Your Grizzled Guru is a bit older than most of you readers.
Many of you have made note of this in the comments. It's true. I've been programming professionally longer than some of your parents have been alive. I understand that I'm coming at life from a different point of view. I can't help it!
So sometimes I come off a little like that pesky old man that lives down the block -- a little preachy, a bit too full of stories about the old country. I hope, however, that some of these stories contain bits of wisdom and/or amusement for you.
I read an interesting WSJ article about teaching in the old school style.
The author, Joanne Lipman, makes some good points. She starts with the idea that top performers accept and even seek out criticism. Steel sharpens steel. Being coddled doesn't help you grow. When I think back on my favorite teachers and mentors, they were rather harsh at times.
My high school composition teacher was the toughest in the department. She always wrote insightful comments that helped improve my writing. A critique is much better than a grade. A grade ranks what you did. A critique gives you a roadmap to improve yourself. And face it, life after school isn't about grades. Instead, it is about improving yourself.
She also notes that rote knowledge is useful. Certainly memorization is not a replacement for creativity and intuition, but it does have its place. I have an eidetic memory. My friends have always called me a walking encyclopedia (that's a dead tree version of wikipedia for you youngsters). It helps to have useful base skills at your fingertips. Sure, you can Google things, but it's better to have it at your fingertips.
Failure is a theme that I can relate to. I've written about my personal failures in previous blog entries. Failure teaches you things that a life of smooth success can not. So long as you have a the desire, drive, and basic skills needed to succeed; a failure along the way will not stop you. Keep going! You really are stronger after a failure.
The author notes that strict teachers are better for you than nice ones. My early, formative years were spent in Catholic school. Uniforms, nuns in habits, rulers, fear of God, the whole nine yards. There were rules to be followed! Failure to follow the rules meant going to hell (or worse, a visit to the principal!). When my early college life fell apart, I went to the military. I think I knew that I needed structure and discipline. Uncle Sam certainly provided that!
Some people make creativity look effortless. I hate them. My brother is an artist. I hate him. I hate him because he can pull together something beautiful without apparent effort. I know, however, that it looks easy because of the countless hours he spent practicing the basics. I believe it is the same when I pull a creative solution out of thin air. I can rationalize the basics after the fact, but really, you have to pay your dues. It is insufficient to just have raw talent.
Next on Joanne's list is grit. One of my favorite novels from high school was True Grit. They made a movie out of the novel starring John Wayne (I know, he's a bit before your time). Grit is about determination. I tell my children that their goal in life is to strive. Your job is to keep going. To move forward even in the face of obstacles. My Dad always said that he wasn't the smartest in his class, but he worked harder than anyone. It worked for him (he founded a rather prosperous chemical firm that was bought out by a larger one that eventually ended up in a Warren Buffet My old teacher Mr. K seldom praised us. His highest compliment was "not bad." It turns out he was onto something. Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck has found that 10-year-olds praised for being "smart" became less confident. But kids told that they were "hard workers" became more confident and better performers.
-- Joanne Lipman
The nuns told us that we shouldn't expect praise. It was expected that we would work hard. When we succeeded, we should be humble and not try to garner praise. I really reject today's "everyone's a winner" mentality. I also reject the coddling that some institutions practice. Sometimes the world's lessons are hard and harsh. When they are, just suck it up. Don't look for your participant ribbon.
When you hear the quote about "old age and treachery will defeat youth and vigor," think about why this is so. I like to believe that it is because us geezers learned our lessons in the school of hard knocks. We are fire hardened and battle tested! Beware!
Now if I could just find my reading glasses...
Thank you for this post, Grizzled Guru.
I also attended Catholic schools growing up (we had "Brothers" instead of nuns) and while it is unclear to me whether or not those were happy times for me, I can say with full conviction that it taught me discipline and the importance of hard work. I even had a teacher (a closet Nazi??) who had the words "Arbeit macht frei" written in German over his classroom doorway... A little bit scary, but needless to say, the discipline I learned there combined with the extensive rote learning (Cursive, Grammar, Vocabulary, and most importantly, Mathematics) was helpful to me later in life.
You are absolutely right in saying that American kids today are coddled, with educators emphasizing self-esteem and the "unique snowflake" school of thought. As I'm sure you are well aware, our country is ranked embarassingly low among developed nations in Math and Science. The reason is not because of any cognitive deficiencies (American children, on average, are no less brighter or dumber than their Chinese and Indian counterparts) but simply due to a lack of discipline.
One story I like to share whenever someone (usually an older lady in her 40s or 50s who says, "Gee, I'm just not good with numbers" or "I am terrible at math") is of one of my classmates in high school who immigrated with his family to the US when he was 12 years old. In his native country (Taiwan), he told me that he ranked consistently near the bottom of his class in Math class. In fact, he was so bad that he was once publically scolded/humiliated by his teacher in class. After coming to the US, however, he absolutely crushed the advanced math classes (and later, Advanced Placement Math classes) that our school offered. In fact, we were the only two students in our class to exhaust the supply of Math classes in school and ended up taking further Math classes at a nearby university.
A lot of our peers thought we were math whizzes/math geniuses. I can assure you, I am no math genius. I am not going to be solving any of the Millenium Prize Problems anytime soon. However, I did very well relative to my peers and that was solely a function of the discipline I learned from a young age.
Discipline. Discipline. Discipline. If one can master that, then one can succeed in life.
-Deo et Patriae
Yeah man, I went to a top national Jesuit high school and it was 10x harder than the next 4 years at a top 50 Big Ten University. The teachers (mostly men, some priests) were really tough on us and intimidating and they forced results. The Jesuit education ideal are so different than the typical US public high school it's scary. Alot of things were mandatory rather than elective (4 years of Latin, 3 years of modern language, hours of community service, sports hours, coat and tie dress code). Anyway, no student was ever coddled and if they didn't like it they were free to leave.
and let me guess - you are successful in life.
meanwhile, as statist group think takes over society, people are calling others scum for sending their kids to private schools, b/c fyi your children belong to the state, and you have no personal responsibility in raising or seeing to the education of your own progeny. disgusting.
LOL I've just been out-IlliniProgrammered on the stoicism front.
This is a great post. SB for you.
Isn't that kind of like giving him a grade?
oh no! that's praise!
Welcome to Bridgewater Associates
Not bad.
But, confidence and enthusiasm are extremely important in order to be able to keep striving, and stripping those away decreases motivation. Just human nature.
If it's constructive criticism, I listen.
If it"s unfair criticism based on personal attacks, stupidity and a desire to humiliate, I tell them to shove it.
My goal has always been to be more competent than the people who give people shit or throw people under the bus. And then quietly call them on it when they start doing it.
As a 24-year-old analyst on the trading floor, I would have really appreciated it if some VP started telling stories about an Associate's screwups when he was yelling at me for something that didn't seem like a big deal.
The way you get even is that, when you get to the next level, you subtly undermine other peoples' bullying.
Trust me, I've had axes to grind. I had axes to grind from high school when the kids who were going to Ivy League schools were acting like douchebags to a lot of my friends. I wanted to get even with them. It was also somewhat annoying in industry, but I channeled that annoyance into running circles around those guys and getting promoted. I channeled that annoyance into trying to get state schoolers onto Wall Street and creating a friendlier environment for them on WSO.
We have a lot of bullies on WSO, but the bullying and douchebaggery that would have pissed me off as an 18 year old or 21 year old- much of that is gone.
So in two years, your older self will have forgiven these guys, but it won't have forgiven the problem. I guess the one thing you can do here to help your future self is to think about what the more senior folks can do to help fix this.
I welcome all kinds of criticism.
Cirticism based on personal attacks, however unfair, tells me a lot about the critic him/herself. It's hard but I will listen to it.
@Grizzled Guru, brilliant as usual :)
If you know that someone who wants to hurt you posts a rant about you, they are probably going to set the bottom bound on a 99.999% confidence interval on who you are as a person.
Sometimes, if I am in an extremely pessimistic but not depressed mood, and I have the energy to read them, I find rants like these ironically uplifting. "Really? That's ALL they had to say about me? Maybe I'm not REALLY doing so terribly." "Maybe I'm only HALF the asshole I think I am." "I know I'm a self-centered narcissistic loser. Wait, they're only calling me an asshole? Maybe I DO have a chance!"
The best solution is to forget being slighted, and just move on. Axe grinding is tiring, and there is no end. I also try to keep a certain distance between people that aren't family or close friends, and for everyone else keep pretty low expectations of their expected behavior and character. And finally, just forget the past, because it doesn't matter.
The past matters. We have to be loyal to who we've been and who we are. We can't hold grudges, and we have to forgive and let go of wrongs, but I think that there's a case to be made that part of character- or at least part of having individual character- is that you remember who you are.
Many of the people I respect the most have a lot of continuity in how they self-identify. And the struggles we go through at 18, at 20, at 22, at 24, 26 etc are things that stick with us. We can forgive, but I think that remembering what we went through makes us stronger.
This advice isn't for everyone. If you were once addicted to crack cocaine, you probably don't want to identify with that part of your life. (But you were also probably at your strongest as an individual in the process of overcoming it.) It's ok to hang onto your struggles and the things you've managed to overcome and try to make life easier for the other folks facing them- that's part of being human.
This isn't the right approach. We overcome and transcend our past. But we also respect our old selves as they went through their trials and tribulations. (Though to be fair, most of the trials and tribulations faced by white-collar Americans are pretty mild.)tldr
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