—placed objectives beyond his reach: only self-demotion brought late-life satisfaction.
A life empowered by capabilities
Abraham Lincoln faced what Doris Kearns Goodwin calls “obstacles unimaginable” to his political rivals. Born in a log cabin to farmers, Lincoln’s early life lacked comfort and security. No one would expect anything out of young Abe, who nevertheless seemed to noticed that he “was unusually gifted and had great potential”.
Lincoln had fierce ambition to win the veneration of other men by “rendering [himself] worthy” of their esteem. Nevertheless, he always anchored his ambitions to his extraordinary drive that “drove him to devour books in every spare moment, memorize his father’s stories in order to captivate his friends, [and] study law late into the night after a full day’s work.”
Never set foot inside a college, Lincoln trained himself through books and compensated for the lack of formal education with sheer “Herculian feat for self-creation”. Lacking social status and family network, Lincoln toiled hard and patiently to build his political career and earned wide respect with his character and personality, all of which would end up serving him to climb to the peak of leadership. Again, John Lewis Gaddis summarizes:
No expectations lured Lincoln apart from those he set for himself: he started small, rose slowly, and only when ready reached for the top. His ambitions grew as his opportunities expanded, but he kept both within his circumstances. He sought to be underestimated.
Alas, ambition and drive are great gifts. But on the road to personal growth and success, we must learn to balance our aspiration with our present capabilities and opportunities. Therefore, when we feel impatient about our present situation, it might serve us well to remember John Quincy Adams’ failed presidency and Abraham Lincoln’s slow and steady rise.
Thin Slices
Some more incisive quotes from Julian Barnes’ brilliant novel, The Sense of an Ending.
Life, Relationships, and Math
You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, p104
Pondering On Life’s Purpose
Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born. Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual lives? To die when something new is being born — even if that something new is our very own self? Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, p105
Lindy’s
Leadership
“Most of the thinking suggests leaders should be charismatic, attention-seeking and persuasive,” Dr. Sherman says. “Yet such leaders tend to ruin their companies because they take on more than they can handle, are overconfident and don’t listen to feedback from others.” (The Wall Street Journal)
Charisma is overrated. “Team leadership requires having sufficient empathy to understand the concerns of others…a good leader also needs the flexibility…Stubborn introverts…lack the required flexibility; narcissists…lack the necessary empathy.” (The Economist)
Ray Dalio, the billionaire investor and hedge fund manager, is speaking up again, warning that the rising inequality in the U.S. will risk social conflict. Original post: (Economic Principles) Shorter summary: (Financial Times)
News & Media
Well, it’s not a stretch to say: whoever controls the media controls the White House. This three-part long-form article investigates how Rupert Murdoch’s empire influences the world. (The New York Times)
It’s no secret that social media wastes time. Americans are more likely to think social media is divisive, spreads fake news and unfair attacks or rumors. However, they cannot seem to give it up. (The Wall Street Journal)
Are there Game of Thrones fans here? I bet 😉 Make sure to check out this article about how Game of Thrones has changed TV. (The Financial Times)
Tech & Science
To avoid an AI cold war between China and the West, the two sides should find a way to work together. “But…conflicting goals, mutual suspicion, and a growing conviction [of] a winner-take-all game are pushing the two countries…further apart.” (Wired)
Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize physicist, and his son Walter, a geologist, formulated in 1980 that “the dinosaurs were killed by a massive asteroid strike”. The theory was itself a massive asteroid strike to palaeontologists. Now there seems to be a hint of fossil evidence to back up that theory. (The Economist)
Thanks for reading!
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