Here's what I mean. Over the past week or so I've been listening to Jessica Lahey's book The Gift of Failure while I exercise or drive around completing my various Christmas break projects. While in some ways it strikes me as having that one great transgression of most popular sociological/cultural books--taking a good idea for a long article and wringing a book out of it--I've thoroughly enjoyed the book as a balm from our accomplishment-oriented, failure-averse, credentialing culture.
Lahey is only another in a growing chorus of disillusionment with contemporary childrearing and educational practices. Books such as William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America's Elite and the more scholarly Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum take aim at the narcissism and lack of curiosity bred in contemporary academia. Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character and Angela Duckworth's extraordinarily buzzy Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance extend the analysis to early education and childrearing practices. Each argues that children in our system are shaped to be nothing but academic box checkers, beings honed to superficially placate and defer to the adults in their lives in order to attain to the next level of accomplishment. Kind of like playing a video game.
Though I first heard this truism in connection with someone striving for partner in a legal firm, this cycle of accomplishment for the sake of attaining what's next in order to seek accomplishment in order to attain what's next, is like a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie. Such is our current dispensation. And what's missing is the willingness and the passion and the drive that opens the door to great and lasting success but, of necessity, leaves the door for failure open as well.
Though all of these broader cultural implications are of great interest to me, I want to make the focus more internal here. It is easy to recognize these broad trends and bemoan them (and I do), but this basic--and I don't know what else to call it--conservatism when it comes to ambition is primarily fear-based. We are scared to death of failure, which is why most of the time we do what is known and comfortable. Fear is basically how Chili's exists. And I don't want to live my life governed by fear, which is, as Marilynne Robinson points out, "not a Christian habit of mind."
Hence the gimmicky goal.
Again, my goal is not failure, but to be willing to extend myself enough that failure becomes an option. To, in other words, be ambitious. This means not watching much TV (even sports) and using that time productively to read and write and having crazy ambitions for that writing (more on this to come shortly). Whatever else it might mean remains to be seen.
Partially this is to show my kids--who are being raised in the teeth of this risk averse culture--that there are worse things than failure. There's the refusal to try.
Endnote: I want to expand on the idea of ambition a bit more in a few subsequent posts. I am starting Macbeth with my sophomore honors kids this week so it's a pertinent philosophical issue. I want to think about ambition a bit from a Christian worldview--what it should or might look like
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