[Vision2020] The Credit Illusion

[Art Deco]

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August 2, 2012
The Credit Illusion By DAVID
BROOKS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/davidbrooks/index.html>

*Dear Mr. Opinion Guy,*

*Over the past few years, I’ve built a successful business. I’ve worked
hard, and I’m proud of what I’ve done. But now President Obama tells me
that social and political forces helped build that. Mitt Romney went to
Israel and said cultural forces explain the differences in the wealth of
nations. I’m confused. How much of my success is me, and how much of my
success comes from forces outside of me?*

*Confused in Columbus.*

Dear Confused,

This is an excellent question. It has no definitive answer. There were many
different chefs of the stew that is you: parents, friends, teachers,
ancestors, mentors and, of course, Oprah Winfrey. It’s very hard to know
how much of your success is owed to those people and how much is owed to
yourself. As a wise man once said, what God hath woven together, even
multiple regression analysis cannot tear asunder.

Nonetheless, this question does have a practical and a moral answer. It is
this: You should regard yourself as the sole author of all your future
achievements and as the grateful beneficiary of all your past successes.

As you go through life, you should pass through different phases in
thinking about how much credit you deserve. You should start your life with
the illusion that you are completely in control of what you do. You should
finish life with the recognition that, all in all, you got better than you
deserved.

In your 20s, for example, you should regard yourself as an Ayn Randian
Superman who is the architect of the wonder that is you. This is the last
time in your life that you will find yourself truly fascinating, so you
might as well take advantage of it. You should imagine that you have the
power to totally transform yourself, to go from the pathetic characters on
“Girls” to the awesome and confident persona of someone like Jay-Z.

This sense of possibility will unleash feverish energies that will propel
you forward. You’ll be one of those people who joined every club in high
school, started a side business while in college and spent the years after
graduation bravely doing entrepreneurial social work across the developing
world.

This may not make you sympathetic when it comes to other people’s failures
(as everybody’s Twitter feed can attest), but it will give you liftoff
velocity in the race of life.

In your 30s and 40s, you will begin to think like a political scientist.
You’ll have a lower estimation of your own power and a greater estimation
of the power of the institutions you happen to be in.

You’ll still have faith in your own skills, but it will be more the skills
of navigation, not creation. You’ll adapt to the rules and peculiarities of
your environment. You’ll keep up with what the essayist Joseph Epstein
calls “the current snobberies.” You’ll understand that the crucial question
isn’t what you want, but what the market wants. For a brief period, you
won’t mind breakfast meetings.

Then in your 50s and 60s, you will become a sociologist, understanding that
relationships are more powerful than individuals. The higher up a person
gets, the more time that person devotes to scheduling and personnel. As a
manager, you will find yourself in the coaching phase of life, enjoying the
dreams of your underlings. Ambition, like promiscuity, is most pleasant
when experienced vicariously.

You’ll find yourself thinking back to your own mentors, newly aware of how
much they shaped your path. Even though the emotions of middle-aged people
are kind of ridiculous, you’ll get sentimental about the relationships you
benefited from and the ones you are building. Steve Jobs said his greatest
accomplishment was building a company, not a product.

Then in your 70s and 80s, you’ll be like an ancient historian. Your mind
will bob over the decades and then back over the centuries, and you’ll
realize how deeply you were formed by the ancient traditions of your people
— being Mormon or Jewish or black or Hispanic. You’ll appreciate how much
power the dead have over the living, since this will one day be your only
power. You’ll be struck by the astonishing importance of luck — the fact
that you took this bus and not another, met this person and not another.

In short, as maturity develops and the perspectives widen, the smaller the
power of the individual appears, and the greater the power of those forces
flowing through the individual.

But you, Mr. Confused in Columbus, are right to preserve your pride in your
accomplishments. Great companies, charities and nations were built by
groups of individuals who each vastly overestimated their own autonomy. As
an ambitious executive, it’s important that you believe that you will
deserve credit for everything you achieve. As a human being, it’s important
for you to know that’s nonsense.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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