solitude-and-leadership

My Linked Notes

• enders-game
  
  • This is an idea described in [[Solitude and Leadership]] by this quote: "The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself." This was a sentiment echoed throughout Ender's Game.
    • Ender was forced into fighting Stilson at the beginning of the story, then Monzo while he was in battle school. In both cases, he had no backup. In both cases he accidentally killed the other boy as a result of the fight they were in.
    • "His isolation can’t be broken. He can never come to believe that anybody will ever help him out, ever. If he once thinks there’s an easy way out, he’s wrecked" (p. 38)
      • Graff says this to Anderson at the beginning of chapter 5, Games
      • From the beginning, Graff is all too aware of how important isolation is to making a great leader
    • "Graff had deliberately set him up to be separate from the other boys, made it impossible for him to be close to them. And he began now to suspect the reasons behind it. It wasn’t to unify the rest of the group—in fact, it was divisive. Graff had isolated Ender to make him struggle. To make him prove, not that he was competent, but that he was far better than everyone else."
      • taken from sparknotes
    • "as their trust in Ender as command grew, their friendship, remembered from the Battle School days, gradually dissappeared. It was to each that they became close... ender was their teacher and commander, as distant from them as Mazer was from him, and as demanding" - p. 282
      • This describes Ender's relationship to his team. As he pushed harder, he became more isolated. Becoming a better leader meant becoming less connected with your team as friends, and more connected as a teacher. This is what forces the solitude on a great leader

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