He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But experience had been his great teacher from boyhood, and in this his greatest test, he learned steadily from experience.
This description is from David McCullough's soon-to-be published biography of George Washington, "1776," parts of which are excerpted in Newsweek.
Learning from experience can be very hard. Just look at how many of us keep making the same mistakes over and over again. You've heard it said that each of us is given certain lessons of life to learn.
How do you know when?
Whenever you feel victimized, annoyed, frustrated or stuck, you could ask yourself the question what am I supposed to learn here?
Surprisingly, you'll always come up with an answer. That's learning from experience.
I'm so looking forward to rethinking Washington with this new biography. I want to understand better how this rich, vain slaveholder became such a stunning leader of men. Fearless, hopeful and persevering, he would lead a rag tag group of rebels with his sheer commanding and compelling physical presence to defeat the most powerful army in the world. What was it about him?
McCullough writes:
If you know history, you know there is no such thing as a self-made man or self-made woman. We are shaped by people we have never met.
That's certainly true of Washington, our founding father. Every American alive today owes at least an occasional moment of gratitude and appreciation to those long ago who in 1776
carried the fight for independence forward a year of all-too-few victories, of sustained suffering, disease, hunger, desertion, cowardice, disillusionment, defeat, terrible discouragement, and fear, as they would never forget, but also of phenomenal courage and bedrock devotion to country, and that, too, they would never forget.
Posted by Jill Fallon at May 20, 2005 1:54 PM | Permalink