#23 Momentous Movie Review: Young Washington
Check out the leadership lessons from Young Washington
Steve Steele
10/5/20268 min read
Before He Was Washington
With family in town this week(end), we sat down and checked out a movie we were all interested in, Young Washington.
I love historical epics with big stakes and stories of real people facing impossible circumstances. I watched it the same way I watched The Odyssey a few months ago: looking forward to a good story, not planning to write about it. And then, about twenty minutes in, I stopped being a moviegoer and started being a coach and leader seeing the film through a lens I couldn't turn off.
Director Jon Erwin's movie isn't really just about George Washington. It's a movie about what happens before anyone becomes the leader history remembers. It's a movie about failure, accountability, and the long, humbling process by which a young man with enormous ambition and very little wisdom slowly becomes someone worth following.
If you haven't seen it yet, go and watch it and come back and read the rest of this. There are spoilers ahead, but more importantly, there are lessons that belong on every leader's shelf.
Before He Was Great, He Was Wrong
The movie opens with a version of Washington most of us have never been introduced to. Rather than depicting him as a naturally great war hero and born leader, he is portrayed as young, flawed, and impressionable. Early on, he is dealing with an onslaught of failures, challenges, and hardships. He is twenty-two years old. He is ambitious in the way young people with something to prove are - urgent, impatient, and lacking sufficient awareness of what he doesn't yet know.
What begins as a diplomatic errand quickly spirals into global conflict, testing Washington's honor, judgment, and courage. Through a series of decisions made with incomplete information and unchecked confidence, Washington surrendered at Fort Necessity and accidentally ignited the French and Indian War.
Let that land for a moment. One of the most revered leaders in human history accidentally started a war. Not metaphorically, or in a leadership parable. Actually, started a war. As a twenty-two-year-old who thought he was ready for more than he was.
Defeats such as the skirmish at Jumonville Glen and the surrender at Fort Necessity, where Washington faced humiliation and signed a controversial document, became crucibles that shaped him. He walks away from Fort Necessity in shame. He resigns his post. He goes home carrying the full weight of what his decisions cost. He realizes that his leadership affected not just him but also the men who trusted him and the conflict he set in motion.
This is where the movie earns its place in the conversation about Momentous Leadership. What Washington does next is the thing that matters most.
He doesn't make excuses.
To Lead Is to Forfeit the Right to Make Excuses
"To lead is to forfeit the right to make excuses."
That line lives at the center of this film, and it has lived in my head since we finished watching it. I want to sit with it for a moment, because I think it is one of the most compressed and complete definitions of leadership accountability I have ever encountered.
Excuses are extraordinarily available to a leader. They are always there, always plausible, and almost always partially true. Washington could have pointed to the Half-King's unauthorized attack that escalated the situation at Jumonville Glen. He could have pointed to the political pressure from Governor Dinwiddie that sent him into the field before he was prepared. He could have pointed to the inexperience of his men, the superiority of the French position, or the terrain that worked against him. Every one of those things was real. Every one of them could have been made to sound reasonable.
He didn't use any of them.
Instead, he went home. He read his brother Lawrence's journals. He sat in the shame of what had happened long enough for it to teach him something. Then he came back, not to reclaim his reputation, but to serve. Washington decided to rejoin the military, volunteering to serve British General Braddock as an aide-de-camp, which was a position well beneath what his ego might have demanded, taken not for status but because it was what he could contribute.
I have coached long enough to know that the leaders who grow fastest are almost never the ones who had the smoothest early careers. They are the ones who failed publicly, sat in it long enough to learn something real, and came back with a humility they couldn't have manufactured any other way.
Fort Necessity was Washington's education. The diploma was the willingness to own it without qualification.
That's what forfeiting the right to make excuses looks like in practice. Not a dramatic gesture. Just the quiet, daily decision to stop explaining why it wasn't your fault and start asking what you're going to do about it.
The Mentor in the Room
One of the most significant relationships in the film is between young Washington and Lord Fairfax, played with enormous warmth and gravitas by Kelsey Grammer. Grammer portrays Thomas Fairfax, a historical figure who mentored the young Washington, as a wealthy, experienced man who saw something in the young surveyor that Washington couldn't yet see in himself. Fairfax invested in that potential before it had produced anything worth investing in.
I've written on this blog before about the people God places in your path at exactly the right moment, and Fairfax is Washington's version of all of those people.
What Fairfax offers Washington isn't rescue. He doesn't fix the Fort Necessity disaster or smooth over the political fallout. What he offers is something more durable: a clear-eyed belief in the person underneath the failure, combined with the wisdom to let the failure do its necessary work.
This is a form of Momentous Leadership that rarely gets enough attention. Sometimes the most powerful moment you can create for someone is not a celebration or a recognition but simply staying in the relationship when their failure has caused everyone else to pull back. It is communicating, by your continued presence and investment, that you see something in them that the scoreboard currently does not reflect.
Fairfax did that for Washington. Washington carried it forward for an entire nation.
Sick, Surrounded, and Still Standing
The scene that hit me hardest in the entire film is the Battle of the Monongahela.
The film depicts an ill, dysentery-stricken Washington rising from his wagon to rally the scattering colonial Virginia regiment after General Braddock is mortally wounded. As bullets tear through Washington's coat and horses are shot out from under him, he remains miraculously untouched. This event led even the enemy to believe that the young warrior was shielded by a higher power.
He had every legitimate reason not to get up. He was genuinely ill. The battle was already going badly. The commanding general was down. The British regulars were scattered. The French ambush had been devastatingly effective. By any rational calculation, the moment called for self-preservation, not heroism.
He got up anyway.
Washington had no choice but to get up and fight. When he meets up with Gage, and all seems lost, George must decide whether to retreat or risk his life to save the Virginians pinned down by the French. He chooses to save them.
I keep thinking about what it took to make that choice. Not just the physical courage, even though that was clearly real. The moral courage. The decision, made in the middle of chaos and illness and overwhelming odds, to be responsible for the people behind him even when no one could have blamed him for not doing so.
That is the most elemental definition of leadership accountability. Not accountability in the comfortable retrospective sense where you own a mistake after the dust has settled. Accountability in real time. In the moment. When the cost of showing up is the highest it has ever been.
Four bullets through his coat. Two horses shot out from under him. Still standing.
The enemy eventually concluded that he must be protected by something beyond human explanation. There is a scene at the end depicting the 'Indian Prophecy' legend, in which a chief who fought against Washington at the Battle of Monongahela tells him that the Creator chose him and has a spirit of protection over him.
I believe that, but Washington still had to get out of the wagon first.
Providence meets preparation. God's protection operates through the leader who chooses to stand up.
The Distance Between Ambition and Purpose
One of the most honest things Young Washington does is clearly show what ambition without accountability produces, and then what happens when accountability is added.
Early Washington is talented and knows it. His ambition is real, but he is oriented primarily toward his own advancement, his own reputation, his own place in the order of things. He wants to be a great leader, the way young people want to be. He wanted it as an identity, a destination, a thing to achieve and be recognized for.
The film powerfully depicts how these early failures taught Washington humility and the nobility of the heart, moving him beyond raw, selfish ambition toward true leadership and service.
That movement from ambition to purpose, from self-focused to others-focused, is the entire arc of the film. And it is the arc of every leader who eventually becomes someone worth following.
I see it every year in young coaches and young players. The ones who are chasing status. The ones who want the title, the recognition, the moment when everyone knows they've arrived. Then they hit a wall the first time they fail publicly and have nothing to fall back on but excuses. Those who are chasing something bigger than themselves find fuel in the same failure.
Washington's Fort Necessity didn't break him. It redirected him. Away from building a reputation for himself and toward building something that would outlast him entirely.
That is the whole story. That's what the movie is actually about.
What Young Washington Asks of Us
I think about the 22-year-old version of myself a lot when I watch films like this. The graduate assistant in the tiny apartment in Madison, South Dakota, who had a dream and very little else. The young coach who was hungry and confident and had, by his own admission, more than a trace of "young, dumb, and invincible" in him.
I made mistakes in those years. Some of them were visible. Some of them cost people things I wish they hadn't. I did not always respond to those mistakes the way Washington eventually responded to Fort Necessity. I did not always forfeit the right to make excuses as cleanly as the moment required.
But I kept getting back in the wagon. Eventually, I learned to get out of it when the battle required.
Character is developed through adversity. And it's through mistakes, which often involve humility, accountability, reflection, honor, integrity, courage, and perseverance, that you can learn true leadership.
That's not just a lesson from a movie. That's the thesis of every hard season I have ever coached through, every failure I have ever had to own, every moment where the excuses were available, and I had to decide whether to use them or put them down.
Washington chose to put them down. Eventually, after real failure, and after real shame. After a long, private reckoning with what kind of man he was going to be.
That is available to every leader in every season of their life. The excuses will always be there. The question is whether you're going to use them or get out of the wagon.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Washington's Fort Necessity, his most public and consequential failure, became the foundation of everything that followed. Think about a failure in your own story that you have most wanted to explain away. What would it look like to fully own it, without qualification, the way Washington eventually did? What might that ownership make possible?
"To lead is to forfeit the right to make excuses." Sit with that line honestly. In the last month, what excuses have you reached for? A loss, a decision, a relationship, a result? What excuse would that principle ask you to put down?
Lord Fairfax stayed in Washington's corner after Fort Necessity, when Washington had given everyone a reason to walk away. Who has done that for you? And more importantly, who in your circle right now is in their own Fort Necessity moment, waiting to see if you'll stay?
Washington was sick, surrounded, and outgunned at the Monongahela, and he got out of the wagon anyway. Think about the moment in your own leadership when the cost of showing up was the highest it had ever been. What did you do? What would you do differently? What did it teach you about who you are when there is no easy option left?