Waiting your way to the top. Dwight Eisenhower's slow career.

Second Act is coming out in the USA

Sep 01, 2024

Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success is out in hardback in the USA on September 10th. It will also be available in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. (You can already get it on audio and Kindle in those places.) It’s already available in the UK.

Tyler Cowen

called it “One of the very best books written on talent.” Helen Lewis
said, “Second Act showcases Henry’s wide reading, deep understanding and playful prose style. Read this book to discover why it’s never too late for a second act in your own life.”

Here’s a recent podcast where I discuss several parts of the book in detail. Here’s a talk and Q&A I did with the How To Academy which summarises my core argument. This piece is about late bloomers in modern culture. And here’s a piece about Frank Lloyd Wright. Second Act has also been covered by Business Insider and featured in David Brooks’s marvellous piece in the Atlantic.

In anticipation, here’s part of a chapter that I cut out of the final draft. The first half tells the story of Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander and 34th President of the United States. The second part tries to explain how it was that this middle-performing officer, who went without a promotion for sixteen years, became one of the most important men of his generation.

If you want to write to me about late bloomers (I get lots of emails about this and appreciate them all) my contact details are here.

Now, on to Eisenhower’s remarkable late blooming…

A great American second act

Scott Fitzgerald once said there were no second acts in American lives. It’s an oft repeated quotation. It comes from his posthumous novel The Last Tycoon, which was published in 1941—the year that one of the greatest second acts in American history got underway. That was the year the Second World War came to America. If it had come much later, Dwight Eisenhower would not have become Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces and later two-term President of the USA. He would have retired, having spent sixteen years between the First and Second World Wars without a promotion.

Eisenhower’s career strategy was, on one level, to wait out the interwar years and keep himself prepared for the inevitable next conflict—and to hope it happened in his career. Because of this, he benefited from his slow progression. And he was graced to work for, and learn from, three of the best generals in America. His time with these generals taught him what he needed to become the Supreme Allied Commander.

Eisenhower was also a hard worker, a man for detail. What Niall Ferguson said about Napoleon’s sudden ascent to power has some relevance to Eisenhower “In times of chaos it is the micro-manager who ascends—the man who instinctively takes any task upon himself.” Eisenhower was always learning: he studied war strategy and technology, he learned to fly, and he discovered how to deal with big and difficult personalities. He took on jobs in many corners of the army, some big, some small, and every senior officer he worked for became wildly impressed with his abilities. It was this steady reputation building that would allow him to make such astonishing advances during the Second World War.

A slow start and a personal tragedy

Eisenhower’s career progression before the Second World War shows few outward signs of the promise of his eventual elevation. He moved from job to job: sometimes a promotion, sometimes a side water. There are times when he seemed to get an opportunity and then a set-back.

Look beyond the career on paper though, and you see the way Eisenhower was preparing for the next war. Under the guidance of mentors like George Patton, Fox Conner, and Douglas MacArthur he developed from a mid-ranking cadet to the most important and successful Army officer in the West.

Eisenhower graduated from West Point in the middle of his class and became an infantry lieutenant in 1915. He saw no military action in the First World War, being kept in America to run training camps. He desperately wanted battle experience and this was a huge disappointment. After the war, a lot of his friends left the army but he stayed, encouraged by his wife Mamie: “I don’t think you’d be happy,” she told him, “this is your life and you know it and you like it.” So he stayed.

After the war he became a Major, a rank he held for sixteen years. His first job was to test and improve vehicle convoys, which ran very slowly. He then commanded a battalion of tanks.

This was when he worked with George Patton. Eisenhower learned by looking closely at the world. He was so interested in mechanical warfare that he and Patton stripped tanks down to its component parts and reassembled them. This impressed General Fox Conner, who became an important mentor. But this tank obsession was very much against the received wisdom in the Army. He was threatened with court martial if he didn’t stop publishing his ideas about tank use. He obeyed.

His incursion into tanks was the only time he went so openly against the grain in the Army. Mostly, his life in the Army between the wars was passive. One biographer says, “He made almost no decisions between his twenty-eighth and fifty-first birthdays, except to stay in the miniscule Army and do his best.” It was a far sighted strategy that would pay off more than any other career path could have done.

This was not a time for career advancement. And not just because the Army didn’t believe in tanks. The military shrank in peace time. By the time the Second World War broke out, America’s Army was smaller than Poland’s.

There were personal reasons for Eisenhower’s quiet period, too. In 1920, the Eisenhower’s three-year-old son died of scarlet fever, contracted from a maid who hadn’t told the family she had recently been ill. Grief and guilt swept over Eisenhower and Mamie. Their happy and straightforward life had become bleak and empty. “For a long time,” Mamie later said, “it was as if a light had gone out in Ike’s life.”

General Conner: the first mentor

Two years later, Eisenhower was transferred to work with General Conner, who had visited Eisenhower’s battalion and been impressed with the young man’s detailed and insistent interest in tanks. When he arrived to work with Conner, Eisenhower was reading Westerns, pulp magazines, and training manuals. Conner changed that. Under Conner’s tutelage for the next two years, Eisenhower read Clauswitz three times, as well as much history and philosophy, and the memoirs of Civil War generals like Grant and Sherman. Conner catechised Eisenhower about the history of military strategy. “What would have happened if they had done this or that differently?” “What were his alternatives?” Eisenhower couldn’t afford to buy these books, so Conner lent them to him.

This was the first significant period of mentorship for Eisenhower. It was Conner who told Eisenhower the Treaty of Versailles would lead to another war in which America would have to fight with Allies. The mistake of the last war had been to not put one officer in supreme command, said Conner. That should be avoided next time. Conner’s influence would eventually run deeper than Eisenhower could know.

Eisenhower’s next job was a brief stint in a football coaching job, a sorry set-back. So Conner pulled strings to get him into the Command and General Staff School, a serious opportunity. This was usually reserved for people who had been to Infantry School, which Eisenhower had not. One officer told him he wasn’t ready and that attending would set back his entire career. Conner, who was probably the only person really aware of Eisenhower’s talents at this point, reassured him that his three years’ of studying Grant and Sherman and Clauswitz meant Eisenhower was “far better trained and ready” for the Staff School “than anybody I know.”

Eisenhower worked hard now, inspired by Conner. He put down the pulp and studied like hell. He had been 61st for academics and 125th for discipline in his West Point class of 164, in 1915. When he graduated from the Command and General Staff School in 1926, he came first in the class.

Always the football coach…

This was not the golden ticket he might have dreamed it to be. After graduating, he turned down another football coaching job for the chance to lead a battalion in Georgia. When he arrived, though, he was expected to coach football as well. Football was one thing he had excelled at at West Point and it hung round his neck for years. His perpetual role as football coach, said Mamie, “just irritated him beyond words.”

Conner intervened again and had Eisenhower sent to D.C. to write a report on European battlefields. He did such a good job he was sent to Army War College, the training ground for senior officers of the future. Despite still not agreeing with the standard Army view of tanks, Eisenhower undertook his studies diligently and obediently. He kept his own mind but he was also obedient.

On graduation he had another choice: got to Paris to update his report, or join the General Staff. The General Staff would have been a splendid opportunity—a real step on the road to advancement. But Mamie insisted on Paris. She’d had enough of trekking round American Army bases. And so they went to France for fifteen months of gentle fun. Mamie recalled that Eisenhower disliked his time in Paris, “He didn’t like his Commanding Officer, and he had to tramp, and I mean literally walk, all over that part of France, but it stood him in such good stead in World War II, for he knew exactly where he was going.”

General MacArthur: the second mentor

On his return he worked for the Assistant Secretary of War, another quiet job. That is, until the new Chief of Staff arrived the next year, one General Douglas MacArthur. So unrewarding was his time with Assistant Secretary for War in the Philippines, Eisenhower considered taking a job as a military editor of a newspaper! The salary would have been six or seven times his Army pay. But he remembered what Conner had told him: the next war was coming and he needed to be ready. He regretted missing action in the First World War so much that it guided his career decisions now.

He was first transferred to work directly for MacArthur in 1933, after the Secretaries for War were all replaced by the incoming Democratic administration. Then, in 1935, Eisenhower went with MacArthur to the Philippines.

MacArthur was the Army’s biggest, most rambunctious and pugnacious, personality. He was an unmanageable, petulant egoist with a zesty temper, full of ungovernable and unrealistic political ambitions. He was a big man who was never above releasing fits of abuse onto his subordinates, something Eisenhower resented.

MacArthur was the opposite of Eisenhower who controlled his feelings and modulated his ambitions into steady obedient work.

MacArthur wanted the Presidency, obviously and insistently, and never got it; Eisenhower was shy of high office, waiting to be nominated, not holding himself forward, and won two outstanding victories. MacArthur held forth whenever he could and irrespective of how interested his listeners were; Eisenhower was uncomfortable in front of a camera. MacArthur was known for being dislikable; Eisenhower won re-election in no small part due to his demeanour. (Indeed, MacArthur made the keynote speech at the 1952 Republican conference, full of his usual feisty energy. As Michael Schaller said, “The delegates cheered dutifully but then nominated another war hero, General Dwight D. Eisenhower.”) MacArthur was right-wing, not just to the extent that he opposed the New Deal—he infamously oversaw the violent dispersal of military veterans who gathered in Washington to protest about pensions. Eisenhower was studiously unpolitical, and studiously unprovocative. Perhaps the best summary of MacArthur’s character and reputation came from Harry Truman, who privately called the general: “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five-Star MacArthur.”

With all his faults, and, indeed, because of them, MacArthur was an unignorable personality with a natural instinct for drawing focus to himself. Eisenhower called him “the most persuasive devil”. And he was important to Eisenhower’s career. Sometimes working with a negative mentor—a close example of misguided brilliance—can be just as useful as experiencing a more traditional mentor who helps and guides you through advice and example. Whereas Eisenhower had learned by listening to Conner and following his advice, the lessons he took from MacArthur were all about what not to do. He watched MacArthur without imitating him. He later said, “I believe in the great value of example—the way a man acts.”

MacArthur seems to have been impressed by Eisenhower, who would later recall, “he and I used to have, even when he was a 4-Star General and I was a Major, some very tough arguments, but he was always very nice about it and he would laugh at me when I would get too vehement and tell me to go on back to my business.” In a report on Eisenhower, written in the mid-1930s, MacArthur wrote: “This is the best officer in the Army. When the next war comes, he should go right to the top.” Eisenhower’s talents were starting to be recognised, some dozen years or more after the First World War was over.

Despite being posted to Manilla with MacArthur and spending several years dealing with the fiery brouhaha of a man who thought himself brilliant—and despite the fact that two senior officers were now convinced of his unique abilities—these were still quiet years in Eisenhower’s career. “He was still a major with no immediate prospects”, wrote Stephen E. Ambrose in Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President Elect, 1890–1952.

“We are talking about a career, not miracles”

One important lesson Eisenhower took from MacArthur was about effectiveness. MacArthur’s job was to enable the Philippines to defend itself on a small budget. It was slow work involving many meetings. MacArthur’s optimism far outran his resources and progress. This tested Eisenhower’s nerves. When he was offered a job as an officer in the practically non-existent Philippine army, he recoiled. That was not the route to the wartime success he had so patiently waited for.

Another job offer came along in 1938, when he got into a row about Nazism at a party. Eisenhower was strongly anti-Nazi and was friendly with many in the local Jewish community. His interlocutors did not share his feelings. The strength of his position caused a Jewish committee to ask him to be in charge of finding places for Jewish refugees to Asia to live. Again, this would have been a significant salary bump. Again, he stayed in the Army, despite working for the impetuous, imperious MacArthur.

Then, in December 1939, he went home, hoping to be of service to his country. The war Conner predicted had begun; opportunity was at hand.

Still, he was realistic. In 1940, Eisenhower was telling his son he would be forced to retire as a lieutenant colonel. “In an emergency anything can happen,” he told John, “but we are talking about a career, John, not miracles.” When John asked if he felt he had wasted his life, he said, “Not at all.” As Stephen Ambrose put it, “He had lived on four continents and worked for and with great men.”

Eisenhower was underestimating himself. The wheel of fortune was about to turn. And he was better prepared for it than anybody.

Now began the hard work of war. Working with the infantry to prepare to fight Germany, Eisenhower often put in eighteen hours a day. He got to know his men, paid attention to their morale, and knew they would fight best if they knew what they were fighting for and why. He believed that the American soldier was “an intelligent human being” who deserved to know “the reasons why his country took up arms.” Eisenhower contrasted this with the more common belief among officers that soldiers need a sense of pride in their unit and to be blooded in battle. Eisenhower understood the importance of preparation. “Any commander that neglects to get around and see the last man in the ranks when he can,” he said, “is making a great mistake.”

He explained the decisions he made, in the plain language that would make him so popular as President. (His deep understanding that “the human spirit is still the great motivating world-wide force” made him successful in the Army and in politics.) And he expected everyone to work as hard as he could. Ike had no room for idleness.

General Marshall: the third mentor

In 1941 he was finally promoted to Colonel and shortly afterwards picked by General Marshall to work with the Third Army on an exercise that involved the largest body of troops put into the field by the U.S.A. since 1918. Marshall was to be the third of Eisenhower’s mentors, the men who spotted, nurtured, encouraged—or in the case of MacArthur, goaded—his talents. Under Eisenhower’s plan, the Third Army utterly trounced the Second Army in the war game. His patient preparations were starting to shine.

When Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, Marshall summoned Eisenhower back to Washington. Eisenhower had no idea what the meeting was about and was stunned when the general gave him a twenty minute debrief on the situation, notably on the state of resources in the Pacific and the threat from Japan to the Philippines, and then leaned across his desk and asked, “What should be our general line of action?”

Eisenhower went straight to a desk and started typing. Eisenhower knew this was his moment. He had to give Marshall a “prompt” and “unimpeachable” answer if he was going to be of any help at a critical moment. As he sat at the desk, “a curious echo from long ago came to my aid.” It was General Conner, whose words Eisenhower recorded in his memoir.

We cannot escape another great war. When we go into the war we will be in company with allies. Systems of single command will have to be worked out. We must not accept the ‘co-ordination’ concept under which Foch was compelled to work. We must insist on individual and single responsibility—leaders will have to learn how to overcome nationalistic considerations in the conduct of campaigns. One man who can do it is Marshall—he is close to being a genius.

Eisenhower’s breadth of learning came to mind as well. Now he would be vindicated about the importance of mobilising tank units in battle, rather than dotting tanks around as infantry support, as had been the approach to tanks in the First World War. He knew about the need to mobilise industry, the need for unprecedented strength in air power. He could see that it would take years to mobilise enough resources to win the fight. Speed and concentration were essential.

His experience with the Chief of Staff, training at War College, and travelling round the world, meant he had considered and digested all of these crucial topics. He had been called in because of his experience in the Philippines—but he was ready and prepared to answer the question more broadly, and with the tight, well-reasoned logic of Fox Conner, not the blousy rhetoric of MacArthur. He dissected the problem and assembled a solution with the care and precision it took to strip and rebuild a tank.

He knew that it was hopeless to save the Philippines, being all too aware of the gap between MacArthur’s mouth and his resources. So Eisenhower proposed a defensive strategy. Resources were not available, but Eisenhower proposed doing everything humanly possible to keep the Philippines safe.

Marshall had set this question as a test. Eisenhower passed and was set to work.

The best man in the Army

Now Marshall saw what MacArthur and Conner already knew. Eisenhower was the best man in the Army. He recommended Eisenhower for promotion to Major General. And Eisenhower learned from Marshall, as he had from the other generals he’d worked for. Ambrose: “Marshall’s rapid absorption of the fundamentals of a presentation, his decisiveness, and his utter refusal to entertain any thought of failure infused the whole War Department with energy and confidence.”

Eisenhower learned other valuable lessons at this time. In 1942 there was a proposal to send an armoured division to reinforce British troops in Egypt. Eisenhower recommended General Patton, his old tank mentor, to command the division. Others were reluctant to take on such tasks as beneath them and Patton had the expertise in tanks and was “an outstanding leader of troops.” It was not to be. Lack of shipping thwarted the project.

Eisenhower had been astonished at the resistance to Patton within the War Department, due to his “bizarre mannerisms and sometimes unpredictable actions.” Here was America desperately trying to mobilise for war and mere personality was dominating decisions. “I realised that selection of personnel for key positions would, even in times of war, frequently be opposed only on the basis of routine consideration and commonly accepted standards, and would sometimes be influenced by nothing more important than a single factor of deportment.”

Eisenhower had met this groupthink before with tanks and he was about to meet it again with the question of the Normandy landings.

“This is it. I approve.”

It was time to concentrate Allied forces in Europe and North Africa and defeat Germany first. Eisenhower’s insight that Allied forces were too thinly scattered and needed to be concentrated in Europe was essential to victory. But there was deep resistance within the War Department to the idea of invading France. It was believed by most people that the fortified coast of Western Europe could not be attacked. For many, trying to get through the U-boats and German air defences was “military suicide.” The American air force believed their role would be diminished in this attack.

“It was patiently explained over and over again” that coordination of bombing and ground strategy was essential to the plan—“as the air consistently assisted the advance of the ground forces its long-range work would not only be facilitated but destruction of its selected targets would contribute more effectively and directly to Nazi defeat.” To Eisenhower this was obvious, but it required weeks of “prolonged and earnest argument.”

Marshall had Eisenhower and others draw up a specific plan for the invasion of France, along with many technical papers. “With his usual receptiveness and open-mindedness”, Marshall “invited a full explanation” of the invasion plan. The combination of air and ground force would neutralise German defences and cut communications. It was a bold plan and the resources needed to pull it off, notably the sheer volume of aircraft, were not yet available. It was a long presentation. Marshall listened carefully.

And then: “This is it. I approve.”

The plan was presented to Roosevelt. It then went over to the British. Eisenhower was coming to the centre of things. By May 1942 he was in command of American forces in England, working closely with top British brass who all found him likeable. Unlike MacArthur, Eisenhower was someone you could work with. They liked Ike.

Surrounded by competing political interests in Europe, throughout the war, Eisenhower kept this difficult balance. Now, too, he was a public figure and his gifts for PR came to the fore.

The man who would be President one day started to emerge.

Death’s brief interlude

In March 1942, Eisenhower’s father died. This creates a startling moment in his papers. The curt official tone of war vanishes in a rush of sadness. Eisenhower took almost no rest from his work. The day after it happened he left work early—at 7.30pm. In his diary, he wrote: “I should like so much to be with my Mother these few days. But we’re at war! And war is not soft—it has no time to indulge even the deepest and most sacred emotions.” The next day, the day of the funeral, he cleared his schedule for half an hour to gather his thoughts.

The war didn’t stop though, so neither did Eisenhower.

What he wrote in that diary that day gives us some insights into the way Eisenhower was raised—into the values both of his family and community that were so clearly animating him during those early war years.

My Father was buried today. I’ve shut off all business and visitors for thirty minutes—to have that much time, by myself, to think of him. He had a full life. He left six boys and, most fortunately for him, Mother survives him. He was not quite 79 years old, but for the past year he has been extremely old physically. Hardened arteries, kidney trouble, etc. He was a just man, well liked well educated, a thinker. He was undemonstrative, quiet, modest, and of exemplary habits—he never used alcohol or tobacco. He was an uncomplaining person in the face of adversity, and such plaudits as were accorded him did not inflate his ego.
His finest monument is his reputation in Abilene and Dickson Co., Kansas. His word has been his bond and accepted as such, his sterling honesty, his insistence on the immediate payment of all debts, his pride in his independence earned him a reputation that has profited all of us boys. Because of it, all central Kansas helped me to secure an appointment to West Point in 1911, and thirty years later, it did the same for my son, John. My only regret is that it was always so difficult to let him know the great depth of my affection for him.

Overlord

In 1942, Eisenhower wanted to plan for D-Day the following year. Britain, however, wanted to rout Germany in North Africa first. Roosevelt sided with Churchill, and so Eisenhower’s plans were delayed. In return, America would appoint the supreme commander. Inevitably, they picked Eisenhower. The North African campaign was a success. This was the turning point. “We never had a victory before El Alamain,” said Churchill, “and we never had a defeat afterwards.”

After the surrender of Axis troops to Eisenhower in Tunisia in 1943, the path was clear for the Allies to invade Sicily and move up Italy. So began the slow defeat of Germany and the crawl of victory towards Berlin. Eisenhower became a four-star general. And then, in December 1943, amid plans for Operation Overlord, when the Allies would land at Normandy—finally, the realisation of Eisenhower’s grand strategy to begin the end of the war—Roosevelt made him Supreme Allied Commander.

Aged fifty-three, Eisenhower had arrived. A mild-mannered, middle-aged star was born and he would remain predominant on the world stage for the next two decades.

Explaining Eisenhower

There are three important aspects of Eisenhower’s strange career path that help explain what happened to him. First, he was unusually interested in things like tanks—he had intensity. Second, he kept the balance of being an individual within a conformist organisation. Third, he never chased immediate promotion.

Many of the people studied in this book shared Eisenhower’s intensity. It marks them out unreally from the rest. Think of Ray Kroc, who travelled across the country just to see a hamburger restaurant because it had ordered more milkshake mixers than any of his other customers. Similarly, there is something more akin to the amateur scientist than the budding army officer in Eisenhower’s willingness to strip a tank. These behaviours are often incomprehensible to other people. They simply cannot see them for what they are.

The Army must have been full of officers of Eisenhower’s generation who anticipated another war: many of them left to make better money elsewhere. This is not about ambition, curiosity, or the unwillingness to give up—those are the homilies of what it takes to be a success. But those qualities are merely necessary, not sufficient. To spot this sort of talent, we must look also for the persistent interests, the willingness to give over precious time to peculiar interests—people for whom stripping a tank doesn’t seem unusual.

Persistence alone is not the key characteristic. What you persist at matters. Late bloomers often seem to be chasing phantom goals. They might have a sense of some future success, however vague, and be willing to let current opportunities pass them by in pursuit of the bigger idea, vague as it may be—with really no guarantee of success at all.

This is not just how late life success is made. This is the cause of much failure and disappointment too. In short, late bloomers like Eisenhower are often quite weird.

An Organisation Man

In his ability to retain his individuality within a conformist structure, Eisenhower was a man of his time. In 1957, right in the middle of Eisenhower’s time as President, the sociologist William H. Whyte, Jr. published a bestselling book, The Organisation Man. Whyte argued that the traditionally individualistic Protestant work ethic was being replaced with a conformist, organisational ethic in post-war corporate America. As C. Wright Mills said in his review, the basic premise was that “the entrepreneurial scramble to success has been largely replaced by the organisational crawl.”

Whyte saw a new corporate culture that wanted a new kind of recruit: one who would manage the business rather than change it. So deeply embedded was this new conformity (which prioritised management over ideas, a steady ship over a creative one) that Whyte’s book is full of quotations from new college graduates saying things like, “I would sacrifice brilliance for human understanding every time”.

“And they do,” Whyte laconically adds.

The work of having ideas, this generation of personnel directors and ambitious graduates believed, was finished. The task now was to “do a good shirt-sleeves job.” The only place left where creativity was still alive and well was in corporate executives’ rhetoric.

Whyte’s rather tentative solution was not for individuals to fight the system but to strive for “individualism within organisational life.” This did not mean finding space for yourself outside of work. What we call work-life balance, Whyte saw as part of the problem with the new conformism. Under the impression that the time of having ideas was over and this was the age of management, the new generation were entirely comfortable telling their boss they didn’t want to work late. To Whyte, this was the opposite of the Protestant work ethic that had taken America to greatness.

In a quote that could be applied to almost any of the examples of late bloomers in this book, he said, “To the executive there is between his work and the rest of his life a unity he can never fully explain, and least of all to his wife.” This is certainly true of Eisenhower, who was working Sundays, against Mamie’s protests, at the time when America entered the Second World War. He had worked Saturdays fairly regularly throughout his career.

But what marks out Eisenhower here is his ability to conform to his Army orders, even when he hated them, as his mentor General Conner told him too, without losing his individualism: his ideas about the use of tanks were scorned by the establishment throughout his career—until they became an important part of Allied military strategy in the Second World War.

Eisenhower once told a historian about the way the principles of war that he learned in Staff School had to be applied without the rigidity with which the Army had taught them:

in all staff schools these principles were in the students mind and they tended, I think, to inculcate in him a logical approach to military problems. But I don't believe that anyone would ever sit down with a military plan and ask himself, “Does this proposal conform strictly with all the ‘Principles of War’?” For example quite frequently the desire for security might easily conflict with the desire for surprise.

Eisenhower had learned how to follow the rules without absorbing the Army’s culture of intellectual fealty. Thus he was ready to think creatively when opportunity presented itself. He knew how to overcome groupthink. Not with the petulance of MacArthur and by avoiding the difficulties, however unfair, someone like Patton faced. Not with rhetoric. Not by expressing individuality. But with patient argument.

He created logical, well-informed proposals. He wrote out concise technical papers. He demonstrated through his knowledge, perspective, and judgement that he could produce the right strategy. He didn’t let the conformist view change his mind. He stuck to what he knew to be right through mentorship, study, and experience.

“Every experience you have today helps you do something else.”

Eisenhower took a simple approach to his career. Rather than constantly looking for the next promotion or opportunity, he focussed on being the best he could be in his current role, on making himself ready for opportunity. By being thus prepared, he was able to rise to the immense challenges that the Second World War offered.

He wrote in his memoir—

Don’t be afraid to reach upward. Apart from the rewards of friendship, the association might pay off at some unforeseen time—that is only an accidental by-product. The important thing is that learning will make you a better person.

Even though Eisenhower’s career had been slow and disappointing, he was following a steady and persistent strategy.

“Every experience you have today,” Mamie said, “helps you do something else.”

This is a section of my book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Teach You About Success which didn’t make it into the final draft. Second Act is coming out in in hardback the USA on September 10th. It will also be available in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. (It’s already available in the UK.)