When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Be curious. Read wildly. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity.
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.