Paleolithic Leadership Analysis

Biology commands the body to have a hardwired ability to adapt to adversity — muscles build through brutal tearing followed by periods of recuperation, adrenaline floods the body when one is challenged with a life-threatening situation, and when faced with insurmountable odds, the body has shown the tenacious ability to surmount them. Since the Paleolithic era, this adaptation to stress has been required of the human-being to survive the dangers of an unpredictable world filled with wild animals and unknown people. Today’s age also features hidden dangers, but the conquest of modern challenges frequently engenders psychological rather than physical change. Problems such as poverty and political hardship require ingenuity rather than brute

From the very beginning of American history, turmoil has facilitated talent. For example, the tumultuous nature of the American Revolution revealed the breadth of President George Washington’s leadership ability. The Revolutionary War forced him into a position of military leadership, but Washington chose to accept the challenge rather than shy away from unquestionable difficulty. This decision alone served as the stimulus for his transformation into a figure most admired for his remarkable ability to harness both great strength and great restraint. The difficulty of fighting the British resulted in the development of his strength because he had to effectively command a colonial army, and his later presidency disclosed his restraint through his meticulous legislation and precedents.War shaped President Abraham Lincoln as well, exposing his talent for mediation and unification. The violently divisive conditions of the Civil War not only disclosed his pragmatic capabilities, but also invoked powerful oration such as the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address. Thus, hardship not only revealed Lincoln’s broad talent of allying opposing groups with one another, but also exposed secondary talents such as oration and organization. Still, many argue that though hardships positively influenced leaders such as Washington and Lincoln, Nixon and Buchanan evidence that hardship can

Though authors employ a multitude of strategies to create multifaceted, dynamic characters, conflict is a tool they frequently choose. Conflict presents characters with a hardship in order to reveal development, and thus, literature provides countless hypothetical examples of talent disclosed by adversity. For example, the archetype of the super-hero depends entirely upon the correlation between hardship and talent. In nearly every story, the hero suffers through a childhood marked by abandonment and sorrow only to realize that he or she possesses a hidden talent, and as a result, everything changes. Though the authors have fleshed out that skeleton of a plot in differing ways, the beginning remains the same, and adversity engenders talent every-time. Life imitates art, and this phenomenon occurs on a personal level as frequently as it does on the hypothetical stage of literature. For example, the circumstances of my mother’s childhood gave her the impetus to harness her talents and change not only the course of her life, but that of future generations. Born in a small-town outside of Moscow, my mother realized her inclination for physics and math by the time she was in third grade, but education in the city was standardized in such a manner that she was forever forced to learn at the pace of the least gifted child. Therefore, she took the initiative and began requesting mail-in math and science