Tom's Views

It takes more than just effort to outperform our parents, though many compliment themselves for their sheer effort and tenacity that they say was solely responsible for their higher success.  Then, they blame those who do not outperform their parents for being too lazy and not putting forth enough effort.  However, while many achieve in life roughly what their parents did, this does not necessarily mean that they’re lazy.  Now it’s clear that in recent generations especially, more children than not manage to achieve higher living standards than did their parents; greater education, more wealth, better health care, safer neighborhoods, more opportunities, and so on.  So an expectation has grown up that anyone who does not outperform his parents by improving upon their lifestyles, is simply lazy and thus, flawed.

Certainly, a willingness to try is needed to outperform our parents. But like the flour in a chocolate cake (which is not the only ingredient necessary for creating a great-tasting cake by the way), voluntary effort is not the only component in the cake of success. We must also consider those inborn and nurtured traits like talent, ambition, aptitude, nutrition, and so many other qualities that impact the amount of effort required to succeed.  What we are born with and born into greatly impacts the amount of effort we must exert subsequently in order to outperform our parents economically and socially. 

Thus, we should be careful when judging people stuck in their traditional castes, because they’re likely fighting and succumbing to forces that we can not see. People all-too-quickly dismiss a person’s fatalism or resignation to his current life standard, as a simple unwillingness to pull himself up by his bootstraps and work hard to outperform his parents. True, some types would benefit from some good old fashioned tough love and forced discipline. But others have good reasons for their resignation and “laziness,” such as the profoundly disabled or the neglected.  We could enhance our own compassion for them by remembering that willful sloth (a voluntary choice to be lazy) is but a small part of all the apathy out there. Some people because of how they were raised, are just not cut out to achieve more greatness than their parents did.  The forces that converged upon them in their lives do not allow it. 

Finally, why are so many so opposed to acquiescing to more powerful forces than their own wills? I suppose that the succumbing to tradition indeed sounds a lot like God’s followers yielding their destinies to Him and his plan without question. I agree that this superstition is not healthy for a society. A truly enlightened culture would have no need to do it, and I regret that I won’t live long enough to see our society reach a total freedom from religion.  Yet many strong religious believers refuse to acknowledge the deep impact of child rearing in how much a child is able to outperform his parents.  They believe in an unseen God, yet downplay these objectively measurable forces.  Though the existence of God in my view has not been proven, there earthly forces have been.  In fact, these can be just as godly in power and scope, in determining how far we can outperform our parents.

Our challenge as humans is to discern which success limiters out of the complete set of forces, are mere phantoms, which are truly formidable yet beatable, and finally, which ones are simply too strong to overcome at all. A philosopher from antiquity – I don’t remember his name – said, essentially, that we need a healthy supply of   resignation   during life’s journey. Otherwise, we overestimate our capabilities, struggle to achieve excessively lofty goals, and therefore spend too much time disappointed. People need to know when it’s time to give up, and in order to know that, they must realize that, contrary to the moral of that   Little Engine That Could   story, quitting a particular pursuit is very often the best course of action.  For more discussion on this point, please see my   We Cannot Achieve Just Anything We Want   post.

Back to the original discussion about people outperforming their parents: Some folks fail to outperform those from previous generations because of factors beyond their control.  Thus, acrimoniously judging them is certainly not good, as it blames them for that which they cannot have power over, and wrongfully assumes that they can be in charge of things that they really cannot.  The blame in this case is therefore misplaced.  We need to stop this sort of misdirected blaming to improve our abilities at getting along with and accepting each other. 

Tom Hesley

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• If You Think You Can
• On Our Parents Defining Our Destiny
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Dear [Mentat],

Our culture could improve if people regarded one another with   more compassion,   and were happier with   less personal gain; at least, less money and material items. Sometimes, people become so obsessed with economic personal gain and getting ahead financially, that they treat others not as obsessed with disrespect; deeming them lazy and irrelevant. This creates many hurt feelings and disappointments throughout our work culture here in America. Instead, we should value people less for the opportunities to get ahead that they present for our own personal gains, and value them more just because of their unique personalities. Let’s worry less about how much we can get from somebody else and focus more on enjoying them for what they offer to us, without compelling them to offer it.

If we realized that we each achieve ultimate success differently, we might expect less from others that they’re not really capable of granting. What’s easier for one might be harder for another. Some people have much natural ability (talent). Others have somewhat less. Still others have still less, and a few have no talent whatsoever. Just because a discipline is easier for one person does not make it easier for all.

Yet those obsessed with personal gain (the overly greedy) treat others as a means to their own successful ends. When the others fail to deliver what the greedy think they should (or could), the greedy mutter and curse, humiliate, fire, and resent those who’s lacking talents and ambition (in the greedy person’s view), hold them back.

Still though, the idea that putting one’s nose to the grindstone as much as he can, and then much personal gain and success will come, is somewhat fallacious. After all, I built the good career and earned a fair amount of money, yet I did not achieve the success I wanted. This puritan work philosophy works for some to be sure; it will definitely feed you. But it will not make you happy, unless of course, it’s just the money that you need to be happy. I however, required more.

Laze-faire economics, material oriented trappings, and the whole Adam Smith philosophy that personal economic gain is best for a country, leaves many out in the cold. It rejects many more than it rewards, and offers fertile breeding grounds for prejudice, exploitation, and other unethical practices. So I just can’t accept the quest for personal financial gain as the right system for humanity, sorry to say. I’m not even sure that it’s the best system we’ve seen throughout the history of humanity.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Certainly there is a degree of   free will   associated with self-actualizing people [referencing here Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. And until science can better quantify the proportions of what is   determinism   and what is  free will,   this debate will continue.

However, we can’t dismiss the  part of what a person accomplishes that is beyond his control.  This part is, though not measurable, a big piece of the accomplishments pie. The following will hopefully illustrate the non-voluntary parts, the  determinism   or   fate,   of any success:

• Did you choose your country of origin? No way. No free will here.  Yet clearly, where a person begins life strongly affects what he subsequently achieves. Americans come pre-bundled from the womb with more opportunities than third-worlders from Africa or the South Pacific, where chances for advancement, not to mention the diversity of disciplines one might pursue, are drastically limited.
• Did you make yourself blind? No! Again, where’s the free will in this?  Yet your overall productivity was severely impacted by your blindness. See my    Blind Hardships   post for a discussion of how blindness can seriously impact numerous dimensions of normalcy in a person’s life. 
• Did you choose your aptitudes? Again, no! Free will must have taken a vacation when innate aptitude was divvied out.  As we’ve discussed at length in our talks about Maslow’s work, people don’t seem to choose their motivations. Do they discover them? Perhaps. But they don’t choose them. If you don’t want to do something, all the free will in the world won’t make you into a world-class performer at it. Since we don’t control very much at all what we want and need, and since our desires overwhelmingly influence our proficiency at various endeavors, we therefore can only take a small part of the total credit for our accomplishments. Without desire, accomplishment of things of a higher complexity than routine tasks becomes unlikely, if not impossible.
• Did you pick how tall you are, the color of your skin, or the texture of your hair? Absolutely not. No free will again.  Studies have shown that a short person is less likely to have children or lead corporations, again, through no fault of his own. Sometimes, there may in fact, be nothing inadequate about a person’s motivation or effective efforts. Yet he still won’t win the prize if he’s too short. Not every hardship can be overcome by willfully pulling one’s self up by the bootstraps, contrary to conservative opinion. The presence of   prejudice   significantly mitigates one’s responsibility for his own successes. 
• Did you choose your parents, or the quality of rearing you received from them? Nope. Yet child psychologists agree that the single biggest influence in a child’s ultimate development is his parental structure – specifically, for boys, it’s the father who affects their growth most profoundly, and for girls, it’s the mother.  So where was the free will in this?
• Did you have any say in the fact that you were born with all your legs, arms, fingers, and toes? I don’t think so. Like vision, the absence or deformity of any of these affects the set of potential accomplishments we’re likely to achieve.  All the free will in the world would not completely compensate for a missing arm or leg; not in this day and age anyhow. 
• Can you take any credit for the fact that you were born with good hearing? No. Often, people site the accomplishments of that Miss America, Heather Whitestone McCallum, in the 1990s who was deaf. True, her will and tenacity were essential ingredients in her success. However, these were just two of many ingredients. Had her mother not worked with her for over twelve hours each day as a child to teach her communications skills and poise, I’m sure that this woman would not have become Miss America, no matter how completely and effectively she devoted herself to the task.  Though Heather exhibited a lot of will, her free will was just s part of what made her successful. 

My point is that no person ever achieves greatness entirely on his own free will.  Thus we humans cannot escape reliance on factors beyond our control to win. Survey after survey shows the high extent to which these attributes of determinism influence the types and degrees of successes we achieve. People come into this world with certain gifts as well as  crosses to bear,   and they have absolutely no control over just what that set is. They can decide (to a measure) what to do with these gifts. But what nature bestows is indeed, from the person’s perspective, a luck of the draw.  It’s fate.  It’s determinism. 

It’s true that a person who has achieved self-actualization did not do so entirely through luck. But a large part of his success is  indeed  luck, since his success rests on many pillars, of which only a few fall into the free will category. While luck is not a sufficient condition for success, it is a necessary condition.

See my   Accepting Our Personal Limitations   piece for a discussion about how detrimental it can be to assume too much personal responsibility for our natural limitations, and why it might be better to accept more of them.   

We should therefore not underestimate the importance of determinism, in driving how successful we become.  In my view, determinism is at least as big a factor as the free-will component.

Take care.

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Accepting Our Personal Limitations
• Blind Hardships
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs
• More Than Effort To Outperform Our Parents
• Thoughts on Bigotry

References

• Determinism   definition on Wikipedia
• Fate   definition on Wikipedia
• Free Will   definition on Wikipedia
• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

There’s a popular rule that says essentially that whether you think you can or cannot, you’re right. 

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Children can indeed break out of their parents’ wakes, and accomplish something totally different either in form or degree of contribution than their parents.  There are indeed other ways to be successful than just imitating the techniques that parents used to become successful.  But the further from these already-blazed paths the children go, the greater the hardships they’ll likely incur due to the following:

• Children must learn things that their parent’s did not teach them.  I suspect that the earliest lessons a child learns become the most indelible to him. These lessons typically come via his parents. But the farther removed from parental beliefs, values, philosophies, skills, life styles and such that the child’s aspirations force him to go, the more he’ll need to learn once he’s older, that he didn’t learn when he was very young and much more pliable.  Learning later in life is more difficult than as a young child, and thus parents are in the best position to impart   their   ways to the child because they’re his first teachers, during the years when he is most impressionable. 
• Children must _unlearn_ things their parents taught them.  Again, should the child wish to pursue a career requiring contradictory values to his parents’, he must work (sometimes extensively) to overcome the weights of those initially learned values. 
• Children must sometimes defend their departing from the family ways to siblings and relatives.  This can be an ongoing and emotionally wrenching task, particularly in tightly knit immediate and extended families like those found in the Jewish community.  Family members will argue, jeer, and judge, and this can frighten the children into doing what their parents did, just to avoid the ridicule.  Few entrepreneurial-spirited children want to be the subject of such tribulations.  So, many opt to abandon their dreams of a different discipline, choosing instead to practice as their parents would have them practice.   
• If their choice of careers is controversial within the family, children will receive less support (academic, financial, spiritual, and otherwise) from their family groups.  If the parents are rich, and would have otherwise significantly subsidized the child’s education, they may not, if he chooses not to do what they did or what they’d prefer he do.  This can seriously degrade the child’s chances of reproducing and improving upon the parents’ financial successes, without his parents helping him or her.
• Once children start a divergent career, they’ll have less in common with their families, and may in fact have so little in common with them that he wishes no longer wishes to attend family functions like Sunday dinners, football afternoons, and so on.  So unless he starts up his own family, he may have to walk as a lonely person as a result.  This may not seem like such a big deal if you don’t espouse family values.  But for those who do, this is nearly unthinkable.  The absense of family contributes much to the feelings of loneliness in lonely people. 
• Often, a different career means that children must relocate, typically, a great distance from home.  This implies that their parents can’t help as much with household mishaps, babysitting, or other types of familial support that would normally take place if they lived close by.
• Children must contend with cultural differences between where they grew up and where they’re living currently.  I experienced this one myself.  Me the liberal moved to Dayton, Ohio, which is located less than an hour from the conservative capital of the country, Cincinnati.  The numerous debates I had with my coworkers and ham radio operators in the area were lively to be sure.  But they also stressed me, and I couldn’t rightly claim that they were very much fun, except of course when I won. 

Now I’m not suggesting that any of these complications either taken separately or together is insurmountable.  Indeed, children surpass thier parents’ success and status levels all the time, taking completely different paths to success than did their parents.  But these potential hardships do complicate life significantly for the child wishing to avoid the nepatism, strike out on his own, and not follow in his parents’ footsteps.  As such, these handicaps should be given due consideration when offspring choose careers which are very much different from their parents’.

Tom Hesley

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Often, people excessively blame others (or themselves) when success eludes them, as though we’re solely responsible for our successes.  I’d suggest however that there’s a   chance component   to success as well, particularly when mass competition for few rewards is fierce.  Watch the Grammies or the Oscars for example, and you’ll hear performer after performer thanking God above for providing those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities which were instrumental in the achievements of those stars. 

Those who regard their successes with thankfulness and humility truly understand that much of their good fortune did not arise from their own doings.  They appreciate the chance part of success.  For competitive successes, only so many people can win.  Practically all of those who try for positions of renown (for millionaire status for example) fall short.  For each person who enjoys the good life, thousands more do not.  So it seems like the highest positions of financial success are reserved for a very small few. 

This reminds me of my years in Amway.  I don’t remember the exact numbers but I believe that in order to achieve “Silver” status in the company, a person and the people beneath him in his pyramid had to sell ten thousand dollars of [in my opinion] substandard and expensive merchandise per month.  A Diamond member began receiving the residual incomes that so many people want these days, myself included. 

But as it was, higher rewards got harder to reach.  The hill that lead to the top got steeper and steeper, the higher up you went.  It was like this at [work] as it is in any competitive situation.  In our system of business, there’s only room at the top for a very small percentage of the people who strive to get there.  So when a person falls short, there may be nothing wrong with him.  It could just be that Lady Luck favored someone else more, or that there just wasn’t room at that table-at-the-top for him. 

Thus, striving for financial success is a long-shot gamble at best, and because of this, I suggest that once again, we have to limit the amount of kudos we attribute to successful people, and our reverence toward them.  We also should blame people less when they fail, because for most every successful person and business, luck played a significant part of getting them to that point.  Without that chance piece that favored them, there would be far fewer successful businesses I’m sure.

Tom Hesley

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You can achieve   self-actualization   and in so doing, fill all your needs described in Abraham H. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs triangle, without focusing exclusively on that effort. But usually, that is only if you’re generally well-gratified up through level four (the esteem needs).  (See Maslow’s book   Motivation and Personality  for a complete description of the hierarchy discussed in this post.)  If you are self actualized, then you can afford the luxury of (as Maslow might call it) unmotivated, non-coping, purely self-actualizing, expressive needs pursuing.

At level five in Maslow’s hierarchy, motivations   are   in fact, less driven by external forces with the purest ones being   strictly internal. Thus, these needs require less from the external world for their gratification. The most advanced ones require no external input to achieve, and no external measures of success to know whether we in fact gratified them. This seems to jive well with typical sentiments people hold on Maslow’s needs hierarchy.

One would also expect people to show less obsession (or monomania) in level five pursuits of self actualization, since these   Being   needs are less urgent and hurt less when not fulfilled. People don’t usually get sick from thwarted level five needs, though pathology does appear when lower-level needs (air, water, food, clothing, shelter, and safety) are thwarted. The lower the level of thwarting, the greater the likelihood and severity of, the resulting sickness (possibly death). There is less risk when gratifying at level five (the self actualization level) however, because we don’t get sick or very empty if we fail. Thus, we need not be fully self-actualized to be healthy.  (E.g. It’s easier to imagine a happy life devoid of piano playing for example, than one without a lover, safe living quarters, and abundant air and food supplies.)

Finally, the size of the set of all pursuits that gratify level five needs dwarfs those at the lower levels, thus another reason why we’d expect people to be less devastated when they can’t fulfill a specific self actualization desire (like playing the piano creatively). With so many more choices at level five (You could learn to play the piano, speak a second language, build a radio transmitter, plant a garden, collect coins, et al), it’d be much easier to find another means to produce the same gratifying effect.

Strictly internal measures of success are the ideal, and are ultimately what we seek – happiness independent of others’ whims and judgments. This is probably why so many attempt to start their own businesses — to break and then to avoid the tyrannical grip of the corporate power structure. They want to gain more control over the measures that establish their success, and in so doing make their success more determined by their own rules (internal).  Self actualization therefore, in its ideal form, is indeed a strictly internal affair. 

Tom Hesley

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References

• Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs   definition on Wikipedia

Some of life entails defying the odds, that’s true. However, in the healthy person, another big part of it involves determining and then  accepting limitations.

Accepting limitations, a healthy supply of resignation regarding things we can’t easily change, is essential for sustained happiness. Today we spend too much time teaching people how to push excessively hard against their natures, and not enough time on how to be happy with what they have. As a result, society is chalk full of stressed-out, depressed, unhappy, and therefore, unhealthy people because they’ve not learned sufficiently well how to accept their   personal limitations.

Since we can’t objectively measure yet what a person’s real limits are, people tend with dogmatic fervor, to believe that such personal limitations do not exist or are way less formidable than they actually are. Many assume that what they don’t see   cannot exist.  We know well the Pollyanna-style rhetoric: You can do and be anything you want. To them, accepting limitations seems weak, lazy, whiny, and a sure sign of lacking personal responsibility and success potential. 

But like the blind person who wants to be an airplane pilot, history abounds with similarly fruitless pursuits.  When we fail at accepting our   personal limitations, we fail ourselves.  Would it be wise to conclude of the blind man, that he lacks enough of the value of   personal responsibility,   and that this is why he cannot fly an airplane?  I think not.   

We cannot realize much potential where there is little potential to start with. Failing to fully accept limitations can lead to chronic disappointment and senses of inadequacy.  Yet therapists get rich because patients enlist their aid to avoid even acknowledging their personal limitations. Therapists help them milk dry cows and to lessen the effects of the natural frustrations when the utter remains dry. In short: They pay therapists to help them avoid accepting their peronal limitations rather than simply owning up to them. 

Now it’s true that people would seem to be able to accomplish   more   with a therapist encouraging them, as evidenced by therapy’s growing popularity and increased success that’s attributed to it. But that’s so unnatural, and creates an unnecessary and costly dependence on the therapist. Indeed, I might have continued working [in the corporate world] if I’d wanted to keep seeing a therapist and refused to embrace my own personal limitations. But I wished not to remain tethered and reliant on therapy just to get me through the next week.

More people than ever before utilize the employee assistance programs these days, because society forces us to overly repress and cope via therapy with our personal limitations. But at some point, as happened with me, one must wonder how much of his success is due to his will and natural abilities, and how much comes via his therapist. Is he really succeeding if his therapist is always close by to pick him back up after a bruising confrontation with his personal limitations?  Yes, it appears that people are more successful these days. But this may be hollow success – a product of therapeutic propping as well as excessive collectivism and unhealthy conformance.

Currently, we can’t objectively measure how much each of nature, nurture, and choice contributes to personal success. No, our genes do not exclusively determine our behavior, but they do strongly influence it, and as time passes, we’re finding that they guide it more than previously thought. Even more so does the   combination   of genes and environment, particularly in the childhood years.  Personal limitatios do not derive exclusively from lackng willpower to overcome.  Some limits simply cannot be overcome, no matter how willfully we try. 

Again, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to do something different than what is born and nurtured into us. However, too drastically going against one’s grain, particularly in directions of lacking aptitude, can lead to a lifetime of alienation, disappointment, dependence on therapy, and unrealized potential in the areas in which one is   actually   suited to succeed.  We need to in some significant degree, embrace our natural abilities as well as accept our personal limitations as a  simple attribute of humanity

Now understand that I believe society should leave the individual to his dream quests. Despite the perceived long odds of a dream ever coming true, never should the desires of the individual be overpowered by   “the people”   so long as his pursuits aren’t harming anyone. But again, an enlightened society must also recognize that people that it deems unsuccessful are not always just lazy and dumb and avoiding accountability.  So they should not bear full personal responsibility for their failures. Perhaps they’re just fighting the forces of destiny; a fight that could be lessened by a healthy dose of acceptance of our limitations; both in ourselves and in others.  Society needs to better accept limitations of its members, just as members should accept limitations happily within themselves.  Maximal personal responsibility does not eliminate all personal limitations. 

Tom Hesley

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I’d point out that though more people would achieve higher levels of success if they pushed very hard against the sense that they’d fail (whether that impression is rational or otherwise), we should nonetheless, not ignore the negative impacts of blindly forging ahead without considering one’s built-in limitations.  Pushing yourself too far in defiance of your true desires and talents often results in the following effects:

• Increased incidents of mental illness, physical problems, and stress. Indeed, we’re seeing drastic upsurges in health issues and early deaths due to stress. Heck, people can’t even sleep the whole night through anymore without taking a pill. They can’t eat meals anymore without taking an antacid.
• Lowering of prevailing moral standards, which I suggest is due in large degree to decreased compassion for one’s neighbor. If we believe that people deserve what they reap because they reap what they sew, and that they reap what they sew because they have complete control of what they sew, then we’re less willing to empathize with another’s difficulties. Disregarding the complicatedness that they faced while sewing fosters a highly critical and judgmental attitude in how we regard our friends, family, coworkers, and lovers. It supplies us more reasons to suspect another of laziness, and then when we find anything that resembles laziness, we’re less likely to look beneath the surface to figure out whether that laziness actually results from willful and thus culpable belief patterns, or something less voluntary. When we hold people _too_ accountable for their choices without considering the involuntary nature of their motivations, we’re more likely to fight and argue with them, to form cliques, to wrongfully exclude, to bully, and generally become more difficult to interact positively with. Society as a result becomes less desirable to live in.
• More Conflict. Imagine yourself working on an auto assembly line. The boss wants you to record the colors of each passing car, because everyone else is too busy. Now wouldn’t it be ridiculous for him to ridicule you because you can’t tell colors apart if you were color blind? Such misplaced blame would tend to make you a little upset, particularly when that job shelters, clothes, and feeds you. We know that when the boss wrongly refuses to accept a person’s limitations as being beyond their control, the victims get angry, and sometimes violent. Not only on the individual level, but as a nation, we do this to our neighbors as well. I’ve heard people from abroad say repeatedly that America treats their own citizenry well, but regards the rest of the world as second-class people. America looks down its collective nose at foreigners and says, “Hmmmm, you really should believe and do things differently than you do, because we have no use for you if you don’t. Or we’ll kill you if we disagree strongly enough. It should be as easy for you to succeed as it is for us. And if it isn’t? Well then, that’s too bad. Your failures are your own fault.” This attitude certainly doesn’t make for peaceful coexistence, does it.
• Heightened sense of inadequacy.  When we’re not doing what we really wish we were, and when we’re attempting to do well what we wish we weren’t, we injure our self confidence.  If we choose a career because we think we’ll get rich, but lack the patience and tenacity to fully master its numerous mundane details, we still may perform satisfactorily at it; indeed, well enough to actually become rich.  But we would not find complete fulfillment in the pursuit, because we’d know deep inside that we’re not as qualified as we would be if we actually loved what we were doing, and felt at ease doing it.  It’s indeed easier to exude genuine self confidence while one utilizes his talents and desires rather than dismisses them due to the motive of money. 
• Dissatisfaction with work.

While it may be desirable for society to advance individually as well as collectively, we should not dismiss the pitfalls of such ill-gotten advances.   People attempting to compensate for lacking desire or talent in their career with sheer willpower to succeed at it is bad. Perhaps this [obsessive drive to achieve high degrees of success] at the cost of our deepest dreams and truest potential going unrealized, is hurting humanity.  Indeed, it’s not as noteworthy a force once we consider its downsides. 

Tom Hesley

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