Admiration Means You Must Be Doing Something Right

March 10, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

What the Chinese are thinking about us is no laughing matter if we’re listening to experts talk about how they are holding America’s mortgage with one hand and stealing our most valuable secrets with the other. But our worries could become more realistic if we also considered just how much the Chinese admire us and the way of life they think we have going on here.

There is always something valuable to be learned when others are both coveting and admiring what you have. As La Rochefoucand famously said: “Sometimes we think we dislike flattery, but it is only the way it is done that we dislike.” Thinking about what we like and don’t like about how many of the Chinese people view America today has some interesting things to teach us about ourselves.

I had the chance to visit China a couple of years back.

I’m glad I went when I did and probably wouldn’t recognize much of the place today. It was a few months before the Beijing Olympics, and the country was moving so fast you could almost feel the wind. But what I remember most was how excited regular folks—particularly young people—were that we had come all that way to see them.

They tried out their English on us and surrounded us for pictures. We were their chance to sample America, in the same way that they were already sampling KFC and Polo Ralph Lauren. At the time, analogizing their admiration to eating or wearing did not seem entirely misplaced.

This inkling got some support when I came upon a piece about “architectural mimicry” in China. While the copycat buildings that are springing up there aren’t always American buildings, easily the most duplicated structure in China today is the White House.

The building serves as the model for everything from seafood restaurants to single-family homes to government offices in Guangzhou, Wuxi, Shanghai, Wenling and Nanjing.

There are duplicate Chrysler Buildings and other Manhattan skyscrapers too.

That “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is certainly part of it. But it’s more than this, and has many antecedents in this ancient civilization. Emperors regularly built parks with an Epcot Center of facsimile structures from remote lands. Both then & now, it is a pretty straightforward effort to enhance their legitimacy by demonstrating China’s de facto appropriation of the known universe.

Today, the Chinese are trying to swallow other aspects of the American way of life as well.

Much of the dynamism you can feel in China today results from a billion people embracing capitalism all at once. It was a forest of timeless bamboo scaffolding clinging to a mountain range of 21^st century construction projects that really brought this home to me when I walked around Beijing. Since almost everybody in China wants to become the next Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, it is hardly surprising that the American rags to riches fantasy has also been made available for mass consumption.

It’s been turned into the equivalent of a fortune cookie.

The Chinese love short motivational phrases even more than Americans do, if that’s possible. They have been a vehicle for transmitting community values from Confucius to Mao, and they are still in active use today. Only now it’s so-called American values that are being conveyed, and what’s being shared has a lot more to do with individual fortune than collective harmony.

Evidence of this comes from the apparently spontaneous rise of 20 or so “allocutions” or commandments that many people in China today believe are written on the walls of Harvard’s library. These commandments speak to the commitment, diligence and self-denial that are supposedly bolstering their counterparts’ remarkable performance here in the States.

One says, “Happiness will not be ranked, but success will—at the top,” while another envisions a slightly different, though related reward, “If you study one more hour, you will have a better husband.” Struggling through exhaustion to get where you’re going is key in this messaging: “Nodding at the moment, you will dream. While studying at the moment you will come true,” and similarly, “Most great achievements happen while others are dozing.” Perhaps most succinct of all is this commandment: “Please enjoy the unavoidable suffering.”

Wherever it comes from, this distilled wisdom about American motivation clearly haunts the Chinese imagination. In an article about the phenomenon by Robert Darnton, Harvard’s university librarian, we learn that:

the allocutions took root in China’s educational system and were widely used in primary schools, in English courses, on exams, and even in interviews for admission to Beijing University. They have appeared on bulletin boards, in newspapers, on telecasts, on a website of China’s Ministry of Commerce and on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. Above all, they have reached millions through the Internet, thanks to endless transmission by blogs, including one that registered 67 million hits.

As a result, it should come as no surprise that the most numerous queries on Harvard’s “Ask the Librarian” web page are about these allocutions, with many of the questions originating in China. When informed that no such commandments appear on the walls in any of Harvard’s 73 libraries, Mr. Darnton records the following responses: “Well my teacher has been using this fooling me,” and “Are you kidding? We grown up with these mottos.” Or even more interesting: “Thank you for liberating us” and “When I know the truth I can’t stop crying.”

Of course, there are both comforting and disquieting things about tokens of flattery like this, as well as the fact that Chinese people will probably be eating fried chicken in a mock-up of the White House later today.

For example, we may like it that the Chinese think we’re this successful, but disquieted by their distortion of us into sleep-deprived automatons. It’s like Eleanor Roosevelt’s ambivalence about one of her tributes: “I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.”

The good news about admiration is the often accurate perception that there is something about us worth admiring.

Even when it is somewhat alarmingly expressed, flattery indicates that somebody out there still thinks you’re ahead in the big game.

But there can be another message too.

Whenever there’s a gapping hole between what’s being hungered for and what is actually true, it may be time to torque up that big game of yours before it’s too late.

(On this last day of the Chinese New Year, great prosperity to all!)

A Holiday Present Worth Asking For

December 22, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The path to fulfilling, purposeful work is hard to walk alone.

Too often, even the smartest, seemingly most accomplished people don’t know how “to get out of their own way” to figure out what they should really be doing with their lives. The push towards clarity usually needs to come from the outside. Who that someone is, of course, is everything.

Most of my work has been inauthentic. I studied things, took jobs because of what others told me I should be doing with myself. I can’t believe that at this age I’m still living somebody else’s version of my life! The lens that looks beyond the here & now is unfocused. I squint, but still can’t see what I’m aiming for. I can’t see past my day-to-day to a more satisfying future. Well of course you can’t. Because you’ll never be able to see clearly through the fog of, say, a parent’s vision for you, through eyes that have always played an outsized role in what you think and feel about the world around you.

So the helpful holiday present I’m recommending may seem, at first, to come from exactly the wrong direction. While a skillful stranger with none of the presumptions you grew up with can provide the catalyst for rethinking your life’s work, you’re probably going “home for the holidays” in a couple of days. As incredible as it may sound, you might also find someone there who can help you out with this.

I’m relying solely on anecdotal evidence mind you, but in my family and in nearly every family I know anything about, it seems that similarities in personality and perspective skip a generation. Now admittedly, some of it may be due to the concerted efforts of daughters not to become their mothers, sons their fathers, and so on, but I think it goes much deeper than this. That great aunt, great uncle or grandfather may have a lot more in common with you than any of the others around the holiday table, and this family member has a present with your name on it.

All you have to do is retrieve it.

What richer or more familiar repositories of stories, life lessons and family traditions are there than the older relatives you’ll be spending time with in coming days? I’d start with the one you always connected with most naturally, because you’ll cover more territory when your conversation with them starts to roll. And roll it will.

As in other situations, you can help your luck along here by thinking beforehand about what you’d like to find out from them, and then doing a little research so you know more about his life or her career when they were your age. You might be surprised at how someone with similar wiring confronted hurdles like the ones you’re facing. You also might be surprised by how much you’ll learn about yourself when you start tapping into all that accumulated wisdom.

What’s less surprising is how few of us ever get around to asking.

Karl Pillemer, who teaches courses on human development at Cornell, wanted to do something about that, while also preserving some of what was being lost. He is the guiding force behind the Legacy Project, whose website and YouTube channel provide access to life lessons collected from hundreds of older adults on topics ranging from marriage and parenting to their careers.

In his own life and work, Professor Pillemer has also come to appreciate the personal benefits that are realized on both sides of the Q & A, and certainly on the answering side. In a recent interview, he offered this simple advice:

Ask them for their life stories, but try to tap their life’s wisdom. If you ask a person for advice, it empowers them. It honors a person’s life experience.

Who helped you along the way? What mistakes did you make? How did you make ends meet? Did you ever want to settle for less? Why didn’t you?

With the holiday season upon us, and New Year’s resolutions ahead, being home for the holidays may provide you with an unexpected opportunity to think productively about the future direction of your life and work. But the present won’t be given to you unless you ask someone for it.

Just Plain Funny #2

December 16, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I like a newspaper I can hold in my hands because sometimes the stories across the folds can talk to one another in ways that never seems to happen on a screen. That kind of exchange took place in my newspaper today.

For as long as I’ve been reading it, the Wall Street Journal has a funny, odd or just plain ridiculous story at the bottom of Page One. At some point, the Page One editor must have decided that stories like this are good antidotes to the calamities, logjams and shenanigans chronicled above. These daily stories always froth over to the last page of the “news” where they brush up against the beginnings of the “commentary” section on the other side of fold. It’s here that strangely compatible bedfellows sometimes meet.

Page One’s dollop of the day today was about a long-standing West Point tradition celebrating the graduating cadet, who by academic and other standards, finishes dead last in his class each year. Because of some “informal” information sharing, everyone but The Goat knows who he is on the big day, and when his name is called out from the graduating roster, the cadets erupt into the loudest cheer of the day.

There are two kinds of Goats, according to a disappointingly dry piece in a publication called Failure Magazine. There are cadets who labor through the muck to the bitter end, and those who take the experience just seriously enough to fall inebriatedly over the finish line. Of course, several of the Good Time Goats were actually pretty smart and went on to make history (Generals Custer and Pickett, for example). Several middling cadets did pretty well too. (Eisenhower reportedly said: “If anybody saw signs of greatness in me while at West Point they kept it to themselves.”) But it’s the ones who always struggled to do their best, while barely making it to the end, who are the real heroes of the story.

Unclear whether to be embarrassed or proud of their accomplishment, most of these Goats eventually seem to settle into being good sports about it. For example: “In my class, no one else can say that they’re the Goat and no one else can say that they’re part of this special lineage that dates back so far,” said good sport Roberto Becarra, Jr. in 2007. Somewhat earlier, the bespeckled Goat (below) seems to have had a similar reaction.

When asked about these persevering Goats by the Journal reporter, James S. Robbins said:

The tradition of the Goat is important because it kind of encapsulates that American spirit of—yeah, you’re going to have the top and they’re going to get recognized and they’re going to get stars by their names and all that other stuff. But, you know what? The guys further down, they have their chance too, and they can succeed too and it’s important to recognize them.

While his insight might have been more penetrating had he been a psychologist or meteorologist instead of an historian, Robbins’ remarks did manage to counterpoint similar observations about the value of “keeping your head up” and “putting one foot in front of the other” on the facing page of the paper, where a Journal writer reviews a new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb called Antifragile.

Taleb’s singular perspective is that theories follow practice instead of the reverse. It’s not “the Soviet/Harvard notion that birds fly because we lecture them how to.” We learn by doing it first, and make up the theories that contain all of our how-to-do-it wisdom later on. It is, as the reviewer notes, “a startling [chicken v. egg] insight,” because what Taleb’s debunking allows is a flat-out celebration of the creativity involved in doggedly keeping at it. The many virtues of trial and error.

Taleb makes up the word “antifragile” to mean not only hardy, but also something that has been improved through repeated failures, becoming more resilient in the process. From this perspective, the persevering Goats are not just plodders: more than a few of them embody the adaptation that is at the beating heart of natural selection. As Taleb’s reviewer notes:

If trial and error is creative, then we should treat failed entrepreneurs with the reverence that we reserve for fallen soldiers.

This is why experience is the best teacher. It’s why “A” students who master the theory often work for the “B” and “C” students who rightly suspect that the magic lies elsewhere. It’s why rigidity and too much seriousness is always a bad idea. And it’s why the loudest cheer really should go to somebody who has not only failed most prominently, but also has the spirit to get up and keep trying.

modern-times — CHARLIE CHAPLIN IN “MODERN TIMES”

Not that it’s always so easy.