On ambition and learning
The thing that's hard to teach
The other day, I saw this in my LinkedIn feed.
This came from one of my former bosses, the woman who gave me my first job right out of college. While I was happy for her son, I also had another thought that popped into my head.
That is—I’ve never seen any parent, either in real life or on social media, say anything about their child graduating with an arts degree. Not once did I see or hear a message like this: “My son/daughter just graduated with an art/philosophy/sociology/liberal arts degree! Now they’re going to make big bucks and have a great life. How lucky are we?!?”
Never.
Because that message doesn’t exist, and it probably never will.
Personally, I can attest to the fact that my mom (and Asian parents in general) was not enthusiastic about me wanting to pursue an arts-related degree. Toward the end of high school, when I told her that I wanted to be a fashion designer, that I’d been drawing for most of my life, that I was interested in making garments, she scoffed at this notion as if it were foreign.
“How are you going to make any money?” she asked. “There’s no jobs in fashion here.”
She was right. Portland was never the hub for fashion. In order for me to “make it” as a fashion designer, I’d have to move to LA, New York, London or Paris.
Still, I was disenchanted by the fact that she, as a parent, could not, or would not tell me that I could make it if I really tried. After all, isn’t that what a lot of parents tell their kids?
Not Asian parents, apparently.
These days, my daughter loves to draw and she’s pretty good at it too. She usually draws comic-strip style art. She’s probably a better artist now as a nine-year-old than I was at her age. I do think that she has a bright future in art, should she choose that path.
However, being someone who is also art-oriented, I also know how tough it is to succeed as a creative professional. You have to see it as a calling of sort. You have to be able to articulate the fact that this was what you were meant to do.
So I decided I’m not going to sugarcoat it for her. If her love (and skill) of drawing continues into high school, I’m going to tell her making art is a wonderful thing, and the world needs it, but you also need to pay the bills. It’s not that she can’t do art, but that she should think carefully about what type of art (plenty of subjects can be considered ‘art’) she wants to pursue and choose an industry that seems to be growing, for if there aren’t any opportunities for upward movement, how can one progress in their career?
As for my former boss, I’d be happy too if my son graduated with a masters degree in aerospace engineering. I’m no engineering expert, but even I know that that particular industry/degree is on an upward trajectory. Having a STEM degree will safely ensconce her son into upper middle class life, or at the very least, help him stay in middle class.
I also wonder too, if her son decided to go into aerospace engineering by himself (did he love math and science as a child?) or if he was steered in that direction by his parents.
As parents and adults, we have a very important job of educating our children. I believe that how my kids turn out will be a reflection of me. I really do. Thus, if they turn out great, I can be like my former boss and shout it into the internet (or in person), but if something else happens, I’m not sure if I can do the same.
My former boss is a bad-ass woman. She’s been a marketing professional since the early 90s. By the time we worked together, it was 2008-2009. At the time, I was surprised by the fact that she was allowed to work from home two days a week. But then again, it wasn’t surprising given that we worked for a woman-owned company. Besides, she’d worked her way up to a director role by then, and had some leeway in how she wanted to coordinate her daily schedule.
I remember having a check-in with her via phone while she, in the background, tried to finagle her sons to behave. They were young, like the ages my kids are now, and already she was well advanced in her career.
The other day, there was talk on the internet about ambition. A lively discussion for members of Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study subscribers that resulted in a lot of thoughts shared about the value of education, about burnout, about the roots of ambition, and more. I was a silent participant, in that I read the comments that people posted, and it was startling to see the sentiments being shared.
One of the things that people talked about was the idea of educating our children. Public school education, while it has certain good elements, is broken. Going back to our founding of this country, back to the Puritans way of believing that hard work is virtuous and that rest and relaxation is a sin. In short, we’ve never been good at acknowledging the value of rest; thus, the only way to move forward is to stay busy, to work and work and work until our bones are almost broken. Because being busy is better than not, isn’t it?
Then I recall something I learned on this newsletter about how the public school education system was founded, and it brought to mind how all these forces have come together over the years to create a system that needs revision, not just in the ways we teach children, but in the ways we teach un-teachable things.
Things like ambition, kindness, and compassion. Helping thy neighbors. That sort of thing. The communal aspect of learning should be front and center, and yet, we’ve educated our children (and also been we’ve been educated ourselves) to pursue a relentless, non-stop work culture where we think about ourselves and how we move forward and how we shouldn’t stop working, how taking time off for personal days is frowned upon, how if we’re not doing something all the time then we can’t measure our success.
In America, we love to measure success by metrics and data. Starting in elementary school, we measure children’s performance through grades. We sort them out from “high achiever” to “low achievers,” with most kids falling somewhere in between. This process continues all the way through college, so much so that we’ve become accustomed to being measured.
I admit—I haven’t felt that motivated lately. This is ironic, given that I’ve always considered myself an “ambitious” person. I can blame it on a variety of things, like the weather, but perhaps the most obvious reason is that I’d just spent a very short time (three months) writing a novel—my first one, and I’m tired. But I’m glad I did it because I wanted to write a novel, so I did and I feel like it’s an achievement in and of itself even though I am still far from being published. I wanted to do it because I felt ambitious, and I had a story to tell so I made time to write.
But the result of that is burnout.
I spent three months measuring my success through word counts and page progressions. I’d spent my whole life being measured and graded, like the rest of you.
We all want to feel like we’re doing okay, so we push ourselves to be busy, for time’s sake, so that we can measure our success in quantifiable terms. But really, at the end of the day, it’s not so much how many words you’ve churned out or how many books you published or how many emails you sent or how many successful projects you worked on or whatever but the community of people around you. For if there is no one to share your success with, then what does it mean to be successful anyway?
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