#571： The Voyage of Character
Episode Stats
Summary
Admiral James Stavridis served as the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, the Commander of the European Command, and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and is now the Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. In his new book, "Sailing to Character: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character," he profiles 10 of history s most notable leaders, making out both their inspiring and flawed qualities, as well as how these qualities intersect with their ability to lead.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Good character
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is hard to define in the abstract, but easy to identify when it's embodied in the lives of
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great individuals. In order to illuminate what worthy character looks like, my guest today has
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written a book which consists of profiles of 10 of history's most notable admirals making out both
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their inspiring and flawed qualities, as well as how these qualities intersected with their ability
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to lead. His name is Admiral James Stavridis. He served as the commander of U.S. Southern Command,
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U.S. European Command, and NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, and is now the dean of the
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Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. On today's show, the admiral talks
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about many of the figures in his latest book, Sailing True North, 10 admirals in the voyage of
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character, including Themistocles, Sir Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson, and Chester Nimitz. We take a look
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at what these individuals did well, what they did poorly, and how their characteristics, decisions,
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qualities, and overall moral compass impacted their leadership and influence. After the show's
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over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash truenorth.
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All right, Admiral James Stavridis, welcome back to the show.
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Great to be on The Art of Manliness again, Brett.
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So we had you on, it was last year, 2018, to talk about your book, The Leader's Bookshelf,
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where you polled four-star generals and admirals to get their recommendations on the best books
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for leaders. And I know our listeners really enjoyed that. That's episode number 373, for
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those who want to check that out. You got a new book out called Sailing True North, 10
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Admirals and the Voyage of Character, where you look at 10 great admirals from history and
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try to find the leadership lessons and character lessons from them. And we'll discuss, talk about
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some of these admirals. But before you do, in the book, you make this distinction between
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character and leadership. And you say they're often, these words are often used synonymously,
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but you think it's important to make a distinction between the two. So first off,
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why do you think these words are used synonymously? And why do you think it's important to make that
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They are often confused. And they're two, in my view, quite distinct elements. And the first one,
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let's start with leadership. Think of leadership as a big, enormous door that swings through the
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world influencing others. And that door is somewhat indiscriminate, right? In other words,
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we can think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a great leader. He influences millions. He
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leads the country through the Great Depression and through the Second World War. But you know what?
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Pol Pot, the dictator of Cambodia, was a great leader. He was quite capable of reorganizing and
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firing a society. And he ended up killing about a third of the people in the killing fields of
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Cambodia. So those big doors of leadership can swing for good or for ill. And I would say that,
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Brett, the hinge of that door, the hinge upon which that big door of leadership swings is called
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character. It's the human heart. And what's in that heart and what kind of character a leader has
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is what will determine whether that big door of leadership swings for good purpose or for terrible
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evil in some cases. So bottom line, leadership is the door, but big doors often swing on small hinges.
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And I wanted to write a book about character because I think we're kind of overweight in leadership
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books. Everybody's got a leadership book out there, but not too many people are writing or thinking
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coherently about character. So that was kind of the purpose going in. And of course, I framed it up
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using what I know, the oceans, the lives of great admirals to try and illustrate some of the challenges
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that these 10 admirals experienced over 2,500 years of recorded history.
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And that's one thing about character. It's hard. With leadership books, you can kind of
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do the bullet point tactics of what it means to be a good leader, like listen carefully, praise people.
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But like character, that's hard to do, like distill down into bullet points.
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It is. And the reason is that character comes to us through a different channel, if you will, than
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leadership skills. Character comes to us initially, I would argue, from our parents, our family, when
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we're small. There's a great deal of what's built into your psychology that becomes your character.
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And then your education, secondly, I think builds character and reading and inculcating new ideas
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through the educational process, which for most of us goes on for close to two decades, if you stop and
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think about it. And then thirdly, your life experience. At the end of the day, we all collide with the real
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world. And how those events unfold for us deeply, deeply sharpens our character, particularly, I think,
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in our 20s. And character then, I think, kind of sets in place in your 30s and 40s. You can still
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change elements of your character throughout your life, but it gets harder and harder. So at the end of
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the day, I wanted to create a book that could help be a bit of a roadmap, or to use a nautical metaphor, a set of
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buoys for how character is created and how you can examine and evaluate your own character.
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And I also think stories are very powerful in conveying character. Yeah, you can't do it a bullet
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point, but if you just tell the story of an individual, it can be inspiring, right, in a subtle way.
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That's absolutely right. And at one point, I was going to title the book Sea Stories, like stories from
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the sea. But at the end of the day, I like that image of sailing true north. I think there's something
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powerful and compelling in it. And by the way, of the 10 admirals in the book, not all of them sailed
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true north every day of their lives, some of them quite far from it. And I think, to your point, we learn
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both from inspiring stories of good people showing us positive attributes of character, we can also learn
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from people who are fundamentally dark. There are dark currents in the human heart. And by learning
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and recognizing those, I think they become counterexamples for us. And there are some of
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these admirals who definitely fit that side of the equation as well.
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And we'll talk about one of them, a pirate. We're going to get to that guy. But let's talk about this
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first admiral you highlight. And it's Themistocles, the famous Greek admiral. Tell us about his world
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that he lived in and what challenges as a leader that he faced.
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Well, first of all, as you know, Brett, I'm Greek American, Stavridis. So I'm contractually required
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to have a Greek in every story I tell, every book I write. So it was always a given. We were going to go
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back to the ancient Greeks and find somebody who faced big challenges of character. And that was
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certainly the case for Themistocles. He lived about 2,500 years ago. And he was the leading political
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actor and also the leading military admiral, if you will, the leader of the Athenian naval forces
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in the wars between Greece and the Persian Empire. And Themistocles faced an existential challenge.
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The Persian Empire was vast. It encompassed at that time about half of the world's population. It
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stretched from present-day India to the Mediterranean Sea and the western coast of Turkey. Think about that
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for a moment. And as far south as the Arabian Peninsula, as far north as the Black Sea. It was an
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enormous, powerful, militarily capable empire. And they decided they wanted to conquer Greece. And they
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edged up to Athens. Athens was the final city, the final major city. And the Persian Empire Xerxes sent
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a massive fleet of these triremes, these great road warships, rode by, in the case of the Persian slaves.
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And Themistocles, knowing he faced this existential threat, gathered up all his oarsmen and his ship
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captains and the marines who would cross over and fight on the decks of the other ships the night before
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the battle. And he said to them, look, we're outnumbered, perhaps 10 to 1, yet we have one great advantage.
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All of you, everyone in this fleet, from the youngest oarsmen to the most senior
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captains, were all free men. Yet in these Persian ships, all of the oarsmen, the vast majority of the
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propulsion of these warships, were slaves. And Themistocles said to his oarsmen and his captains and
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his warriors, tomorrow, there will be a great battle at sea. And tomorrow, you must row for
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your families, for your wives, for your children, for your parents. Tomorrow, you must row for your
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city. And tomorrow, you must row for freedom, for freedom itself. And with that charisma and that
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inner strength of character, he conveyed and inspired. And on the morrow, the Greek fleet destroyed
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the Persian fleet in an extraordinary battle. Still studied today at Annapolis at the Naval Academy,
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by the way. So I think he's a good first example of the power of inner character, particularly to
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inspire others. Again, that small hinge of character swinging the big door of leadership.
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But I'll close with something on the darker side, which is that he was also extremely arrogant,
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prideful. And after this enormous victory, he went back to Athens and attempted to completely
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overtake the politics of this free city, and eventually was banished and ended his life in the
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court of the Persian emperor. It's a Greek tragedy, and it's a story of hubris, and how sometimes our
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greatest strength can be our greatest weakness as well. That's Themistocles from Sailing True North.
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And as you've studied Themistocles, what have you taken away that you've noticed that you've
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taken something from Themistocles and applied it to your own role as a leader in the Navy?
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You know, I began to hear about Themistocles when I was a boy from my father, and it was always a
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cautionary tale. And the caution is, no matter how successful you are, and even at the very peak of
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success in your life, avoid arrogance. Avoid that tendency to overreach. Exercise humility. That's the
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real lesson of Themistocles. And tragically for Themistocles, it is a negative lesson for us as we see him.
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That's what I take away from that. And in every job I've had when I was a ship captain, or the
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commodore of a group of destroyers, or commander of an aircraft carrier strike group in combat, or
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supreme ally commander in NATO, I've always had that little voice in the back of my head saying,
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hey, you're not the center of the universe here. You have a role to play, but you are only part of
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something that is vastly greater than yourself. That's a good little voice to have in the back
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So the next admiral you highlight is Zheng He. I think I pronounced that right. Chinese admiral.
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He lived about 100 years before Christopher Columbus, so in the early 1400s. So while the Europeans are
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putting together the expeditions that discover America, if you will, they were sailing in quite
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small ships, about 150 feet long, maybe 60 people. A hundred years earlier, Zheng He is in command of
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a Chinese fleet where the ships are 500 to 600 feet long and carry three or 400 mariners.
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China at this time is a regional power that had the capability to become a global power, but
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chose not to. Zheng He led these treasure expeditions and economic expeditions that sailed from the
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South China Sea through the Strait of Malacca into the Indian Ocean, to the Arabian Peninsula, to the
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coast of Africa. Enormous, enormous sea voyages. He was at the right hand of the Yangl emperor of the
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time. But here's what you want to know about Zheng He. Resilience. When he was 10 years old, he was
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captured in a raid, was a small boy, was enslaved, and then castrated. And as a eunuch, rose from those
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horrific circumstances to the pinnacle of military power in the Chinese empire. It's an extraordinary
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story of resilience. And the character lesson is that no matter how far down you are, you can still
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come back if you exercise discipline and calmness of spirit and a willingness to face the challenges and
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overcome them. And that's the story of Zheng He. He's a figure of great resilience.
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Well, the character, yeah, after you got him, was resilience. But then you also, when you're
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talking about Zheng He, you talked about how you admired his organizational ability as a leader.
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Yeah, remarkable. And again, think about the ability here, because he was not just a commander
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of these fleets. He was the constructor. He was the naval architect. He designed them. He was given the
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power to conscript as many people as necessary. He built shipyards to build these enormous wooden
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structures. He effectively invented the idea of these large sailing ships with massive crews. So that
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organizational ability, I think, is also much at the heart of Zheng He.
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And what did you take away from him? Like, how did you apply the lessons from him in your own
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Yeah, two things, and we've touched on both of them. One is any task, no matter how big it is,
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you can reduce it to small components and methodically execute it. That's organization.
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And I always say it's like graduate school or any school, really. Doing well in school is not about
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being smart. It's about being organized and breaking down learning into small chunks that
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you can inculcate. So organizational skill. And the other thing I think of, again, is this idea of
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resilience. Hard to imagine a harder starting line in a race than being enslaved at age 10 and castrated
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when you put that in perspective, your day doesn't look so bad, does it? And I think that has been a
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Another interesting tidbit that I got from the book is he was a practicing Muslim, which was
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interesting. You know, he's in the mean court. He's probably a religious minority, but he's still
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Absolutely. And I think this goes to another attribute, which you will, is flexibility. It's
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not being utterly dogmatic about things. Several of the admirals, perhaps we'll talk about later,
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were very certain of themselves at all times. I think Zheng He comes through the ages. And of
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course, this is 500 years ago. It's difficult to have precise descriptions of individuals like we can
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today. But Zheng He comes across in the historical record as someone who will mold himself to the
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circumstances. And I think probably being a Muslim in a Confucian court would lead to that.
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The next leader you include on your list is a pirate, which is not something you'd expect in
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a book about leadership lessons from admirals. That's Sir Francis Drake. So what can we learn
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from Sir Francis Drake about leadership and character?
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Yes, this is a classic, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good of Sir Francis Drake is he's
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utterly decisive. He's a gifted mariner. He is someone who can inspire his subordinates.
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And he, as a result, he circumnavigates the earth for the first time. He's the first commander who
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makes the entire circumnavigation of the world and survives. Magellan's famous voyage did circumnavigate
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the globe, but Magellan died before the voyage was complete. Drake is the first one to lead an
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expedition and survive going all the way around the world. Secondly, he leads the British forces
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that defeat the Spanish Armada. And like Themistocles, he's an existential threat to England,
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and he succeeds. So he has great gifts of decisiveness and command. That's the good. The bad is he is the
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dark currents we talked about truly flow through his heart. He is rapacious. He is driven by a desire
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to amass great wealth. His burning ambition allows him to overcome what many others would face as moral
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and ethical boundaries. So the good, the bad, and the ugly is his techniques include enslavement,
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rape, rape, murder, summary executions of his crew. He is a dark, dark figure, very much a pirate. And on a
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slightly lighter note, for any of the listeners who have been to the ride at Disney World, the Pirates of
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the Caribbean, it's based on the exploits, if you will, of Sir Francis Drake in the Caribbean. A very
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dark figure, but a very compelling one as well. That's a great example of being a good leader,
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but not having the character to go along with it. Exactly. We're going to take a quick break for
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your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So any list of great admirals wouldn't be
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complete without Horatio Nelson. For those who aren't familiar with him, tell us a bit about his career and
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his lasting influence on the British Navy and culture. Yeah, I think he's arguably the greatest
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admiral in history. In a certain sense, like a couple of the other admirals we've discussed,
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England at this time is facing an existential threat from Napoleon Bonaparte, who, if he could
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have built the ships and overcome the British Navy, could, I believe, successfully have invaded
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the British Isles. So Nelson is commander of the British fleet at this time. He is on patrol off the
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coast of Spain at a place called Trafalgar near Cape Trafalgar. And he fights a battle with the
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combined fleets of France and Spain and utterly destroys them. It's the greatest single-sided
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victory at sea I can imagine. And with everything riding on it, the only one that matches up with it,
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I suppose, is Themistocles back at the Battle of Solomus, who saves his city, state, Athens.
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But here's the difference. Horatio Nelson dies in the battle. And there's nothing better for your
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reputation than dying right at the absolute peak of an enormous victory. And your last words are,
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God and country, protect my wife. He is really, in every sense, becomes the iconic admiral and is
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still heroically regarded in Great Britain. In fact, many folks have been to London and gone to
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Trafalgar Square, right in the heart of London. And on it is a plinth. And at the top of it is an
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enormous statue of Horatio Nelson. In that sense, it's like, if you think of it in terms of Washington,
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D.C., it's like the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial kind of put together. And he is
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so highly regarded. That's the good news. Here's the bad news. His moral compass didn't always sail
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true north in the sense of he had a long-term adulterous affair with a very beautiful young
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actress, Emma Hamilton, conceived a daughter, a child born out of wedlock, named her after himself,
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by the way, Horatio. And he was scandalous in that regard. It's hard to overstate how society at that
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time looked at an arrangement like that, which was frankly quite public. And thus people were quite
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scandalized by it. And then secondly, we would say today he was kind of a publicity hound. He just
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loved to get his voice out there, get his engaged publicly. He needed public acclimation. So a few
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failings on the moral side, but overall, in terms of his impact on the naval profession,
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got to score him really at the top. And last thought, his great gift and what I take away from
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Lord Nelson was his ability to build teams. All of his ship captains worshipped him. He just inspired
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people with his kind of simplicity of command and his kindness to his sailors. In an age in which the
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lash was commonly used, he refused to do so. He took incredible care of his sailors, making sure they
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had the best food, the best doctors. He was a beloved as a leader. And he inspired this idea of
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the band of brothers. His ship captains operated together better than any other military unit in
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modern military history. And thus he won this epic battle of Trafalgar.
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And how have you developed your team building capacity as a leader during your career? I mean,
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any lessons you took away personally from him on team building?
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Indeed. You mentioned one of them, which is obsessive concern about living conditions,
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logistical support, taking care of people in very visible ways. Nelson walked the decks of his ships
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constantly, went into every corner of their ships, made sure that things were right for the sailors.
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People will reward you when you do that. And then secondly, that near peer network, the people who
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are at your level or just below are often the most honest observers who will give you the best advice.
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Nelson did both of those things brilliantly. He took care of people below him. He reached out
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to the left and the right to the peers around him, built these bands of brothers.
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I took both those lessons, particularly, for example, when I was a young ship captain for the
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first time on USS Barry, an Arleigh Burke destroyer. I would walk that ship hour after hour, day after
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day. I loved that crew and they saw that. And secondly, talking to the other captains on the waterfront,
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learning from each other, that band of brothers mentality served me well throughout all the days of my
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career. Another character strength of Horatio Nelson that I took away from your section on him was his
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resilience as well. He lost an arm, lost a leg. He had seasickness, even though his career was being
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an admiral. He was. He was also a very small guy, which is one of the reasons I like him. I'm like a
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towering five-five. Lord Nelson was five-four, a small even for those days. And he weighed, I don't
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know, 125 pounds. I've seen his uniform hanging in the British Royal Museum. It looks like a boy's
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uniform. He's a small, slight man, yet he was fearless in battle, would often lead boarding parties
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when he was a junior officer. And as you say, he lost his right arm, which he was right-handed and
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had to reteach himself to fight and to write with his left hand. Some very valuable archives, by the
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way, are letters that he wrote as a left-hander as he was learning to write again. And then he lost an
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eye in a subsequent battle. And he was the quintessential small but very tough kind of
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individual that you just have to admire. And yes, the resilience was a big part of that.
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Last point, back to the blind and one eye thing. He was also a kind of difficult subordinate. He was
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great to his peers, great to the people who worked for him. He didn't always do exactly what his bosses
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wanted him to do. And if he saw a signal at sea, and of course, ships are maneuvered at sea in these
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days by flapping signal flags in the breeze. If he didn't like the signal from his senior's
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flagship, he would often put the telescope to his blind eye and claim he didn't see a signal and then
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do whatever the hell he wanted to. Fortunately for him, it virtually always came out better than what
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his boss had wanted him to do. But Brett, that's where the expression to turn a blind eye to something
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comes from, from Lord Nelson and his telescope to his blind eye.
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That's a good bit of trivia you can drop at a party.
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Right. So the next admiral you talk about, we're finally getting into U.S. admirals,
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American admirals. And the first one you included was an academic. He's an academic admiral named
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Alfred Thayer Mahan. Tell us about him, his influence on the U.S. Navy.
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Sure. You cannot overstate the strategic influence of Alfred Thayer Mahan. He was not a good
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sailor. He was mediocre at best in command of ships. In fact, one of his fitness reports
00:27:54.640
actually had a line in it that said, Captain Mahan needs to develop his ship handling skills,
00:28:02.640
and it is not the business of naval officers to write books. Because, of course, that's what he
00:28:08.720
really was skilled at. He was a writer, a strategic analyst who built a plan for an emerging global U.S.
00:28:16.700
Navy. He's living at the end of the 19th century in the late 1800s. And he absolutely crafts the ideas
00:28:25.860
that went into Teddy Roosevelt and the Great White Fleet. He's the one who comes up with the idea of
00:28:31.420
building global naval bases all around the world. He sketches out the future of America as a world
00:28:38.900
sea power and writes a whole series of books about this, which are still used today and, by the way,
00:28:44.820
are studied by other nations. China today in the 21st century is building that kind of global naval
00:28:52.580
capability that Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote about well over 100 years ago. So, intellectual, brilliant,
00:29:01.040
but kind of a mediocre operator and personally a very cold person, not someone who had a lot of
00:29:08.560
empathy for others. He was scholarly. Dostoevsky said somewhere that an intellectual is a man with
00:29:17.200
spectacles on his nose and winter in his heart. That was kind of Alfred Thayer Mahan, a brilliant mind,
00:29:25.180
but not high emotional intelligence to go with it.
00:29:29.960
So, what lessons have you applied in your own career as an admiral from him?
00:29:34.180
Well, first of all, certainly all the strategic thinking, but in the context of our conversation
00:29:40.680
today about character and leadership, I took two things away from him. One, his relentless,
00:29:49.020
relentless pursuit of the truth, of find the facts wherever they lead you as you write the strategy.
00:29:57.000
He was a researcher who wanted all the facts. That's pretty powerful. And then secondly,
00:30:05.500
life balance. If you want to have a fulfilling life, at least for me, and I think for most people,
00:30:12.740
you have to let other people into your heart. You have to spend time with others. You have to have
00:30:18.080
real empathy for others. That was his flaw. And I've often thought in my own context that to
00:30:27.000
how important it is to find that time to connect with family and friends, not always easy in these
00:30:33.360
lives and careers we lead, but a powerful counter lesson that I take away from Alfred Thayer Mahan.
00:30:39.680
Yeah. So, a leader needs to think about those high-level things like strategy, but also
00:30:44.640
get out from the ivory tower and be able to interact.
00:30:51.500
So, you talk about Chester Nimitz, and I think people might be familiar with the name because
00:30:55.100
we have a, there's a carrier named after him. Who was Chester Nimitz and why is he known as the
00:31:02.220
Yeah. He's certainly the greatest of the American admirals. I would say he's the Nelson,
00:31:08.580
the Lord Nelson of the United States of America. And he's born in the early part of the 20th century.
00:31:14.780
He's born a million miles from the ocean in a small town in central Texas called Fredericksburg,
00:31:21.000
Texas, not too far from Austin in the hill country of Texas. He's in a German-speaking family
00:31:27.780
when he's born before World War I, and then wants to go to West Point. He's a land kind of guy. He's
00:31:35.400
probably never seen the ocean until he fails to get into West Point, and then is selected to go to
00:31:42.100
Annapolis to the U.S. Naval Academy, and adapts himself. And his gifts, as he rises through the
00:31:50.640
ranks, and his progress is steady but not spectacular, his gift is his empathy, his quiet
00:32:00.260
confidence, his calm demeanor. He reminds me a lot of Zheng He, as we understand the Chinese
00:32:07.840
admiral over the centuries. I think the two of them, Nimitz and Zheng He would have been quite
00:32:12.780
similar. They were also both large men, had physical stature going for them. They both were
00:32:19.120
very skilled organizers. They both were quietly confident. Chester Nimitz never had to go through
00:32:27.420
what Zheng He did in his youth, obviously. But Nimitz had this gift of inspiring confidence in others
00:32:35.860
without being the smartest person in the room, without raising his voice, without being flamboyant.
00:32:41.920
And it's interesting to contrast him, for example, with his army counterpart at the time, General
00:32:46.920
Douglas MacArthur, who was that flamboyant, loud, charismatic, got to be the bride at every wedding
00:32:56.480
and the corpse at every funeral kind of personality. Nimitz was the opposite of that. And I'll close on
00:33:03.300
Nimitz by saying, picture this in terms of resilience. This is his Zheng He moment. He finally gets
00:33:11.960
command of the Pacific fleet. That's the good news. The bad news is he gets it two weeks after Pearl
00:33:18.300
Harbor. The fleet is destroyed. All the battleships are sunk. Cordite is in the air in Pearl Harbor. Bodies
00:33:26.360
are being pulled out of these ships. The carriers are out at sea dodging the Japanese. All that's left
00:33:33.140
in that port are a few diesel submarines, small, stinky, oily little boats. So instead of taking
00:33:42.220
command on a beautiful day, standing on a gorgeous battleship in his service dress whites, Chester
00:33:49.540
Nimitz takes command of what's left of the Pacific fleet, standing on the deck of a tiny diesel
00:33:55.540
submarine. And what does he do? He squares his shoulders. He keeps almost everybody from the previous
00:34:03.700
staff because he knows what happened at Pearl Harbor could have happened to anybody. He builds teams. He does
00:34:11.080
that Nelsonian thing of building and working with his peers. Only Nimitz could have subdued the flamboyant
00:34:19.480
personality of Douglas MacArthur. Only Nimitz could have melded a team that includes Admiral Bull Halsey,
00:34:26.560
the most flamboyant of American admirals and the biggest publicity hound we've ever produced. Only
00:34:33.500
Nimitz had that kind of self-effacing, take the big task, beat the Japanese empire, but break it down
00:34:40.440
into small bites. Let's rebuild the fleet. Let's overhaul the ships. Let's fix everything we can.
00:34:46.220
Let's figure out where the Japanese are going. Let's build a strategy. Let's work with MacArthur.
00:34:51.880
Let's get all my admirals together. Slowly, methodically, three and a half years later,
00:34:57.000
we signed the declaration of surrender of the Japanese empire in Tokyo Bay. That is a trajectory of
00:35:05.160
real character above all. No, that's the thing that stood out to me when I read about him is his
00:35:11.160
discretion. He saw the big picture and he'd oftentimes do things that in the short term might
00:35:17.600
have looked weak for a leader to do, but he understood he was playing the long game and he
00:35:22.260
knew that if he did that, it would help the overall goal that he was going for. That's absolutely right.
00:35:28.540
Let me give you an example from my own career. When I was a four-star admiral for the first time,
00:35:34.300
and my job was to be commander of U.S. Southern Command, everything south of the United States,
00:35:40.620
all the military activity in Latin America, Caribbean, Central America, and so forth. My
00:35:47.460
instinct was to rush into very high-level military kind of exercises. What I decided instead was to
00:36:00.820
play that long game, which is don't use the heavy hitter, big carriers, cruisers. The long game is
00:36:10.060
soft power in a place like Latin America and the Caribbean. It's medical diplomacy. It's quiet
00:36:17.700
counter-narcotics and intelligence work. It's counter-insurgency in Columbia. It's building
00:36:24.000
schools, wells, and clinics. It is literacy training. Playing that long game was very,
00:36:32.480
very powerful for me in that job. This is before I became the NATO commander. That was a very different
00:36:39.120
job. But in that job, I really drew on the lessons of Chester Nimitz.
00:36:43.320
Did you find any weaknesses in his leadership or his character?
00:36:46.420
I really can't. With Nimitz, I think he's as close to perfect as you can come,
00:36:52.480
at least the way I look at people. I suppose you could say, well, he didn't have that kind of
00:36:58.640
crackling charisma. He wasn't one to leap up and give the flashy, perfect press conference.
00:37:07.460
And I'm not sure that's as important in a leader for me as those inner quiet qualities of character
00:37:17.100
are. So again, big door of leadership swings on that small hinge. I'd take that hinge of Nimitz over
00:37:25.180
anybody else in this book. So throughout all these admirals you highlight, they all have different
00:37:29.540
traits that they've exemplified and character traits and leadership abilities. Did you find a common
00:37:35.840
thread between all of them, like attributes that they all possess and had in common?
00:37:41.300
I don't think there is a single trait that all of them possessed. But I'm going to add 10 seconds
00:37:49.660
about one other admiral. I know this is the art of manliness, but there is a woman admiral in the
00:37:54.880
book, and that is Admiral Grace Hopper. She's the last admiral in the book in terms of chronology.
00:38:01.520
And she's a computer scientist, a mathematician. She's completely different than all the other
00:38:07.480
admirals. But she has a quality character trait that I think is vitally important, and that's
00:38:14.780
intellectual curiosity. As a seven-year-old, she starts disassembling alarm clocks, trying to figure
00:38:20.520
out how they work. Her whole life is one of finding out and learning. She's also wonderful to be around.
00:38:28.480
I've met her several times. Just a dynamic, funny woman. She writes the computer program COBOL,
00:38:36.380
essentially inventing the idea of programming computers at the end of the Second World War,
00:38:41.560
and serves on active duty as an admiral longer than any other admiral in American history other than
00:38:47.660
Hyman Rickover. And so Grace Hopper has intellectual curiosity. And so I suppose if there were one quality
00:38:55.060
that every one of these admirals had, it would be that, that they were curious about the world and
00:39:02.160
willing to try new things. Intellectual curiosity often related to creativity, not always, but I think
00:39:10.080
that's sort of the package that flows through all of them is that blend of curiosity and creativity.
00:39:19.360
Almost all the admirals have moments of extreme doubt and fear and failure. So I think all of them
00:39:29.040
demonstrate resilience in fairly significant ways, some more than others. But if you look at other
00:39:36.420
qualities of character, you know, things like humility, balance, honesty, a sense of justice, empathy,
00:39:43.820
yeah, some of them had those qualities and others did not. And that's why if I'd wanted to write a
00:39:50.460
book about character and I was going to pick one admiral, I'd probably write about Nimitz, as you can
00:39:56.080
guess. But in order to illustrate kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly, as we talked about with the
00:40:01.860
pirate Drake, you really do have to pick, I'd say, at least 10 admirals. There are a couple of great
00:40:08.080
admirals that didn't quite make the cut. But bottom line, the closest there is to a universal pair of
00:40:15.680
qualities, I suppose, are creativity and resilience. Well, it's been a great conversation. Where can
00:40:21.420
people go to learn more about the book and your work? First and foremost, I'd say go to my website,
00:40:27.220
which is really easy to remember. It's just Admiral Stav, the first four letters of my last name,
00:40:34.440
admiralstav.com. And then secondly, when you do check out the book, in the back is a kind of mini
00:40:43.880
bibliography. It's not an academic one, but for each of the admirals, it lists two or three books
00:40:50.200
with a couple of sentences about each of them that'll propel you on this voyage of character
00:40:55.860
as you hopefully continue to sail true north. Well, Admiral James Stavridis, thank you so much
00:41:01.680
for your time. It's been a pleasure. It's my pleasure, Brett. We'll do it again when my next
00:41:05.900
book comes out, which is going to be a novel, which will be out in about a year. So stay tuned.
00:41:11.700
I'm looking forward to that. My guest today is Admiral Stavridis. His latest book is called
00:41:15.980
Sailing True North. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find out more
00:41:19.800
information about his work at his website, admiralstav. That's admiralstav.com. Also check out
00:41:24.400
our show notes at aom.is slash true north. You can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:41:31.680
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at artofmanliness.com
00:41:40.640
where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles about different topics.
00:41:44.180
And also check out The Strenuous Life, strenuoslife.co. It's an online platform that we created to help you
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00:42:28.600
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