Crisis Is the Catalyst

The more I read about great leaders, the more I notice the same pattern: they don’t rise in calm times. They rise in chaos.

Hamilton was an orphan from a Caribbean island with nothing. He arrives in New York right as the colonies are about to break from Britain. Without that revolution, he’s a smart kid with no connections who maybe becomes a lawyer. Instead, he becomes Washington’s right hand, designs the financial system of a new country, and changes the course of history. The crisis made the man, or at least, it gave the man the opening.

Napoleon is the same story. He’s a minor Corsican noble, an artillery officer with a thick accent that Parisian elites laughed at. Then the French Revolution tears the entire old order apart. Every established general is either dead, exiled, or discredited. Suddenly there’s massive, unprecedented room for a young officer who’s competent and ambitious. By twenty-six he’s commanding the Army of Italy. Without the revolution, he retires as a colonel if he’s lucky.

Ho Chi Minh spent decades wandering (Paris, Moscow, Canton), organizing, writing, waiting. He was a revolutionary without a revolution. Then World War II happens, Japan occupies Indochina, France collapses, and suddenly the entire colonial order is shattered. He walks into that vacuum and declares independence. The crisis didn’t create his ideas, but it created the conditions where his ideas could actually win.

Churchill is maybe the clearest case. He was politically finished by the late 1930s. A washed-up backbencher who’d been wrong about India, wrong about the abdication, too aggressive, too old-fashioned. Then the war comes, and everything that made him difficult in peacetime (the stubbornness, the rhetoric, the refusal to compromise) becomes exactly what Britain needs. The crisis didn’t just open the door for him. It made his specific qualities, which were liabilities in normal times, into the most valuable assets in the country.

Alexander the Great inherited a throne because his father was assassinated. If Philip II had lived another twenty years, would Alexander have conquered Persia at twenty-five? Would he have conquered it at all? Philip was already the most powerful man in Greece. Alexander might have spent his prime waiting in the wings, growing restless, maybe even growing complacent.

The pattern is always the same: a crisis destroys the existing order, and in the wreckage, young and hungry people rise faster than they ever could have in stable times. The old guard is gone or weakened. The rules are suspended. The people who thrive are the ones who are agile enough to move when everything is moving.

You can see it in the American founding. These were mostly young men: Hamilton was in his twenties, many of the others in their thirties. In a stable British colonial system, they’d have been merchants, lawyers, minor politicians. The revolution compressed decades of career into years. It took people who would have been notable and made them historic.

I think about this a lot, actually. Not just as history, but as a lens for right now. Whenever there’s a major disruption (a war, a financial crisis, a technological shift), the instinct is to see it as a threat. And it is. But it’s also the moment when the next generation gets its opening. The old playbook stops working, and the people who can write a new one fastest are almost always younger, hungrier, and less attached to how things used to be. Perhaps AI is that moment for Gen Z, who knows.

Crisis doesn’t create greatness. But it creates the conditions for greatness to emerge. So if you are living in a country or in an environment where things are going bad, perhaps having this perspective would give you some energy to try things.