Anyone who has had the task of reviewing applications for entry-level non-managerial employment will be aware of how many inexperienced people boast of their leadership skills. Moreover, anyone experienced in dealing with those newly recruited to the world of employment will likely have come across the novice intent on assuming direction of the operation within days of joining the team. An example that comes to mind is America's latest political sensation, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already, it seems, running for President.
Such naive eagerness to lead is generally unappreciated by those with actual responsibility for the smooth operation of an administrative process or the turning of a profit. Rather, what is most valued is intelligent self-regulation to fulfill the objectives laid down by those with actual responsibility for end results. Thus, the leadership skill most appreciated by management is the capacity for leadership of an army of one, namely oneself.
Self-regulation is not a simple matter. Hard work is, well, hard. The temptation to break for a snack, to check the Internet, or to engage co-workers in chat is at times all but irresistible. Moreover, to work effectively, one must be adequately prepared, both physically and mentally. That means no late nights or heavy drinking from Sunday to Thursday. It also means thinking in advance of how best to tackle the work ahead.
How, then, given the sensations, emotions and rationalizations that flood the mind, is one to achieve consistent self-mastery? To that question, one might expect psychology to have an answer, which indeed it does, although not necessarily the correct one. Indeed, psychology has, during the modern era, taken three shots at defining the springs of human action, the first two unquestionable duds. First, was the Freudian unconscious mind, now correctly written off as a farrago of fantastic nonsense. Then there was the much more scientific-seeming theory known as behaviorism, that held human action to be the product of reflexes induced by specific experiential regimes.
The notion that behavior is controlled through the formation of reflexes has the merit of a basis in experimental research. Thus, for example, dogs fed after hearing the sound of a bell soon come to salivate at the sound of the bell, whether or not food is subsequently forthcoming. Humans likewise form such Pavlovian reflexes. More generally, psychologists established through experiments, as was already generally known, that animals learn to avoid actions that have painful effects — often an electric shock in the case of experiments with rats, while they learn to repeat actions that have pleasant consequences, e.g., a food pellet dispensed automatically in the case of a rat being trained to press a lever. And it works pretty much the same with kids and cookies.
The founders of this line of psychology were the late great Harvard University scholars, J.B. Watson and his successor, B.F. Skinner. To these giants of psychological research, conditioning by the application of pain or pleasure, otherwise known as operant conditioning, was all there is to know about the regulation of human behavior. Moreover, so great was the prestige of this school of learning in the USA of the 1960's that the principles of operant conditioning were applied by the US military in the war against the Communists in Vietnam. The method was applied thus: first the US Air Force would launch massive air-raids on the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, "bombing the shit out of the inhabitants" to use the terminology of current US President Donald J. Trump. The thing then was to instigate a "bombing pause" during which the occupant of the White House, the man of Quaker roots, Richard Milhous Nixon, waited for evidence that the Viet Cong had ceased their military infiltration of South Vietnam.
The thing did not work for the obvious reason that the leaders in North Vietnam were not only sentient creatures susceptible to the horrors of having the shit bombed out of them, but also intelligent beings capable of thought and with the clear purpose of winning the war. Thus, to them, a bombing pause was simply an opportunity to regroup and mount new incursion into the anti-Communist south. This, however, the behaviorist- inspired US leadership could not grasp since it was an axiom of behaviorism as laid out by the geniuses at Harvard that the mind is irrelevant to an understanding of human behavior, if not, indeed, entirely a figment of the imagination.
Inevitably, such a foolish idea eventually blew up, to be consigned to the psychological scrapheap along with Freudian psychiatry, mesmerism, and notions about demonic possession. The process of debunking was hastened by the rapidly advancing science of cybernetics, which when applied to things like missile guidance systems, made it clear that intelligent behavior depends not on automatic conditioned responses to external stimuli, but rational calculation with reference to defined goals.
Today, therefore, psychology is back in the world of common sense where people are understood to have complex goals, and indeed hierarchies of goals, and are driven much more powerfully by emotions such as love and hate, fear and curiosity, than by the reward of a food pellet or a jelly bean, or the punishment of a mild electric shock, or even of heavy military bombardment. And it is based on this common sense understanding of human action that the achievement of self-command in the service of ambition is to be achieved.
But even with a realistic understanding of the basis of self-mastery, it is achieved only with difficulty, in an ongoing effort requiring continual review of both one's successes and failures, with adjustment of future conduct with a view to improved future success. Success thus depends on a combination of continued evaluation of strategies for success, combined with adequate emotional commitment to its achievement. An idle genius will achieve little, whereas a determined and relentlessly focused mediocrity may go far, especially if aided by good luck.
Life is a race and the prize is to those who, as Niccolo Machiavelli asserted, combine virtu et fortuna, which is to say intelligence, determination, and luck.
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