Can You Sit Alone With Your Own Thoughts?

A note to young leaders.

All the great leaders I know enjoy their own company.

It’s a rare quality – especially in the hyper-stimulated, screen-saturated world we live in.

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher once observed: “All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Is this where war and greed and addiction come from? An inability to sit quietly in a room alone?

Every generation before ours had to learn to sit with their own thoughts. We are the first to carry an exit door in our pocket.

How many of us today can sit in a room alone for one hour, let alone a full day – with no phone, no laptop, no TV, no book, no music.

Just you … and your thoughts.

Can you do it?

If not, what – I wonder – are we afraid of? What truth are we running away from?

Each of us carries a still, small voice within.

Be still. Listen to it. This is where all authentic leadership stems from.