Leadership means not only knowing, but loving the knowing. American essayist Logan Pearsall Smith once said, "The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves."
It's become fashionable to sniff at this as workaholism or wonkishness. But it's really describing someone who has found joy in the innumerable nuts and bolts of work. And that is precisely what the greatest leaders of free societies have possessed. Winston Churchill even arranged his sleeping hours into two parts so as to "press a day and a half's work into one." Oddly, it's been the hallmark of dictators to be careless and spendthrift of governing, preferring to franchise the real work to underlings who must then compete for the dictator's attention.
