When I was a kid, one of the more useful bits of advice my father gave me was that, whatever I would end up doing with my life, I should strive to be the best at it. The best. That was the goal. If I was going to be a waiter in a diner, I should be the best waiter in a diner ever.
Somewhere along the way, maybe a generation and a half ago, this advice morphed into “just do your best,” rather than be the best. The change was subtle, but reflected the difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
As I kid, I never took this as too much pressure. It was what we should aspire to be, with the understanding that we may never quite reach the goal, but we would damn well keep trying. To do less was to have no purpose. Goals were a good thing, the reason we kept pushing. I never doubted that it was what I should aspire to, and it drove me forward. I hit brick walls like everyone else, but it pushed me to find a way around them, under them, over them, to reach the other side. To do any less was to give up. I would not give up.
A shift in child-rearing came about after someone felt badly that their kid’s self-esteem was not enhanced when they failed to win a race. It was largely phrased in rhetorical questions: why should we make our children feel like failures for not being “the best”?
And so we handed out lovely participation trophies, suitable for display on the mantle so that all who saw it could appreciate that the young person did his best. The grown-ups would pat the youngster on his head, commending him on his effort, and muttering the critical lesson he would take away from the endeavor. “You did your best. That’s all you can do.”
Yesterday, I was constrained to attend a wake for a person I didn’t know because reasons. While there, I saw a young lady, the daughter of a dear friend of Dr. SJ, who is an incredibly talented singer/songwriter, and otherwise just a lovely young lady. I asked her how she was doing.
Her response made me deeply sad. It was hard, she told me. Too hard. It was a mean, brutish, nasty business, and though not yet 20, she had lost faith that she would achieve success. She seemed not to be cruising through the gears, never pushing anything too hard because it was, in her view, pointless. Not only was this horribly depressing, but she had essentially surrendered.
There are no shortage of platitudes that are meant to spur us forward when the odds are against us, when life is hard, when we are confronted with a brick wall that makes our trek to our future seem unreachable. I’m not a fan of such platitudes, as they tend to be simplistic substitutes for real thought. But I felt like saying, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going,” trite as that may be.
And yet, she was one of the special ones who worked hard at her craft to develop her talent. Sure, she chose a field that’s unbearably difficult, fraught with irrational failure, and nearly impossible to succeed without some monumentally fortuitous lucky break. But she worked to prepare herself for good luck. She was not merely good, but incredibly good.
She’s off to LA this week to meet with her record company. As down as she was, she’s going to bang her head into the wall again because there is nothing else she can but keep trying to make it happen. Whether she comes back a star or not remains to be seen, but despite her gloom, she will get on that plane to try.
If the effort ends with trying your best, rather than being the best, then you will fail. Even if you’re the lucky one who catches a break, deserved or otherwise, you will fail. Doing only as much as you feel like doing, seeing what you can get away with, just getting it done even if not well, is failure. If you are not striving to be the best, you are merely muddling through.
The slackoisie will read this and think I’m being cruel, demeaning them, attacking their self-esteem. Bullshit. Every one of us has the ability to push ourselves, whether it’s to jump high enough to get over that bar or to come up with an argument that gives our client a fighting chance to prevail. No, we will not always win. We will fall short much, maybe most, of the time. But the fact that we may not achieve the goal of being the best — and by definition, few of us will — we will not give in to mediocrity, to surrender of any point to our existence.
Yes, your parents lied to you. It is not good enough to try your best. That lovely trophy on the mantle is meaningless, worthless, a trinket meant to trick a child into feeling better about himself under the mistaken theory that if he feels proud of his failure, he will somehow find the spirit to achieve success. Life doesn’t work that way.
Instead, people give up the moment the path gets hard. Then they realize they won’t win, they stop trying. They then spend their lives seeing how little they can do and still get the trophy. They become part of that huge blob of people who expect little of themselves and always meet their expectations. They convince themselves that this is good enough, that achievement is too hard, and there is no reward in it anyway since you get the same trophy whether you’re the first winner or the last winner.
And if they aren’t the best, that doesn’t stop them from pretending they are, claiming they are, telling their world how they are the best. Except it’s a lie, and they know it but don’t care. Spending one’s life trying to reach the goal of being the best is just too much work, too much effort. Why bother?
Because if your life isn’t dedicated to the idea of being the best, and not just doing your best, then it lacks purpose and you have surrendered to mediocrity. If that’s all you want out of life, then why bother?
Update: Mike Pospis sums it up in a five second video:
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I think your father and mine might have had something in common. My father’s point of comparison was “garbage collector,” but the goal was to be the best.
I’ve a son who’s now in his late 20s. He, too, has aspirations in the arts and has been working like a dog, in LA and NYC, to make it happen. What I find encouraging about him is that even since playschool, he’s not been one to accept the “Good Job!” level of reward. I recall him refusing to even accept a medal for simply having tried hard in some athletic competition, believing if he didn’t come in first, he lost.
I do think, however, that the lack of parental pressure to be X can be its own form of pressure. It requires that one actually do some heavyweight thinking and getting a grasp on reality. It’s much harder to figure out what one is both truly capable of doing and wants to do than it is to simply take family help in following well-trod paths. But those paths can be fraught with danger, too. I know of several of my son’s classmates who have burned out in banking or stocks, law or medicine because that was the path they were pushed to follow.
A corollary to the “do your best” crowd is to compensate by micromanaging their children’s lives, pushing them where the parents want their children to be. Not only does that mean they lack the will to achieve, but they lack the interest in whatever they’re doing to begin with.
The usual retort to a post like this is for kids to blame their parents (or my generation, as the case may be). And they’re right, but so what? They still have to grow up, take responsibility for their lives and decide whether to spend it whining about their lousy parents or do something about it. At some point, every young person has to shift from being the child to being their own person, and that means overcoming their parents’ mistakes.
I recall reading aboit research that the best way to motivate children to work hard is to praise them for working their hardest not for their results so much. The benefit of this with a smart kid is easier to see. For example, a smart kid may get all As and be number one in her class at a small school without really working that hard. Praising her for getting As without really working hard is praising her for coasting through life. Once she gets into a bigger pond in college or life and she can’t coast anymore she may be prone to giving up because she is not used to working hard to achieve anything. Come to think of it maybe a way to think of it is what you started with. Tell her to be the best… Not just the best in her little pond, but the best in the whole world. Show her examples of people outside her pond that are achieving more than her and tell her she has to always work hard. I tell my own kids that working hard is what matters. Someone not as smart as you can do better than you if they work harder than you. [Ed. Note: Balance deleted as off topic.]
You lost it in your first sentence, “I recall reading about research…”, and went south from there.
Research beats a gut reaction. I do still wonder, as a parent, what is the best way to motivate my kids to try to achieve things in life. I don’t want to add to the ranks of your slackoise.
You don’t cite research. You vaguely “recall” research. I’ve read quite a bit of it, and most isn’t research at all, but rather inductive confirmation of feel-good theories to validate parenting trends. My “gut reaction” comes from having read, and written about here, this subject extensively. It’s all here if you care to look. If you prefer to read research, start here.
A self-esteem deficit is obviously a symptom, not a disease. The underlying causes are myriad and would require individualized attention and treatment to fix. Much easier to have a blanket program to increase self-esteem. Self-esteem is good! Who could possibly object?
The self-esteem movement is a red herring giving rise to unwarranted self-esteem and lack of self-respect.
Why can’t every symptom have a movement? It doesn’t seem fair, really, does it?
When I read this, there was no question in my mind this would go stupid fast in the comments. After 30 years of the self-esteem movement and idiotic rationalizations for raising children who are so wrapped up in their feelings that they will never overcome the ordinary obstacles that people have faced forever, what else could possibly happen.
I love being right.
What pains me is that they don’t realize that they’re stuck in the failed paradigm. Much as they seem to be in agreement, they get there the wrong way.
> After 30 years of the self-esteem movement
You’re off by at least a decade. My brother-in-law has significant and real mental health issues that were ignored for way too long, partly because he was sent to a special school for special snowflakes, where they consistently beat Lake Wobegone HS in all endeavors.
It may have only become popular 30 years ago, but the seeds were sown long before that.
His parents were thought leaders.
Research shows: People who go directly to the back of the store don’t buy anything from the back or the front of the store. Seriously!
I wanna hear what BarleyCorn has to say on this topic: Let me guess? Some people believe in the Power of Positive Thinking. “I, John BarleyCorn contrariwise, believe in the Power of Positive Drinking.” Ha. (But not while driving; no texting either, or smoking.)
I was going to say something about, “it is….what it is, perhaps the children-s will have the last laugh” or “I don’t think the final word is in”.
Unfortunately this is a rugged and jaded crowd here in the back pages of SJ that ironically was mostly fortunate enough to have parents and if not parents certainly grandparents that knew and flavored “independence” as a necessity as well as a virtue.
Independence as a necessity. What a novel concept…just in case you missed that.
I can report though that, leap frogging outer trans-generational distortions of the social fabric may once again become possible once the social security checks start bouncing.
Until then never miss an opportunity to mess with the mind of a child. Which by shifting standards covers them up till about 25-30 or so it seems?
P.S. When I and if I ever make it through the arduous training processes here in the back pages of SJ and or the esteemed one sells out and I come into possession of the URL, I intend to institute a Tuesdays in the Montessori Classroom for Those Over 50 sub-section.
Here I will be able to train countless “old people” how to adapt and ingauge their surroundings without simply giving up and expecting a trophy or tummy rub.
Just like a bubbling toddler given free reign to tinker with a counting block or learn how buttons work this virtual classroom will unleash delicate new realities to fill the empty minds of “old people” with boundless practicalities while instilling in them creative new potentials they never new existed.
If it comes with a Bex and a good lie down, count me in
Don’t you worry David. You will have plenty of opportunity, whether you forget your sack lunch or not, to play around with the pros and cons of going with Bass vs. Becks while attempting to perfect your black & tan skills.
There is some magic involved when it comes to the layering of Guinness but no one graduates without mastering the artistic and precession like deployment of the spoon.
Nap time is mandatory. Always has been, always will be.
Talisker. That is all.
“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.” Winston Churchill
Seen on a t-shirt my son wore 15 years ago: “Second place is first loser.” While catchy, don’t agree 100%.
I don’t agree either. Then again, second place isn’t the winner either.
As a parent of young kids (4. 7 & 9), this type topic has been coming up a lot with my wife and I. We live in a town that is especially good at the participation trophies and making all kids feel good about themselves.
With our eldest hitting an age where his awareness is blossoming, it has lead to many conversations, and its remarkable how often I hear my father’s words coming out of my mouth, and then having to explain why its not the same as what he hears in school.
I personally think we do a disservice to our kids to hide the struggles we take (at least those of us in constant pursuit of improvement) to better our lives from our kids, and most importantly our failures in those attempts.
My father’s favorite statement to me as a young boy was that “any day you arent improving yourself in some way, is a day you were falling back into mediocrity.”
While my kids are now a bit older (25 and 20), we all struggle with what makes the right mix of advice to raise them healthy and successful. From the other side, it becomes clearer that no matter how many tummy rubs we give our kids to give them a sense of self-esteem, it doesn’t change reality. Some will win. Some will not. Winning is better, and winning comes from putting in the effort to be the best, or as you father said, improve every day.
Once this becomes a way of life for them and they internalize the message, the problems with self-esteem give way to their own self-respect. They know who and what they want to be, and they don’t need external forces to validate them. They don’t need someone else to make them feel better about themselves. They are proud of themselves.
Good grief, you’re up early. Couldn’t wait to hit the old blawg site, could ye?
Today is going to be a good day.
It’s not early for me. Just another morning in paradise.
I read here for my own amusement, and to develop a certain sense of Schadenfreude at the the rate your country is sinking in to the pit (mine is stupid too, its just yours is stoopider).
Then you write something like this. Bravo, sir. This should be required reading for all parents.
This is the best reason there is to read here.
Hey, I’m an entirely different foreign David. Copycat.
I read here because I like the way you tetherball, SHG. Oh, and maybe someday, I’ll understand something John Barleycorn writes.
If it makes you feel any better, no one understands anything Barleycorn writes. And yet, I find him most amusing.
There can only be one.
I think we should team up. As a posting bloc, our combined influence will let us sway the other commentators on the site, until the whole blog becomes a festering cesspool on a par with the comment threads on Slate articles.
Sigh. SJ, where the David’s meet and greet.
You read Slate?
I hereby declare shenanigans.
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That was good advice. I learned a similar lesson from boot camp: you underestimate your own limits, so if you only do what you think you can (i.e. “try your best”), you will never actually hit your limits. Pushing yourself beyond what you think you can do (i.e., “be the best”) is the only way to find out what you can really do.
As for the whole self-esteem thing that infested the schools for the last few decades, I read recently that researchers have found out that actually hurt kids’ self-esteem–kids aren’t dumb, and they know when they are being praised for doing nothing. Apparently it’s led to young people mistrusting all praise, unless those giving the praise have shown that they will also ruthlessly criticize where criticism is warranted. I mentioned this to my daughter and she vehemently AGREED–she’s of the generation that got all that “self-esteem” boosting crap in school, and did indeed find it hollow and false.
That’s a point I’ve made to law profs in teaching students, that praise is insincere if unaccompanied by criticism when appropriate. If anything, there should be far more criticism than praise, as the job is to teach.
Welcome back, Dragoness. I knew you would come back,… for more punishment!
SJ is addictive, is it not? Even when you get beat up,… especially when you get beat up!?!
All the best,
Dragon Electric (Remember me?)
P.S., I was in court today. The older you get, the harder it is to stay out of court,… or
the doctor’s office/hospital. Ha. But who cares, really? Welcome back; I remember you
and your handle. I knew/predicted you could do it! Am proud of your reappearance, honest.
I never left–I enjoy reading Mr. Greenfield’s articles. However, I am not a lawyer, and rarely have anything intellgent to say about most of his articles. Therefore, I keep silent. My internet life started on Usenet, where flamewars were a matter of course; I am not so thin-skinned as to flounce out in a huff just because the owner of the blog lets me know that he’s not interested in certain types of comments.
Also, it’s “Dragoness Eclectic”, not ‘Dragon Electric’.