As always, I was ready to learn about some new topics. This time, I focused on subjects such as climate change, alternative energy sources, and ethology. Remembering how Kobe Bryant studied predators to perfect his ability to attack and dominate other players, I studied the behavior of sharks, lions, and gorillas to gain a deeper understanding of the animal instincts and basic drives and needs that make people kill, cry, compete, and even love.
I wondered then if the lion’s roar matters more than his bite. It’s a metaphor, but its implications are real. Capitalism encourages competition and hard work, but cunning, intellect, and privilege get you in the ring. Privilege allows us to look upon certain evolutionary instincts with disdain, to act as if we’re above violence, revenge, carnality, and chest thumping. Privilege allows us to preach reason and resort to it as a means of resolving problems. And for black men, to be successful, we have to neutralize white fears and anxieties with smiles and composure.
But the truth is that when another man barks at you, you instinctively feel the urge to bark back. When terrorists attack us, we strike back. When people stand before an audience, we may not say it or even realize it, but we’re more inclined to like them, to give them a chance, when they’re attractive and confident and appear to be among the fittest—those who seem the most capable and can survive in a competitive world. We try to instill humility and laud modesty, but deep down we appreciate the presence of power because it makes us feel secure. The truth is that we discourage fighting and yet most of us desire leaders who authorize killing others to protect us. The truth is that we act as if reason runs the world when in fact most of our lives are governed by the instincts, drives, and desires we try to suppress.
For every strong man, there is somewhere an even stronger man. I realized that the bite matters, but more often than not it’s the lion’s roar, the length and color of the mane—the handshake, the swagger, the demeanor, and one’s presence—that are the deciding factors.
* * *
—
One of the best friends I made that summer at Stanford was a guy named Moe Katchen. We stayed in the same dorm and hung out often, at least a few times a week. We studied together, grabbed meals together, and explored Palo Alto and San Francisco together. Moe was an immensely likable guy—smart, empathetic, and cool, but also conscientious. We were tight, but after knowing each other for a couple of weeks we still hadn’t discussed politics, and I heard from another classmate that he was a conservative.
Soon after, we were in the common room of our dorm just hanging out, and I started coming at Moe—playfully at first—about some of his conservative beliefs. “So,” I asked him, “you’re telling me that a flat tax is fair? That small government benefits the middle class?” Moe was a passionate but not bloodthirsty competitor. But he was a competitor. I, on the other hand, made no effort to conceal my taste for battle. I began going after Moe ruthlessly. My intent was to utterly dismantle his arguments. Moe stumbled, made some weak points, and wavered a bit. I stridently corrected him. The thing that impressed me, though, was that he never backed down. No matter how forcefully I came at him, he always bounced back.
The other people in the room listened with rapt attention. As our debate went on, our audience grew. Of course they loved the spectacle, and we were two popular guys with big personalities. After two hours, we had at least thirty or forty bystanders observing us as if they were watching a movie. I’d been waiting for something like this my whole life and loved every second of it. Moe wasn’t in his element in quite the same way. He hadn’t read as much as I had and got tripped up a few times by the evidence I presented. But he never relented. Over three hours, he put up a good fight and made it clear to me that he was a conservative for the right reasons, because of his principles. I respected that as well as his resilience.
Over the course of the summer, Moe and I ended up having three debates like this, and with each one, we only grew closer. I went at him with everything I had, and I admired the way he kept coming back. I hadn’t found that in a friend or rival before—or since. After leaving Stanford, I missed Moe. He was the kind of friend I could debate with intensely and then chill with and talk to about almost anything. I made a few other friends like that at Stanford, and those connections made that summer special, one to remember.
Since doing forensics at Grosse Pointe Academy, I’d been interested in a career in public service. I knew that I cared very deeply about helping people and that I wanted to improve their quality of life by impacting different areas. But it wasn’t until after leaving Bullis that I decided that I wanted to run for president one day. When I got to Stanford and peers asked me what I wanted to do, I shared that ambition with them, and many told me they believed I could win. It meant a great deal to know that they believed in me and my potential to make a positive difference in the world, and I began my time at Williams on the wings of their confidence.
CHAPTER 9
Friday Nights
Like Bullis, Williams offered me a generous financial aid package, but my family still had to come up with several thousand dollars a year for me to attend. The day I got my financial aid award, my dad’s account balance was in the single digits. And he was already working three jobs. So our options were limited. He’d already pulled money out of his 401(k) early to make a down payment for my dental work, and my grandmother had already gotten a reverse mortgage to cover the remainder of my dental fees and repair the kitchen floor, which had caved in. We thought about taking out a loan, but my dad was still in debt, and his credit wasn’t great. I thought about outside scholarships, but most deadlines had passed. And Peggy had already done so much for me and I was extremely grateful. I didn’t want to ask her for more help. So paying the remainder of my Williams expenses would be a struggle.
I was aggravated. I knew Williams had a huge endowment. And while I appreciated the aid they offered, I thought it was problematic that most elite colleges with considerable endowments were frugal in granting aid to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. I understood the complexities. Colleges and universities needed a steady flow of donations to their endowments to meet their short- and long-term goals. To ensure a better future for their institutions, they have to grow their endowments. They also had to consider withdrawal rates. So most colleges could spend only 4 to 5 percent of their endowment per year. On top of that, some donations were onetime gifts; others were annual but specified for a particular purpose, so donations couldn’t just be arbitrarily used to ease the burden on low-income students. Because of these factors and others—such as the state of the economy, inflation, and projected rates of return—simply handing out more money to students like me was hardly feasible. Yet I refused to accept the notion that wealthy institutions of higher education couldn’t do better.
While it would be naive to suggest that a single blueprint could work for most colleges in America, there are questions that may inform useful approaches to solving the problem of rising college costs: How often does “demonstrated need” meet the actual need of the recipient and adequately account for financial circumstances that taxes and federal documentation do not inquire about? How are colleges prioritizing their range of institutional goals with the financial burdens placed on low-income students and their families? Are efforts to raise money sufficiently focused on financial aid? And does the unsettled idea of a tuition-relief fund with possible tax exemption necessarily have to detract from endowment donations? Or can the two amounts grow separately yet simultaneously? Answering these questions would not solve the problem but may help us think about how best to retool and refocus our efforts to address this pivotal issue.
Fortunately, my dad was able to find a small car in good shape for an affordable monthly rate. His plan was to start working as an Uber driver between jobs to make more money. There were hardly any hours left in the day for him to work more than he already was, but he managed, somehow, to do Uber a couple of hours a day. Once he n
oticed how lucrative Uber could be, he dropped the paper route and one valet shift a week to do Uber more often. Fortunately, this was enough to cover the part of my college tuition that wasn’t covered by financial aid. The last car he had was in bad shape and too unreliable to drive far distances. But with his new car he would be able to drive me up to Williams.
On the way up to Williamstown, I told my dad about my mind-set going into the next four years: “I want to take my intellectual engagement to another level. If I adopt Kobe’s polyphasic sleep schedule, I can read systematically across disciplines and cover more in the areas I value most. Conditions will be better, too, so I can go full throttle.”
“Balance; don’t you want balance?” he said.
“You always say that, but balance isn’t what got me here. I have to push myself to my outermost limits. Good grades have never been my only goal. At Williams, I’ll have access to every academic journal and periodical there is. No subscription fee. No paywall. No Internet issues. No space constraints. I’ll be able to explore whatever I want, as much as I want, for as long as I want.”
“You’ll do what you want to do. But if you want that brain to work at its best, you have to sleep and eat. You don’t feel it now, but wait till you’re fifty.”
“Right,” I said. “So the plan is to brief three news outlets a day, read five academic journals a week, and a few magazines a month. If I aim for that, with course work and clubs, I’m sure I’ll struggle to meet the mark. I can systematize the schedule, too, and increase each category by one each month if it’s not difficult enough.”
“Mm-hmm.”
My dad always listened, but rarely with any genuine interest in my intellectual pursuits. Usually, he just nodded impassively. If he did comment, it was always on my lack of attention to things such as eating and sleeping on a regular schedule. Sometimes he also encouraged me to take on less. But I was going into my freshman year of college and was hell-bent on raising the bar. By then I knew my dad well enough to know that, with him, intellectual conversations were usually one-way. So I thought I might be able to gain some insight from him on drinking and dating, two aspects of college life that I was uncertain about.
My dad had gone to Ferrum College but dropped out toward the end of his second year. He’d told me some stories before, but I was curious to hear more about his experiences. Whenever I’d talked to my dad about girls and dating in the past, he painted a simple picture. At my age, he was a flirt—bold, carefree, and largely uninterested in deeper conversations and serious relationships. His approach was simple: “Go for it. All she can do is say no. If she does, there are plenty more fish in the sea.”
From what I gathered, my dad had a solid success rate and a short memory. What may have seemed like an awkward moment or a fraction of self-doubt to most people was just an indication to move on to another girl for him. “So you’ve never thought twice about how to approach a girl or what to say?”
“I don’t know; it just flows, and you get a vibe,” he said, without giving it much thought.
“So you never really hesitated then?” I replied.
“Maybe back in middle school when I was shy.”
“But not since then? Damn. You ever been played or gotten caught up?”
“Not that I can remember. I was usually seeing a few girls at a time until I met your mom.”
“Did you care about them all?” I asked.
“Not really, not until things got serious with your mom.”
Unlike my dad, I was more deliberative and wanted to develop a connection with the girls I’d been interested in. For him, the main factor was physical attraction. Naturally, I looked for that first. But I also cared about other factors, such as a girl’s personality, intelligence, values, and opinions. For those reasons, my dad had been a bit keener on hookup culture than I would be.
Our experiences with alcohol stood in even starker contrast. When he was younger, my dad drank a good bit. I knew that drinking was a big part of the typical college experience, and up to that point I’d never tried alcohol. James and I had opened a Bud Light at his house one time over the summer but decided not to drink it. I’d never been one to give in to peer pressure, but I wanted to be able to go out in college without worrying about how I’d handle alcohol. So I asked my dad if I could try some with him before he dropped me off at Williams.
Once we checked into our hotel room in Williamstown, we went out to a liquor store nearby and he bought a six-pack of Corona. When we got back, I tried one and hated the taste. But school didn’t begin for another two days, and I wanted to see how much I could drink before I felt anything. So I finished it and grabbed another. Thirty minutes later, I was on my third. I asked my dad how much he thought I could drink and still be able to read analytically after going out.
“It depends,” he said. “It’s different for everyone. You don’t have a lot of mass, so you may feel something after a few beers,” he told me. “Over time, you build a tolerance. If you take a shot, it can hit you a little quicker.”
By the time I’d gotten through my fourth bottle, I was buzzed. I was still myself, but more easygoing and relaxed. It wasn’t a bad feeling, just peculiar. I felt loose and laid-back, as if I would be more likely to laugh at a bad joke. My dad got me a glass of water and told me to always hydrate afterward.
“You’re gonna want to take it easy at first and avoid mixing drinks,” he said. “If you’re drinking hard alcohol, space it out. After shots, wait fifteen minutes and see how you feel. And always eat something before you drink.”
The next morning, I woke up feeling a little groggy. I was still able to do everything normally, but I tried to write a letter to a friend at Stanford and realized I wasn’t firing on all cylinders. That was enough for me to get a sense of my limits. Over the next four years, I wanted to be in optimal condition—to be more precise, efficient, focused, and sharper than ever. So I decided then that I would simply avoid drinking too much. To approach the life of the mind the way Kobe approached basketball, I had to be ready to perform at my best, whether that was at 3:00 a.m. or noon. Good grades had always been a goal of mine, but what motivated me the most was the prospect of reading more deeply and widely than I ever had before.
At freshman orientation (which Williams called First Days), students chose to join one of several groups to get to know classmates and learn about life at Williams. The group I joined was called Leading Minds, for students who were interested in becoming campus leaders. The first day, we went around introducing ourselves, and I volunteered to go first. I boldly laid out my goals for my time at Williams and the future. “I hope that over the next four years we can come together in cooperation for mutual enlightenment,” I told the group, “and use all of our individual passions, talents, and energies to make the most of our time at Williams.”
I brought that intention and intensity to every aspect of my life at Williams. Now that I was in college, I wanted to be a part of everything, to get to know everyone, and, most of all, to learn everything I could. When the time came to sign up for classes, I decided to take five classes instead of the usual four, including two infamously tough tutorial courses that most freshmen shy away from. But even that demanding course load wasn’t enough.
I wanted to defy the limitations that stemmed from academia’s natural tendency toward expertise and specialization. That meant exploring areas of knowledge I knew I’d never master. I had read a bit about the sociology of academia and the “publish or perish” impulse, so I understood why scholars specialized in particular fields of inquiry. One professor even told me that I would be better off in the long run focusing on one discipline and committing to it. I could certainly appreciate that perspective, especially as it came from a respected scholar. Like most people, I had certain abilities and areas in which I excelled. And my bread and butter had always been politics and philosophy. But I wanted to learn more about different
kinds of subjects, even if I had no interest in pursuing a career in them. So while I picked my courses according to my level of interest in various subjects, I tried to read about everything from American architecture and the neuroscience of music to quantum tunneling and supersymmetry.
I’d read books written for popular audiences when I could access them through Williams’s online library. But I focused mainly on academic journals. The first time I picked up a quantitative economics journal, the bulk of the math flew over my head. But after spending several hours over the next two days looking up some of the jargon and researching certain econometric concepts, I was able to make a bit more sense of the implications of the scholar’s findings. For many who would never become an expert in those areas, reading journals like that one may seem like a waste of time. But my outlook was different. In my view, knowledge and understanding could only be gained by exploring new and unfamiliar terrain. So I believed in the value of expertise as strongly as I rejected the idea that any knowledge should be off-limits.
To be more efficient, I systematized my extracurricular reading routine. On average, I tried to explore a new topic every five to seven days. Given the range of topics I was curious about, my overarching goal was ambitious but practical: to get a sense of what the leading thinkers in various fields of interest were studying, why they were studying it, and if their research held any relevance to everyday life. To accomplish this, I would sometimes read academic journals in as many as twelve subject areas.
On several occasions, I was lucky to meet peers who were interested in the latest research in one of the subjects I was exploring. One of them was a guy named Dan. He lived in my dorm and was majoring in biochemistry. Dan was a science wiz, and I loved learning from him. We had some cool conversations about string theory, telomeres, and the cellular causes of aging. My talks with Dan helped me gain a better understanding of some of the practical implications of the scientific research I’d read. On most days, I did my extracurricular reading late at night, between midnight and 3:00 a.m. And on more than a few occasions, I didn’t begin my class assignments until the morning of the day that they were due. But by this point I was used to juggling a heavy workload without missing deadlines or taking a hit on my grade point average.
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