by Amy Chua
This anxiety can last a lifetime, even after one’s parents have passed away.
In Asian families, the pressure to excel is often intensified. Particularly in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean immigrant families, children are frequently taught that “failing”—for example, by getting a B—would be a disgrace for the whole family. When asked open-endedly in a recent study what makes children do well in school, almost a third of Taiwanese American mothers—compared with zero white American mothers—brought up family honor. Harvard sociologist Vivian Louie observes that in traditional, Confucian-influenced cultures, “ancestors are ever present and ‘the individual alive is the manifestation of his whole Continuum of Descent.’ When it comes to achievement, then, the accomplishments of the individual are strongly grounded in familial obligation and prestige.”
Family honor is only part of the picture. It’s important to remember that for Asian immigrant parents (as for so many other immigrant parents), high grades, prizes, brand-name schools, and other visible markers of achievement are a child’s best—perhaps only—protection in an uncertain, competitive, potentially hostile world. Hence the stereotype of the Asian parent fixated on rankings. “Harvard #1!” is the Asian parent’s constant reminder in this stereotype, which, for many, hits painfully close to home. “Why just an A, not an A plus?” is a query regularly heard in some Asian American households. As one second-generation teenager in a study of Korean American college students put it, “Korean parents are like you have to do this this this to be successful . . . you have to go to medical school or law school and study study study. They think the best colleges are Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. I am not saying white people don’t stress education, but Koreans . . . they take it to another level.” There are Asian American kids actually named “Princeton Wong” or “Yale Chang”—and not because their parents are alumni.
With an explicitness that would horrify Western parents steeped in self-esteem literature, Asian parents often deliberately put pressure on their children by making pointed comparisons with the wildly successful kids of other family members and friends. All this translates into an insecurity of just the kind we’ve described: a multilayered anxiety about one’s material position, a persistent feeling of not being good enough, where “good enough” is defined in highly conventional fashion, in terms of grades, rankings, wealth, or prestige. From a young South Asian:
When I was growing up my parents thought I was a bad girl. I had good grades, but it was never good enough. I used to envy my (white American) friends; their parents were so nice to them. Like this one girl made brownies with drugs in it, and her mother only made her write a poem of atonement.
One Asian American who grew up in the Los Angeles projects, the daughter of poor garment workers, went on to graduate from Cal State. Even as she pursued a graduate degree, she felt she was “average” but not “great”; despite her extraordinary upward mobility, her frame of reference remained the kids of her parents’ friends “who had gone to Yale.” Likewise, a Vietnamese American girl who graduated third in her class with a 4.21 GPA, when asked if her parents were proud, said, “It would have been better if I was first or second.”
The same self-dissatisfaction has been found repeatedly in Asian American students, from middle schools to top universities. Asian American students regularly report low self-esteem despite their academic achievements. Indeed, across America, they report the lowest self-esteem of any racial group even as they rack up the highest grades. In a study of almost four thousand freshmen at twenty-eight selective American colleges, Asians said they were the least satisfied with themselves of any racial group; blacks reported the highest positive attitude toward themselves, followed by Latinos, then whites, then Asians. Since the 1960s, American educators have accepted, and shaped our schools around, the idea that when minority students—indeed, any students—do poorly, the chief culprit is low self-esteem. The facts indicate otherwise.
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INSECURITY CAN MOTIVATE. We’ve talked about some of America’s best-known successful groups. We’ll close with a more obscure example: Lebanese Americans.
Joseph J. Jacobs, born in Brooklyn in 1916 to poor Lebanese immigrant parents, founded one of the largest engineering and construction companies in the world. In his autobiography, Jacobs describes how he and his fellow Lebanese Americans always felt looked down on by America’s WASP elite, which was especially stinging for a people so “intensely proud” of their heritage.
The Lebanese, he writes, are “descendants of the ancient Phoenicians,” a Semitic people who, like the modern-day Lebanese, were famous for being commercially successful wherever they went. Both Greeks and Romans singled out the Phoenicians for their superior intelligence, commercial acumen, and master seafaring skills. They appear in the Odyssey as “greedy knaves” with great “black ships,” and Cicero says it was they, with their superior “cleverness,” who first introduced to Greece “greed and luxury and the unbridled desire for everything.” Evidently well rounded, the Phoenicians were also credited with inventing the alphabet, arithmetic, and glass.
But Jacobs, as a Lebanese, was not only a descendant of the multitalented Phoenicians; Jacobs was a Christian Lebanese, a Maronite, as were most Lebanese Americans of his generation. The Maronites, as Jacobs puts it, “like to claim that they descend from the original Christian disciples.” In Lebanon, where Christians until recently dominated the country politically, economically, and socially, the Maronites’ superiority complex is well-known. Even today, Muslim Americans from Lebanon sometimes report that their parents “taught us to be ashamed of ourselves, not to be proud. You know, to look down on yourself, and look up at the Christians.”
All this gave Jacobs, though a peddler’s son, an outsize superiority complex, which, combined with what he perceived as WASP superciliousness, goaded him and other Lebanese Americans to succeed:
Having no one to speak for us, no family, no references, we worked doubly hard to become accepted, to demonstrate our worth to the establishment, those scions of the Mayflower, those third-generation WASPs who looked down on the “Syrian” immigrants and, by their very presence, seemed to taunt us with our lack of status. . . . The rejection we felt was exaggerated but was part of our motivation. . . . [E]nvious of the easy familiarity of our American peers, we were spurred on by dissatisfaction and the need “to show them.”
Jacobs’s insecurity and drive had another source as well—his mother. Growing up, he recalls, there was no escaping his mother’s “driving ambition” for her children: “[W]e should and could be better than anyone else, better even than we ourselves may have wanted to be.” The pressure, he writes, was “confusing and traumatic”; his eldest brother rebelled. Jacobs, however, internalized her demands. “Much of my early uncertainty and subsequent aggressive drive were undoubtedly spurred by a need to please my mother”—to satisfy her “demand for success and the admiration of the community.”
Nor was Jacobs’s mother unique in the Lebanese American community. He recounts how, when his friend and fellow Lebanese entrepreneur Alex Massad—described by Fortune as one of America’s toughest businessmen—first accepted a position with Mobil Oil, Massad’s mother lamented, “[W]hy don’t you go into business for yourself? Why don’t you open a store?” But Massad stayed on, rising quickly to become one of Mobil’s top executives. Finally, on one visit home,
Alex . . . announced triumphantly, “Mama, I have bought a store.” Her elderly face brightened at the news. At last! Alex had taken her advice; her son would finally be judged a success in her community. . . . “I bought Montgomery Ward!”
Her smile changed to a disappointed frown. She was unimpressed and said, with despair, “It’s not the same thing. I meant your own store!”
As Jacobs describes it, he and his second-generation Lebanese American friends “were doubly driven to succeed” to “show our parents” and to show the world.
In Jac
obs’s account, we find everything we’ve discussed in this chapter: a group superiority complex combined with acute insecurity generated by both perceived social scorn and unrelenting parental pressure. Over and over in America’s most successful groups, these forces converge to produce an intense chip on the shoulder, an “I’ll show everyone” mentality—and ultimately, disproportionate group success.
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INSECURITY AS A KEY TO SUCCESS—not exactly the lesson taught by America’s self-esteem-centered culture or its “just learn to love yourself” popular psychology. But for an individual to be driven, something has to be driving him: some painful spur, some goading lack. Disproportionately successful groups disproportionately feel this insecurity.
Thus the second element of the Triple Package deals another blow to modern American mantras. Insecurity is the enemy—a pathogen targeted for obliteration—in popular and therapeutic psychology, not to mention contemporary parenting. There’s an ocean of difference between zealously protecting self-esteem and actively promoting insecurity; between “Just be yourself” and “You’re not good enough”; between “You’re so amazing—Mommy and Daddy will always be here for you” and “If you don’t get straight As, you’ll let down the whole family and end up a bum on the streets.” Insecurity is not supposed to lead to success, but in America’s most successful groups, it seems to do just that.
CHAPTER 5
IMPULSE CONTROL
IF YOU ASK SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE why they’re successful, it’s striking how often they’ll bring up episodes of failure. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” Michael Jordan once observed. “I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been entrusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over, and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
How people respond to failure is a critical dividing line between those who make it and those who don’t. Success requires more than motivation, more even than a deep urge to rise. Willpower and perseverance in the face of adversity are equally important.
Led by social and developmental psychologists such as Roy Baumeister, Carol Dweck, and Angela Duckworth, a large and growing body of research has demonstrated that the capacity to resist temptation—including especially the temptation to quit when a task is arduous, daunting, or beyond one’s immediate abilities—is critical to achievement. This capacity to resist temptation is exactly what we mean by impulse control, and the remarkable finding is that greater impulse control in early childhood translates into much better outcomes across a wide variety of domains.
This finding was first made—stumbled on, actually—by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in his famous “marshmallow test” of the late 1960s. Trying to determine how children learn to resist temptation, Mischel began putting treats in front of three- to five-year-olds. The children were told that they could either eat their chosen treat (often a marshmallow) or, if they waited a few minutes, get another one too. Children who held out for fifteen minutes received a second marshmallow.
A majority ate up; only a minority held out. The great surprise, however, came years later. Although it wasn’t part of his original plan, Mischel followed up on the roughly 650 subject children when they were in high school. It turned out that the children who had held out were doing much better academically, with fewer social problems, than those who hadn’t.
Now confirmed by numerous studies, the correlation Mischel discovered between impulse control and success is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Kids who “passed” their marshmallow test, waiting the full fifteen minutes, ended up with SAT scores 210 points higher than those who ate up in the first thirty seconds. For college grades, impulse control has proved to be a better predictor than SAT scores—better even than IQ.
In the most comprehensive study to date, researchers in New Zealand tracked over a thousand individuals from birth to age thirty-two. Controlling for socioeconomic status, intelligence, and other factors, the study found that individuals with low impulse control as children were significantly more likely to develop problems with drugs, alcohol, and obesity; to work in low-paying jobs; to have a sexually transmitted disease; and to end up in prison. Those with high impulse control were healthier, more affluent, and more likely to have a stable marriage, raising children in a two-parent household.
There’s been another finding too, of equal if not greater importance. Willpower and perseverance can be strengthened. That’s where culture comes in. Cultivating impulse control in children—indeed in anyone, at any age—is a powerful lever of success.
But not by itself: impulse control by itself has nothing to do with academic achievement or moneymaking. The Pennsylvania Amish have as much impulse control as any group, denying themselves electricity and every modern convenience. But they aren’t academically or economically overachieving, because their culture points them away from those goals.
In other words, impulse control in isolation is mere asceticism. As always, it’s the fusion of all three Triple Package elements that creates an engine of economic success.
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ON OCTOBER 8, 2012, spectators in Lower Manhattan, as well as Internet viewers around the world, could watch a man complete his seventy-second straight hour of standing atop a narrow, twenty-foot-tall pillar. He also happened to be attached to wires jolting his body with a million volts of electricity. He never fell.
The media were unimpressed. After all, this was the same man who had remained encased in a block of ice for over sixty hours in Times Square (it was a month before he regained the use of his legs), the same man who had fasted for forty-four days inside a plexiglass coffin suspended above the Thames (to the point where his body began consuming its own organs). The world had grown tired of David Blaine’s feats. “[F]or once,” yawned an English newspaper, “it would be fun to see Blaine do something properly exciting—something which doesn’t consist of doing nothing for hours on end.”
Readers of Kafka will remember a similar fate befalling his “hunger artist,” who, once celebrated, ends up ignored and forgotten, starving himself to death in a cage on the outskirts of a circus. What Blaine and Kafka’s protagonist share is a belief in the virtuosity of endurance—an idea familiar in Western thought at least since the Stoics espoused it twenty-five hundred years ago. The Stoic sage demonstrated his moral perfection by mastering his passions—restraining his impulses—even in the face of extreme hardship. David Blaine is Stoicism on steroids.
The significance of Blaine, Kafka’s hunger artist, and Stoicism for our purposes is that they all exemplify a certain fusion of superiority and impulse control—a belief in the superiority of impulse control, an achievement of superiority through impulse control—that can generate a self-fulfilling cycle of greater and greater endurance. In the extreme case, people with superiority complexes built up around impulse control end up on top of poles enduring electric shocks. But in milder forms, this dynamic is another potent Triple Package specialty. Many of America’s most successful groups build impulse control into their superiority complex, priding themselves on their capacity to endure adversity and working hard to instill this capacity in their children.
This is certainly true of Chinese immigrants—and two-thirds of today’s Chinese Americans are immigrants. In fact, Chinese Americans not only tend to value impulse control. They have all three elements of the Triple Package, in spades.
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IN ASIA, EVERYONE KNOWS about China’s massive superiority complex. China’s very name—Zhongguo, often uncolorfully translated as Middle Kingdom—connotes in Chinese “center of the world” or “center of civilization.” Its emperor was the “Son of Heaven.”
If all societies are to a certain extent ethnocentric, special circumstances combined to make China an extreme case. Surrounded by natural barriers, China for millennia experienced minimal contact with the great civilizations of Europe, India, and the Middle East. Instead,
China’s neighbors were scattered, nomadic, and tribal. For most of its history, China was the largest unified population in a vast region, by far the most urbanized, the most literate, and the most technologically, politically, and culturally advanced. As the historian John K. Fairbank put it, “Since ancient China began as a culture island, it quite naturally considered itself superior to the less cultured peoples roundabout, whom it gradually absorbed and assimilated.”
Like the Greeks, the Han Chinese viewed all foreign peoples as “barbarians.” Those who resisted Chinese culture were “raw” (sheng); those willing to accept it were more generously referred to as “cooked” (shu). Cambodia, Central Asia, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were all China’s “vassal states” whose rulers were required to pay “tribute” to China and technically expected to prostrate themselves before the emperor. Because Chinese superiority was understood to be moral and cultural, it could be maintained even in the face of military weakness. In 1260, the Mongols conquered China, but Chinese historians—taking a page from the Persians—later recast this defeat as a victory. The Mongols, they observed, were ultimately “sinicized,” adopting Chinese names, rituals, customs, and values.
And when the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) overthrew the Mongols, China rose to heights unprecedented in world history. Its population of over 100 million was at least double that of all the European states put together. While Europe was creeping out of the Middle Ages, China had paper money, printing presses, gunpowder, and the world’s largest iron industry. At its height, the Ming navy consisted of more than 3,500 vessels, including leviathans that could accommodate perhaps 1,000 passengers and carry 400 times the cargo of their largest European counterparts. By contrast, the “royal fleet” Henry V assembled to conquer France consisted of four fishing boats each able to ferry one hundred men across the channel at a time; Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Niña, was about the size of a Chinese treasure ship’s rudder.
