Parenting Line of the Day

Posted inRelationships3 Comments on Parenting Line of the Day

From a review of Edward Kennedy's posthumous memoir:

Kennedy tells us that when he was still a child his father once let him know that he had a choice between living "a serious life" and a "non-serious life."

"I'll still love you whichever choice you make,” his father, the bootlegger, wrote. "But if you decide to have a non-serious life, I won’t have much time for you."

Imagine as a child hearing that from your father! I think the better emphasis is personal happiness and fulfillment. But does the parent's emphasis even matter?

Not as much as most people think. Bryan Caplan, in his now gated article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes:

The punch line is that, at least within the normal range of parenting styles, how you raise your children has little effect on how your children turn out. You can be strict or permissive, involved or distant, encouraging or critical, religious or secular. In the long run, your kids will resemble you in many ways; but they would have resembled you about as much if they had never met you.

There is plenty of other work on this topic; twin studies are some of the most interesting. I am not optimistic that it will become mainstream thinking in the near term. The parenting industry — and it is an industry, all those books and tapes and classes on how to groom the next Einstein — is large and profit hungry.

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Here are all my links on parenting. Here's why I love my parents. Here is the key to life in one simple flowchart.

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Life: Your Adventure in Entrepreneurship

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David Kelley has a great piece up on The Atlas Society site entitled Life: Your Adventure in Entrepreneurship. You don't have to be an Objectivist or Randian to appreciate it. He discusses the spirit of entrepreneurship and how it applies in all parts of life. Here's the opening graf:

The entrepreneurial spirit is the spirit of enterprise: ambition to succeed, initiative in taking action, alertness to opportunity. It means being proactive rather than reacting to events and opportunities as they come along. It involves a full acceptance of the responsibility for initiating action to achieve one's goals, and for dealing with the consequences that arise as one does so.

I liked this bit on self-ownership:

Not all of us own the businesses we work for. But all of us are self-owners. The concept of self-ownership is a partly metaphorical way of capturing the fact that individuals are ends in themselves. That fact is easier to state in the abstract than it is to embody in the concrete, in one's actual outlook and practice. The sense of self-ownership manifests itself in the kind of total autonomy that leads us to say of someone: "He is his own man." It involves a commitment to one's own happiness as a true end-in-itself—not something one has to apologize for pursuing, not something that one may enjoy only on condition that it serves some other end. It involves the ability to experience happiness without any tendril of guilt at having succeeded. It involves a sense that the only person one answers to, ultimately, is oneself.

Read the whole thing.

Thanks to DaveJ for sending, who also sent me this worthwhile piece on the Myth of Crowdsourcing.

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Being Individuals in an Increasingly Individualistic Culture

Posted inCareers16 Comments on Being Individuals in an Increasingly Individualistic Culture

Career advisors and motivational speakers are obsessed with “passion” as the key to a happy successful career. I do not question the underlying message but I do think the message ought to be complicated a bit and placed in a broader context.

First, “find a job you’re passionate about” isn’t a simple task that you can just check off the list. To do it right requires a lifelong commitment to a set of values. Second, I think these are new values. Advice to pursue your passion is a profound shift from what a young person’s parents heard. Finally, the passion imperative is rooted in a larger idea of individualism, which operates on both the global and local level, and it affects everything, not just career thinking.

Back in the day, spiritual fulfillment was not on the check list when thinking about work. Career-advice instead assumed that a job first and foremost puts food on the table and supports your stay-at-home wife and children, that stability matters more than stimulation, and that to get to the top you have to earn your stripes and respect established hierarchies (and thus stay at one employer for a long time).

Today, career-advice assumptions start with a conviction that you are special and need to find work suited to your special interests and strengths. In other words, before picking a career, you need to first “find yourself.” This involves an extended period of self-discovery, aka The Odyssey Years, in which you try on for size a bevy of jobs. Then, after experimenting, you settle on a career (or perhaps multiple careers in parallel) about which you are truly passionate. Nothing says “I am unique and passionate” like starting your own business around your passion. No surprise, then, that we are witnessing a golden age of entrepreneurship. Along the way you struggle with self-doubt, loneliness, and the nagging issue of whether you are actually passionate about chosen career path, but if all goes to plan you come out with a life uniquely stitched to you.

That is the ideal career trajectory presented to Gen Y and I do not think it was the one presented to Baby Boomers. What happened? One theory: the shift in career messages is part of the larger blossoming of individuality.

Individualism has been the dominant cultural force since the 60’s. The birth control pill ushered a new era of sexual freedom and related identities. Cable television and now the internet (the greatest individualizing force of all-time) have allowed people to opt out of mass media and instead construct a personal blend of information sources. If you are what you read, you can now be a great many things, including all-your-own hybrids. The feminist movement has caused a huge expression of individualism: women are free-thinking individuals who can opt out of pre-written career (or non-career) scripts and lead unique, unpredictable lives. And around the world, democracy and capitalism, ever the enablers of choice and individual identity, has been on the march; history ended in 1989, after all.

The development of norms and the clarification of societal expectations around new behavior usually lag the actual behavior. This is one explanation for the Quarter-life Crisis phenomenon: 20-somethings are being told to do the new behavior — applying the spirit of individualism to their career — without the guideposts, case studies, and advice from people who’ve been there / done that.

Imagine being a teenage girl listening to your stay-at-home mom telling you to break through the glass ceiling. Imagine being a teenage boy listening to your dad, who’s had one employer his whole life, now encouraging you to start a business or at least get into a job you’re passionate about. Or imagine being a 28 year-old ambitious, career-minded woman, one rung away from Managing Director. If you have kids, the career will certainly suffer, and you’ll also think (rightly or wrongly) that the kids suffered as well. Skip the hard work that it’d take to get the promotion and have kids, and you’ve let down the feminists who’ve come before you. It’s not clear what you “should” do or how others will judge your actions.

Bottom Line: When people say, “Find a job you’re passionate about” they really mean to include it under the broader 21st century mandate: “Go out there and become self-actualized.” This sounds a whole lot scarier and impossibly vague. That’s because it is. A lot of the career angst over “passion” is part of a larger learn-as-we-go process of how to be individuals in an increasingly individualistic culture, as Wilkinson puts it. We should celebrate greater individualism and the quest to personalize our career, despite the associated stresses — just as we celebrate women’s freedom despite how it complicates women’s lives. It would be nice, however, if the career advice industry would frame their obsession with passion in larger sociological context, and reinforce how new a concept it really is.

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Thanks to Will Wilkinson for inspiring this post via his diavlog with Kay Hymowitz and his blog post Menaissance and Its Dickscontents.

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The Contrarian Heroes

Posted inPhilanthropy8 Comments on The Contrarian Heroes

Peter Thiel has launched his foundation — The Thiel Foundation — which seeks to "defend and promote freedom in all its dimensions: political, personal, and economic."

In his essay for the Oslo Forum, Thiel writes, "Like explorers or inventors, the first one to stand up for the truth faces the biggest challenge, but creates a model for the second and third, who benefit from his example. The world needs more refuseniks, rejectionists, resisters, gadflies, doubters, critics, objectors, muckrakers, and prisoners of conscience."

He goes on to talk about the "contrarian heroes" who stand up against violence:

In human rights, a conceptual breakthrough generally involves no new knowledge, but rather the rigorous application of a principle we already knew. Libertarians talk of the nonaggression axiom, Christians of the golden rule, Hindus and Buddhists of ahimsa; and this commandment to love others is written on the heart.

Some societies suppress sympathy for the other more or less entirely. More advanced societies typically honor this principle loudly but narrowly. Contrarians who apply it have discovered and exposed the evil of slavery; conscription; persecution of speech, belief, and worship; collective guilt; war; and torture. And they’ve frequently been rewarded for their discoveries with a spot on the list of victims.

Contrarians have also discovered that these evils are driven by common temptations—tribalism or utilitarianism—and entail a common expedient, violence.

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The Meta-Data That Comes from Certain Interview Questions

Posted inBusiness3 Comments on The Meta-Data That Comes from Certain Interview Questions

In an expansive interview with Fortune displayed on 15 different "slides," Steve Jobs says this about interviewing potential employees:

How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they're challenged? Why are they here? I ask everybody that: 'Why are you here?' The answers themselves are not what you're looking for. It's the meta-data.

It's the meta-data. I like that. I once mused that asking the question, "Do you have self-confidence?" can be an effective interview question not for the answer that's given (everyone will say yes) but for the meta-data that comes with the candidate's answer: body language, tone, approach, etc.

Jobs also says in the interview that when it comes to choosing strategies, "We do no market research. We don't hire consultants."

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