I want to talk a bit about some of the framing problems
embedded in how we think about success. This is a topic I have addressed many
times, but it bears repeating.
The other night a client of mine (I moonlight as a tennis
coach) asked me what I thought was the ideal environment in which to raise
children. I replied that from 0-12 or thereabouts the deep suburbs are the best
in my opinion (somewhere like Eastwood or Gordon, if not a coastal town), or rather, that it is
healthy for children at that age to be surrounded by nature, peace and quiet,
and that they should be allowed to explore the world at their own pace in a safe environment largely free of things like traffic, trends and expectations. From 12
kids need to start to (slowly) grow up, and at such times a transition to a
slightly faster paced urban environment is useful. I spoke out against raising
children in places like New York, which establish an artificial value regime in
the mind of a child very quickly. As a character in Sex and the City (the book,
not the show) once quipped, ‘New York is competitive; I want my [toddler] to
have the best’.
My client was concerned that such an environment would
not expose a child to the pressures that mold youngsters into the
hard-working, self-sacrificing individuals that get the best jobs, as though ‘good’
jobs were getting fewer rather than growing exponentially. The world needs more
high skilled workers, not fewer. The vast majority of jobs are getting more complex, more interesting and more rewarding, not less.
This reminded me a bit of the comments of The
Tiger Mother. This was a book written a few years back about the supposedly
Chinese way of raising children—with constant pressure. The key selling point,
observed the author on Radio National one week, was that her children had grown
up to be very ‘successful’. One, as I recall, was a lawyer at a prominent firm,
while the other was at one of the major financial firms.
 |
| If only I was successful, then my life could be like that! |
Leaving aside that I
think in most cases finance and law are largely vacuous fields, why do some
parents measure the quality of their parenting by the ‘success’ of their children as opposed to some other measure; for example: their character, their
morality, how liked and/or well regarded they are by their peers, or even, their happiness? I am reminded of a quote by John Lennon:
“When I was five years old my mother always told me that
happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I
wanted to be when I grow up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t
understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
Now I’ve written before that few things infuriate me more
than the statement ‘I
just want to be happy’, but there is a lot of sense in what Lennon had to
say. So often in ultracompetitive human society we forget that the main
building blocks of a life you enjoy living are meaning and happiness. Status, jobs, success, they might help, but they are a secondary factor.
It worries me deeply that as the world gets richer and an accountant at a private school gets paid $80 000, the
response of so many people is not to slow down and enjoy all this wealth, but
to speed up, work harder, compete more so that they might remain at the top of
a heap that is just going to get ever steeper. It reminds of the hamster on the
wheel, or rather, a rat. And remember that the problem with the rat race is, even
if you win, you’re still a rat.
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