Confidence, Competence, and the Power of Books!

Nicknamed “Old Blood and Guts,” General George S. Patton was the most famous and feared general of the twentieth century, but his life hardly started with much of a bang. Having descended from a long line of warriors, from an early age Patton had one aim: to become a great combat commander. To him, this was not a goal but his destiny. However, there was a problem: The young Patton was a horrible student and struggled with what would today be diagnosed as dyslexia and ADHD. “I am either very lazy or very stupid or both,” he said as a young man, “for it is beastly hard for me to learn and as a natural result I hate to study.”

As a cadet at West Point, where he managed to finish only in the middle of his class, Patton continued to struggle with his studies, and was often beset by an “overpowering sense of my own worthlessness.” There was, he wrote, “no one in my class who so hates to be last or who tries so hard to be first and utterly fails.”

Through a massive effort, Patton turned reading, and therefore learning, from a hated chore into a core passion. His library became very large and would ultimately become a key weapon in his quest for fame and fortune on the battlefield. He dived into classics of history and was an ardent student of the Civil War, studying the lives of Lee, Grant and other famous generals. Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon…