I used to think I had leadership figured out.

I knew what I believed. I knew who was right. I had a uniform on, a rank on the collar, and a set of opinions I could defend in any room I walked into.

Then I got stuck in a car somewhere west of nowhere, with nothing but an AM radio, and everything I thought I knew started to come apart.

That is the story I want to tell you. Bear with me. There’s a point.

The Drive

Oklahoma, 2005. One in the morning. The FM band was empty. I rolled the dial down to AM out of boredom.

It was 2005. I was a captain. I’d been in long enough to be cocky and not long enough to know I was. The road was a two-lane through Oklahoma at one o’clock in the morning, the kind of stretch where the FM band gives up between towns and your phone may as well be a paperweight. I rolled the dial down to AM out of boredom.

What you find on AM at one in the morning, in the middle of America, is political talk radio. Not music. Not weather. Talk. Hosts and callers, two- and three-hour blocks of somebody making a case — and somebody else, two channels over, making the opposite case twice as loud. You don’t go looking for it. It finds you.

The signal I locked onto was a national political talk show coming out of a station I’d never heard of, hosted by a man I had been trained — by family, by neighborhood, by tribe — to dismiss before he finished his first sentence. I knew which side he was on inside thirty seconds. I knew which side I was on. I was already loaded for bear. I was ready to hate every word.

I didn’t.

I sat with the radio on for the better part of an hour. I let him talk. I let his callers talk. Some of them were exactly the caricatures my side had told me to expect. Some of them were not. One was a woman who sounded a lot like my own mother — only she was making an argument my mother would have walked out of a room over.

The host wasn’t subtle. He wasn’t particularly fair. He was wrong about plenty. But two or three times in that hour, he said something I could not immediately throw away. Something my own side had never told me. Something that would have sounded like heresy at any dinner table I’d grown up at.

I drove the rest of the way home with the radio off.

The next week, I did something I had never done in my life. I went to the bookstore — the actual bookstore, this was before Amazon owned the world — and I bought two books on the subject. One from his side. One from mine. I read them both, with a pen in my hand, the way I’d been taught to read intel reports.

By the end of the second book, my opinion had moved. Not all the way across the field. Not anywhere close. But enough that I could no longer pretend the other side was made of monsters and idiots.

Here’s the line that matters: I didn’t change because someone convinced me. I changed because I got curious enough to check.

That sentence is the entire reason I am writing this article.

Two books. A pen. Read the way you’d read an intelligence summary from a country whose intentions you don’t yet understand.

What Reading Actually Is

There is a quote you’ve probably seen on a poster in some commander’s office. They credit it to Truman. Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers. I’ve hunted for the primary source on it. I can’t find one. I don’t actually care.

What I care about is the part the poster leaves out.

Leaders aren’t defined by what they know. They’re defined by what they’re willing to reconsider.

And the only way you reconsider anything — really reconsider it, not just nod politely while a colleague talks — is if you’ve read something outside the four walls of your own beliefs.

Reading isn’t about books. Reading is about input diversity.

  • If you only read what you already agree with, you become predictable. Your boss can guess your conclusion before you open your mouth. So can your enemy.
  • If you only read inside your own industry, you become replaceable. Every problem you face has been solved better by somebody in a field you’ve never heard of, and you’ll never know it.
  • If you only read headlines, you become manipulatable. Somebody is paying very good money to make sure the headline you saw today is the headline that pays them tomorrow.

The battlefield has changed. The war is over information now. And most people — most leaders, most veterans, most Americans — are fighting it with one source.

That is not a strategy. That is a target.

What the Military Already Knows

Here’s the part that makes me angriest as a retired officer.

In uniform, we trained for contested environments. We trained for incomplete data, for multiple competing threats, for the certainty that the first report from the field would be wrong. We had whole career fields built around the discipline of refusing single-source intelligence. A young intel lieutenant who briefed her commander off one source and only one source was the worst intel lieutenant in the building, and everybody in the room knew it.

And then, somewhere between the retirement ceremony and the second cup of coffee on Monday morning, a lot of us stopped training our minds the way we trained our units.

We pick a cable channel. We pick a podcast. We pick a feed. We let the algorithm read for us. And we wonder why every conversation with a brother-in-law at Thanksgiving feels like a hostage negotiation.

General Jim Mattis put it bluntly in a 2003 email that has been pinned to officer corps walls ever since:

“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”

Mattis kept a personal library of more than seven thousand volumes. He read every memoir written by a former Secretary of Defense before he became one. The man went into Fallujah with Marcus Aurelius in his rucksack.

The reason was not that Mattis was a reader. The reason was that Mattis refused, on principle, to be a single-source intel officer for his own decisions. He was contested-environment trained, and he kept training, and he kept his mind in the same shape he kept his Marines.

That is the standard. That is the whole standard.

Two Leaders

I have served under both of these people. So have you.

Leader A reads only what confirms what he already believes. He speaks in certainties. He runs every meeting like a verdict. His subordinates learn very fast that bringing him a contrary fact is a career limiting move. He is loud. He is decisive. He is, more often than anyone is willing to say to his face, blindsided — by markets, by enemies, by his own people, by the world.

Leader B reads against the grain on purpose. She seeks out the smartest version of the argument she most disagrees with. She thinks one beat slower than Leader A and decides one order of magnitude better. She does not get blindsided, because she has already war-gamed the surprise in private at her kitchen table at six in the morning, with a pen and a book by somebody she didn’t want to agree with.

I will tell you which one I wanted to fly with. I will tell you which one I wanted commanding the ground I was about to walk on.

It was never the loud one.

Confidence without curiosity isn’t leadership. It’s loud ignorance with rank.

What This Costs You

The leader who stops reading does not stop deciding. He just starts deciding from a smaller and smaller pool of inputs. Every year his mental map of the world gets a little more cartoonish. The other side gets a little stupider in his telling. His own side gets a little nobler. The next surprise gets a little bigger.

One day a problem walks into his office that his pool can’t solve, and somebody pays for it. Sometimes that somebody is a junior employee. Sometimes that somebody is a Marine. Sometimes that somebody is the country.

Mattis warned about exactly this in the same email: “Any commander who claims he is too busy to read is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.” He was talking about Iraq. He could have been talking about a startup. He could have been talking about a marriage.

Somewhere in those pages is a sentence you cannot immediately throw away. That one sentence is the difference between Leader A and Leader B for the rest of your career.

What to Do This Week

I’m not going to hand you a reading list. The Service Chiefs publish theirs every year — Marine Commandant’s, Army Chief of Staff’s, CSAF’s, CNO’s. Pick one if you don’t know where to start.

Here is the only piece of advice I’ve earned the right to give.

This week, read something that makes you uncomfortable.

Not a book that flatters you. Not a book that hands you ammunition for your next argument. A book by somebody you have spent years dismissing. Read it the way you would read an intelligence summary from a country whose intentions you don’t yet understand. Pen in hand. Skeptical, but honest.

You may not change your mind on anything. But somewhere in those pages is a sentence you cannot immediately throw away. That one sentence is the difference between Leader A and Leader B for the rest of your career.

The moment you stop reading is the moment you start falling behind. You just won’t realize it yet. By the time you do, the people you are supposed to be leading will already know.

I changed my mind, that night on the AM radio, because I got curious enough to check. Thirty years later, that is still the only definition of leadership I trust.

If you want to lead better, don’t start by speaking.

Start by reading something that makes you uncomfortable.

Sources & Fact-Check Trail

About the Author

Michael Komorous is the host of Voice for Valor, a podcast dedicated to sharing the stories of military veterans, first responders, and their families. A combat-rated Air Force officer, Mike served as a nuclear missile operator, C-17 pilot, and MQ-1 Predator pilot before managing rated personnel across the Air National Guard. His policy career spans legislative affairs, defense acquisitions, and geopolitical strategy at OSD Policy.

Today Mike builds AI systems and leads Alpha Zulu Solutions, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business focused on defense technology and government contracting.

Watch the podcast on YouTube | Visit voiceforvalor.com