Admiral James Stavridis - Sailing true north: ten admirals and the voyage of character

Sea Power

The Accidental Admiral

Partnership for the Americas

Destroyer Captain

C OA UTHORED BY A DMIRAL J AMES S TAVRIDIS , USN (R ET .)

Command at Sea

The Leaders Bookshelf

Watch Officers Guide

Division Officers Guide

When I wrote a book called Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the Worlds Oceans, I hoped to bring a mariners eye to the vast world of the sea. While looking at each of the major global bodies of water, I tried to combine three things: the fascinating history of the various maritime regions; the current geopolitical challenges linked to them, both locally and globally; and my own four decades of seagoing experience. All of this was intended to make a coherent case for the importance of the oceans. It was a book about a long, complicated, and ultimately rewarding voyage around the oceans of the world. When people asked me how long it took to write Sea Power, I would truthfully say about forty years. It was the culmination of my professional life, much of which was spent at sea.

In Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character, I have turned the lens of the work away from the physical universe of the oceans and into the realm of the biographical, personal, behavioral, and psychological characteristics of ten admirals whose careers stretch across 2,500 years of history. By using the sea stories of this colorful group of historical maritime leaders as a kind of canvas, I hope to illuminate for the reader the most essential qualities of character, demonstrate how they contribute to effective leadership, and make the case that by using this information, each of us can chart a course toward becoming the best we can possibly be within our own lives. In the end, a physical voyage at sea is a demanding undertaking, requiring intensity, energy, forehandedness, and intelligence, among many other qualities; but it is vastly easier than the inner voyage we all must sail every day of our lives. That voyage of character is the most important journey each of us ever makes.

I am also motivated by a growing sense in this postmodern era that we are witnessing the slow death of character, driven by a global popular culture that has turned increasingly away from classic valueshonesty, commitment, resilience, accountability, moderationto a world that moves at breakneck speed and refuses to slow down and consider what is right and just. Attention spans have spiraled resolutely downward. Take reading as an example: we were once ready to willingly read a multivolume work; many (including, according to many reports, our president) now balk at reading a single long book. Some readers avoid long journal pieces and demand briefer and briefer articles in slimmer and slimmer magazines. There is online impatience with long blog posts and we seem to have finally arrived at our current state: a Twitter world where many observers recently opined that they regretted the lengthening of a tweet from 140 characters to 280 because reading the long tweets is taking up too much time. One abiding characteristic of most of the ten admirals in this book is that they were thoughtful, intellectually grounded individuals. Perhaps the long periods at sea that almost all of them experienced have something to do with that. Naturally, they manifested a wide variety of differing traits, and some were better and more admirable than others. Ive selected them to help show the richness of the human character across both time and personality types. And above all, we learn from these admirals that the quality of finding sufficient time to think and reflect is a crucial part of building character. In our frenzied world today, we should learn from their collective example.

Alongside the cultural demands for short, ironic, value-neutral thinking comes the utter transparency of our times. As I will say again in this work, character is what you do when you think no one is lookingand in todays world, someone is always looking. We have lost the ability to hone our character in private, and our lives are on display seemingly from the moment we are born. Our intense self-obsession is reflected in the desire to constantly burnish our images on the endless social networks, something none of these admirals remotely encountered, and we are poorer for this characteristic. We overshare publicly and under-reflect privately on what our individual voyages mean. Do they add up to a journey that matters? Is the destination important? In the small hours of the morning, as we think about our lives, can we honestly say our voyage matters? Or do we drift endlessly on an uncaring sea? The answer to these questions is bound up inextricably in the heart of our character.

Finally, we are much diminished in our ability to learn and tell stories in order to advance our intellectual pursuits. In so many ways, the story of our lives is little more than a collection of the stories we have heard, inculcated, and then created and told about ourselves. Most of us want to be part of a society that is dependable, predictable, and stablebut this turbulent twenty-first century, both at home and abroad in an interconnected worldresembles that less and less. The stories we hear seem chaotic, disconnected, and thematically barren: school shootings of children by other children; wars without end in the Middle East; biological advances that presage a godlike power uncoupled from a humanistic, ethical perspective; leaders who routinely lie, cheat, and steal; followers who act out in spasms of anger, fulfilling Tocquevilles dire nineteenth-century prediction that the tragedy of democracy will be that in the end we elect the government we deserve. Self-talk matters deeply, and we must learn to tell ourselves, our peers, and above all our children the stories that inspire a better world.