Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
Friday 5 January 2024
Saturday 24 June 2023
Economics Explained: Business Failure and Entrepreneurs
The survival and success rates of new businesses can vary significantly depending on various factors such as industry, location, market conditions, management, and more. While I don't have access to real-time data, I can provide you with some general information based on historical trends and studies conducted prior to my knowledge cutoff in September 2021. It's important to note that these figures are approximate and can vary over time.
Survival Rates:
- According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 20% of new businesses fail within their first year of operation.
- By the end of their fifth year, roughly 50% of new businesses no longer exist.
- After ten years, around 70% of new businesses have closed down.
Success Rates:
- Determining the success of a business can be subjective and depends on various factors, such as profitability, growth, market share, and individual goals.
- Studies suggest that a significant percentage of new businesses may struggle to achieve sustainable profitability and long-term success.
- Factors that contribute to successful businesses include a strong business plan, market demand for the product or service, effective marketing and sales strategies, financial management, and adaptability to changing market conditions.
It's important to remember that these statistics are generalizations and do not guarantee individual outcomes. The success of a new business depends on a multitude of factors, including the specific circumstances surrounding each venture. Entrepreneurship requires careful planning, market research, a solid business model, and continuous adaptation to improve the chances of survival and success.
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Despite the challenges and risks associated with starting a new business, many people still choose to pursue entrepreneurship for several reasons. Here are a few factors that motivate individuals to start their own businesses:
Pursuing Passion and Independence: Many entrepreneurs are driven by their passion for a particular product, service, or industry. They desire the freedom to work on something they love and have control over their professional lives.
Financial Opportunities: Starting a business can provide potential financial rewards. Entrepreneurs may see an opportunity to create wealth, generate income, or achieve financial independence by owning a successful business.
Flexibility and Work-Life Balance: Some individuals start businesses to gain greater control over their schedules and achieve a better work-life balance. Entrepreneurship can offer the flexibility to set one's own hours, work from anywhere, and spend more time with family and pursuing personal interests.
Innovation and Creativity: Starting a business allows individuals to bring their innovative ideas and solutions to life. They may want to introduce new products or services, disrupt existing industries, or solve specific problems they are passionate about.
Personal Growth and Challenge: Entrepreneurship is a journey that provides opportunities for personal growth and development. Overcoming challenges, acquiring new skills, and taking on leadership roles can be highly rewarding and fulfilling for many entrepreneurs.
Autonomy and Decision-Making: Some individuals prefer to be their own boss and make independent decisions. Entrepreneurship offers the autonomy to shape the direction of the business, implement strategies, and build a company culture according to their vision.
Job Security and Control: In an uncertain job market, starting a business can provide a sense of security and control over one's professional future. Rather than relying on a single employer, entrepreneurs create their own opportunities and have a certain level of control over their destiny.
It's important to note that while starting a business can be appealing for these reasons, success is not guaranteed, as it requires careful planning, hard work, resilience, and adaptability. Each individual's motivations for starting a business can vary, and the decision to become an entrepreneur involves a unique blend of personal, professional, and financial considerations.
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While starting a new business involves risks and uncertainties, it is not entirely comparable to buying a lottery ticket. Here are some key differences:
Control and Influence: When starting a business, individuals have a considerable degree of control and influence over the outcome. They can shape the business strategy, make decisions, and take actions that impact its success. In contrast, buying a lottery ticket is purely based on chance, with no control or influence over the outcome.
Effort and Skill: Starting a business requires significant effort, planning, and the application of skills and knowledge. Entrepreneurs must invest time, resources, and expertise to develop their business, whereas buying a lottery ticket requires no effort or skill beyond the act of purchasing the ticket.
Probabilities and Factors: The success of a business is influenced by various factors such as market demand, competition, industry knowledge, marketing strategies, financial management, and more. While the odds of success may vary, they are not entirely random like the odds of winning a lottery, which are typically extremely low.
Learning and Adaptation: Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to learn from their experiences, adapt their strategies, and improve their chances of success over time. They can acquire knowledge, seek guidance, and make adjustments based on market feedback. In contrast, winning the lottery is based purely on luck and does not offer the opportunity for personal growth or development.
Long-Term Potential: Starting a business has the potential for long-term sustainability, profitability, and growth. A successful business can provide a stable income and create value for its owners, employees, and customers over an extended period. In contrast, winning the lottery is typically a one-time event with no guarantee of long-term financial stability.
Success in business is influenced by a multitude of factors, including strategic planning, effective execution, market understanding, adaptability, innovation, customer satisfaction, financial management, leadership skills, team building, and more. While there are external factors and market forces that are beyond an individual's control, entrepreneurs have the ability to actively shape and influence many aspects of their business, increasing the likelihood of success through informed decision-making, hard work, continuous learning, and a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances.
Saturday 4 September 2021
Monday 9 August 2021
On Ambition: Necessary but Corrosive?
Lucy Kellaway in The FT
Not long ago I had lunch with a friend who told me that his father, who had been a moderately well-known politician, had just died.
How sad, I said.
What was sad, he replied, was less his death than his life. From a young man he had set his heart on being in the cabinet but never made it beyond junior minister — and never got over it. For the past three decades of his life, he had been bitter, envious, bad company to others and a liability to himself. What had killed him in the end, his son told me, was not the organ failure reported on his death certificate, but thwarted ambition.
A few days later I was doing a podcast with Dame Jenni Murray, the veteran broadcaster. We were discussing our careers post separation from our life-long employers, the BBC for her and the Financial Times for me.
She said she was loving her new freelance existence and felt more carefree than she ever had. The reason: she had not one shred of ambition left. Freed from the monkey on her shoulder driving her on to succeed, she could enjoy the work she did for its own sake.
I said that on the contrary I was entering my seventh decade more ambitious than I had ever been. I was starting a new school in September, would be teaching A-level economics for the first time, and was hell bent on doing well.
These two conversations have got me thinking about both the corrosiveness and the necessity of ambition and wondering how much of it we need, how to turn it off when it’s no longer useful — and how to stop it from doing us in.
Striving for power, position or money
I was brought up to despise ambition. My parents had that snobby suspicion of overt success common in Britain in the middle of last century and disapproved of striving for power, position or money. I would hear them say “He’s very ambitious” — implying that the person in question was only a hop, skip and a jump away from turning into Macbeth.
When it came to my own early career as a journalist I would have sworn black and blue that I had no ambition whatsoever — any advancement was simply due to luck.
I changed my mind about 15 years ago when I went around asking all the most successful journalists at the FT if they considered themselves ambitious. The older, posher Brits mostly said no, but everyone else, all the Americans and all younger journalists said yes.
Suddenly I saw how pathetic the old-fashioned British aversion to visible striving was. All successful people are ambitious. If you want to achieve anything, especially in anything competitive, you won’t get anywhere at all without ambition.
Now as a teacher, I find myself not only pro-ambition, but being forced to teach it to children. “High expectations” are one of the government’s eight teacher standards each trainee teacher must provide evidence of to qualify — the idea is that teachers expect great things from every student so that they can expect great things of themselves.
Just before the end of term I asked my year 11 students to write down what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives. Some said they wanted to make a lot of money in the City and then start their own businesses. Others wanted to be neurosurgeons, professional footballers, astronauts, forensic scientists. One said he wanted to return to the country his parents were from and become a politician and help to resolve the civil war there.
As they started to discuss their ambitions I wanted to cheer. What a great job the school and their parents had done to make them all aim so high. What a great job I was doing as their economics teacher!
Aim high, but within reason
But as this roll call of ambition continued, I started to feel a bit uncomfortable. I wanted to say: come off it Tommy, you have struggled for three years to see the difference between fixed and variable costs so I’m not sure that the ambition of being Elon Musk is realistic for you.
What comes out of this are three thoughts.
Ambition is a good thing but it must be proportionate. This is true not only of Tommy but of all of us — we should aim as high as we can, but within reason. If my friend’s father had had the more reasonable (but still high) ambition of becoming an MP, he might have died a very happy man.
The second is that if you do not get the success you want, you need to let go quickly, before the wanting destroys you. My brother had the ambition of being a professional oboist. From the age of about 15, this was all he wanted in life and for a decade he did everything to make it happen. But when, in his mid 20s, he realised he was probably not going to get snapped up by the London Symphony Orchestra — or any orchestra at all — he sadly put his oboe away, cancelled his ambition and joined a stockbroker instead.
Lastly, I now see I’m wrong about myself again. Contrary to what I told Murray, I’m not ambitious any more. I’ve looked it up and it means a “strong desire for success, achievement, power or wealth”. I don’t even have a weak desire for three of those and while I do want to achieve as an A-level teacher, that is because I’ll be no use to my students if I don’t know what I’m doing, and I won’t have any fun myself.
Now mine is gone, I see more clearly the trouble with ambition. It is not that it turns you into a ruthless, driven version of Macbeth, but that the striving, by definition, makes you dissatisfied with your life at present. Worse still, all the really ambitious people I have known have never been satisfied by achieving the thing of their dreams, they merely concocted an even bigger dream. I daresay that if my friend’s father had made it to the cabinet, he would still have died embittered by dint of not having made it as prime minister.
In the end he was unusual and unlucky to die still holding on to ambition. One of the greatest joys of getting older is the corrosive side of the striving, the wanting, the envy tends to recede. Whether it is because the charms of success, power and money fade as you get older or whether it is because of the diminishing probability of achieving those things — it doesn’t matter. Murray was right: life without the monkey is a good deal nicer.
Wednesday 7 April 2021
Saturday 19 December 2020
Thursday 30 July 2020
All marriages are arranged
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev in The Indian Express
Arranged marriage is a wrong terminology, because all marriages are arranged. By whom is the only question. Whether your parents or friends arranged it, or a commercial website or dating app arranged it, or you arranged it – anyway, it is an arrangement.
The idea that arranged marriage is some kind of a slavery – well that depends on whether there is exploitation. There are exploitative people everywhere. Sometimes, even your parents themselves may be exploitative – they may be doing things for their own reasons, like their prestige, their wealth, their nonsense.
Recently, someone asked me about choosing a girl for their boy. One girl is well-educated and pretty, but another girl had a wealthy father. They asked me which they should choose. So I asked a simple question, “Do you want to marry the girl or someone’s wealth?” It depends on what is your priority. If your priority is such that someone’s wealth by marriage becomes yours and that is all that matters to you, that is fine. Well, that is the kind of life you have chosen.
Arranged marriage and divorce rates
The success of something is in the result. Luxembourg, a small country which is held as one of the most economically prosperous and free societies, has a divorce rate of eighty-seven per cent. In Spain, the divorce rate is around sixty-five per cent; Russia is at fifty-one per cent; United States, forty-six per cent. India: 1.5 per cent. You decide which works best.
Well, people may say the divorce rate here is low due to the social stigma associated with divorce, but definitely how it is arranged is also an important factor. When parents are the basis of organising the marriage, the success rate is a little better because they will think more long term. You may just like the way a girl is dressed and you want to get married today. Well, tomorrow morning you could realise you don’t want to have anything to do with her! When you are twenty, due to various compulsions or peer pressure, you may take decisions which will not last a lifetime. But sometimes you really hit it off with someone and it may work out – that is another matter.
Everything is an arrangement. You may think so many things about it, but it is arranged by your emotion, your greed, or by someone. It is an arrangement. It is best that it is arranged by responsible, sensible people, by those who are most concerned about your wellbeing, who have a larger reach. You cannot find the best man or woman in the world because we do not know where they are! With the limited contacts that we have, we can arrange something that is reasonably good. That is all it is.
If a young man or young woman wants to marry, who will they marry? Their contacts are very limited. Within those ten people that they know in their life, you marry one guy or girl. Within three months you will know what it really is. But in most countries, there is a law: if you make a mistake, at least two years you must suffer before you can divorce. It is like a jail term. Well, many religions have fixed it that you cannot divorce, that it is completely wrong. But where such religions are practiced, there the divorce rate is highest. So, neither God’s diktats nor the law is able to stop the breakups.
When parents organise a marriage, their judgement may not be the best, but they generally have your best interests in mind. If you have matured beyond your parents’ judgement or prejudice, that is different – now you can make your own decisions.
Conducting your marriage responsibly
When I married I did not know my wife’s full name. I did not know her father’s name. I did not know her caste. When I told my father that I wanted to marry her, he said, “What? You don’t know her father’s name? You don’t know who they are, or what they are? How can you marry her?”
I said, “I’m only marrying her. I’m not planning to marry any of the other things that come with her. Just her. That’s it.” I was absolutely clear about her potential and what she will bring to me, and she was helplessly in love from the first moment.
Though I never took anyone’s advice in my life, there are always self-appointed advisors who said, “You’re making the biggest mistake in your life, this is going to be a disaster.”
I said, “Whatever happens, whichever way it happens, it is for me either to make it a disaster or a success.” I knew this much.
Because who you marry, how you marry, which way it was arranged or by whom it was arranged is not important. How responsibly you exist – that is all there is. How you arrange the marriage is your choice. I’m not saying this or that is the way, but whichever way you do it, please conduct it responsibly, joyfully. You need to understand to fulfil your needs, physical, psychological, emotional, social and various other needs, you are coming together. If you always remember, “To fulfil my needs, I’m with you,” then you will conduct this responsibly. Initially, you may be like that, but after some time, you think he or she needs you; then you will start acting wantonly and, of course, ugliness will start in many different ways.
This happened. A young man and a young woman got engaged. So once the ring was slid on her finger, the young woman said to him, “You can lean on me to share your pains, your struggles. Whatever sufferings you go through, you can always share them with me.”
The guy said, “Well, I don’t have any struggles or pains or problems.”
She said, “Well, we are not yet married.”
If you think you are full of pain, struggles, and problems and need someone to lean on, there will be trouble. You know, they have been saying, marriages are made in heaven, but you are cooking hell within you. If you think someone else is going to fix you then there will be trouble for you, and of course, unfortunate consequences for the other person. If you make yourself into a joyful, wonderful human being, then you will see, your work, home and marriage will all be wonderful. Everything will be wonderful because you are!
Arranged marriage is a wrong terminology, because all marriages are arranged. By whom is the only question. Whether your parents or friends arranged it, or a commercial website or dating app arranged it, or you arranged it – anyway, it is an arrangement.
The idea that arranged marriage is some kind of a slavery – well that depends on whether there is exploitation. There are exploitative people everywhere. Sometimes, even your parents themselves may be exploitative – they may be doing things for their own reasons, like their prestige, their wealth, their nonsense.
Recently, someone asked me about choosing a girl for their boy. One girl is well-educated and pretty, but another girl had a wealthy father. They asked me which they should choose. So I asked a simple question, “Do you want to marry the girl or someone’s wealth?” It depends on what is your priority. If your priority is such that someone’s wealth by marriage becomes yours and that is all that matters to you, that is fine. Well, that is the kind of life you have chosen.
Arranged marriage and divorce rates
The success of something is in the result. Luxembourg, a small country which is held as one of the most economically prosperous and free societies, has a divorce rate of eighty-seven per cent. In Spain, the divorce rate is around sixty-five per cent; Russia is at fifty-one per cent; United States, forty-six per cent. India: 1.5 per cent. You decide which works best.
Well, people may say the divorce rate here is low due to the social stigma associated with divorce, but definitely how it is arranged is also an important factor. When parents are the basis of organising the marriage, the success rate is a little better because they will think more long term. You may just like the way a girl is dressed and you want to get married today. Well, tomorrow morning you could realise you don’t want to have anything to do with her! When you are twenty, due to various compulsions or peer pressure, you may take decisions which will not last a lifetime. But sometimes you really hit it off with someone and it may work out – that is another matter.
Everything is an arrangement. You may think so many things about it, but it is arranged by your emotion, your greed, or by someone. It is an arrangement. It is best that it is arranged by responsible, sensible people, by those who are most concerned about your wellbeing, who have a larger reach. You cannot find the best man or woman in the world because we do not know where they are! With the limited contacts that we have, we can arrange something that is reasonably good. That is all it is.
If a young man or young woman wants to marry, who will they marry? Their contacts are very limited. Within those ten people that they know in their life, you marry one guy or girl. Within three months you will know what it really is. But in most countries, there is a law: if you make a mistake, at least two years you must suffer before you can divorce. It is like a jail term. Well, many religions have fixed it that you cannot divorce, that it is completely wrong. But where such religions are practiced, there the divorce rate is highest. So, neither God’s diktats nor the law is able to stop the breakups.
When parents organise a marriage, their judgement may not be the best, but they generally have your best interests in mind. If you have matured beyond your parents’ judgement or prejudice, that is different – now you can make your own decisions.
Conducting your marriage responsibly
When I married I did not know my wife’s full name. I did not know her father’s name. I did not know her caste. When I told my father that I wanted to marry her, he said, “What? You don’t know her father’s name? You don’t know who they are, or what they are? How can you marry her?”
I said, “I’m only marrying her. I’m not planning to marry any of the other things that come with her. Just her. That’s it.” I was absolutely clear about her potential and what she will bring to me, and she was helplessly in love from the first moment.
Though I never took anyone’s advice in my life, there are always self-appointed advisors who said, “You’re making the biggest mistake in your life, this is going to be a disaster.”
I said, “Whatever happens, whichever way it happens, it is for me either to make it a disaster or a success.” I knew this much.
Because who you marry, how you marry, which way it was arranged or by whom it was arranged is not important. How responsibly you exist – that is all there is. How you arrange the marriage is your choice. I’m not saying this or that is the way, but whichever way you do it, please conduct it responsibly, joyfully. You need to understand to fulfil your needs, physical, psychological, emotional, social and various other needs, you are coming together. If you always remember, “To fulfil my needs, I’m with you,” then you will conduct this responsibly. Initially, you may be like that, but after some time, you think he or she needs you; then you will start acting wantonly and, of course, ugliness will start in many different ways.
This happened. A young man and a young woman got engaged. So once the ring was slid on her finger, the young woman said to him, “You can lean on me to share your pains, your struggles. Whatever sufferings you go through, you can always share them with me.”
The guy said, “Well, I don’t have any struggles or pains or problems.”
She said, “Well, we are not yet married.”
If you think you are full of pain, struggles, and problems and need someone to lean on, there will be trouble. You know, they have been saying, marriages are made in heaven, but you are cooking hell within you. If you think someone else is going to fix you then there will be trouble for you, and of course, unfortunate consequences for the other person. If you make yourself into a joyful, wonderful human being, then you will see, your work, home and marriage will all be wonderful. Everything will be wonderful because you are!
Sunday 3 November 2019
How to Keep the Wrong Women out of Your Life | Dr. Shawn T. Smith PsyD | Full Speech
You never have to chase women
The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi
Friday 24 May 2019
It can be Hard to tell Luck from Judgment
Randomness often explains the difference between triumph and failure writes Tim Harford in The FT
It hasn’t been a great couple of years for Neil Woodford — and it has been just as miserable for the people who have entrusted money to his investment funds. Mr Woodford was probably the most celebrated stockpicker in the UK, but recently his funds have been languishing. Piling on the woes, Morningstar, a rating agency, downgraded his flagship fund this week. What has happened to the darling of the investment community?
Mr Woodford isn’t the only star to fade. Fund manager Anthony Bolton is an obvious parallel. He enjoyed almost three decades of superb performance, retired, then returned to blemish his record with a few miserable years investing in China.
The story of triumph followed by disappointment is not limited to investment. Think of Arsène Wenger, for a few years the most brilliant manager in football, and then an eternal runner-up. Or all the bands who have struggled with “difficult second-album syndrome”.
There is even a legend that athletes who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated are doomed to suffer the “SI jinx”. The rise to the top is followed by the fall from grace.
There are three broad explanations for these tragic career arcs. Our instinct is to blame the individual. We assume that Mr Woodford lost his touch and that Mr Wenger stopped learning. That is possible. Successful people can become overconfident, or isolated from feedback, or lazy.
But an alternative possibility is that the world changed. Mr Wenger’s emphasis on diet, data and the global transfer market was once unusual, but when his rivals noticed and began to follow suit, his edge disappeared. In the investment world — and indeed, the business world more broadly — good ideas don’t work forever because the competition catches on.
The third explanation is the least satisfying: that luck was at play. This seems implausible at first glance. Could luck alone have brought Mr Wenger three Premier League titles? Or that Mr Bolton was simply lucky for 28 years? Do we really live in such an impossibly random universe?
Perhaps we do. Michael Blastland’s recent book, The Hidden Half, argues that much of the variation we see in the world around us is essentially mysterious. Mr Blastland’s opening example is the marmorkrebs, a kind of crayfish that reproduces parthenogenetically — that is, marmorkrebs lay eggs without mating and those eggs develop into clones of their mothers.
Place two clones into two identical fish tanks and feed them identical food. These genetically identical creatures raised in apparently identical environments produce genetically identical offspring who nevertheless vary dramatically in their size, form, lifespan, fecundity, and behaviour. Sometimes things turn out very differently for no reason that we can discern. We might as well call that reason “luck” as anything else.
This is not to say that skill doesn’t matter — merely that in a competition in which all the leaders are highly skilled, randomness may explain the difference between triumph and failure. Good luck plus skill beats bad luck plus skill any time.
It is easy to underestimate how much chance is at play all around us. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has recently been studying what he calls “noise”: the variability of judgments for no obvious reason.
A wine expert blind-tasting two glasses from the same bottle will often rate them differently. Pathologists disagree with each other in their judgments of the same biopsy. More disconcertingly, they also disagree with their own prior judgments of the case.
We rarely appreciate just how much inconsistency there is in the judgments we and others make, argues Prof Kahneman. It can hardly be a surprise, then, if past performance is no guarantee of future success.
We should remember, too, that people often achieve outsized success by taking risks or being contrarian. When John Kay examined the forecasting record of economists in the 1990s, he noted that Patrick Minford, an idiosyncratic forecaster, would often produce the best forecast one year and the worst forecast the next. If the consensus is wrong, being an outlier gives you a high chance both of dramatic success and spectacular failure.
We perceive all this randomness through a particular filter, too. Few people make the cover of Sports Illustrated after a run of mediocre luck. They appear after things have been going well, and if the good luck fails to hold then it seems like the SI jinx. More likely it is “regression to the mean”, or in simple terms, a return to business as usual.
We begin paying attention only when someone is producing a remarkable performance. Genius followed by mediocrity is a story arc we all notice. Mediocrity followed by genius just looks like genius — assuming the mediocre performer gets a second chance. Not all do.
So I wish Mr Woodford well. Perhaps he has lost his touch, perhaps the world has changed, or perhaps he has simply been unlucky. It would be nice to know which, but in such matters the world does not always satisfy our curiosity.
It hasn’t been a great couple of years for Neil Woodford — and it has been just as miserable for the people who have entrusted money to his investment funds. Mr Woodford was probably the most celebrated stockpicker in the UK, but recently his funds have been languishing. Piling on the woes, Morningstar, a rating agency, downgraded his flagship fund this week. What has happened to the darling of the investment community?
Mr Woodford isn’t the only star to fade. Fund manager Anthony Bolton is an obvious parallel. He enjoyed almost three decades of superb performance, retired, then returned to blemish his record with a few miserable years investing in China.
The story of triumph followed by disappointment is not limited to investment. Think of Arsène Wenger, for a few years the most brilliant manager in football, and then an eternal runner-up. Or all the bands who have struggled with “difficult second-album syndrome”.
There is even a legend that athletes who appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated are doomed to suffer the “SI jinx”. The rise to the top is followed by the fall from grace.
There are three broad explanations for these tragic career arcs. Our instinct is to blame the individual. We assume that Mr Woodford lost his touch and that Mr Wenger stopped learning. That is possible. Successful people can become overconfident, or isolated from feedback, or lazy.
But an alternative possibility is that the world changed. Mr Wenger’s emphasis on diet, data and the global transfer market was once unusual, but when his rivals noticed and began to follow suit, his edge disappeared. In the investment world — and indeed, the business world more broadly — good ideas don’t work forever because the competition catches on.
The third explanation is the least satisfying: that luck was at play. This seems implausible at first glance. Could luck alone have brought Mr Wenger three Premier League titles? Or that Mr Bolton was simply lucky for 28 years? Do we really live in such an impossibly random universe?
Perhaps we do. Michael Blastland’s recent book, The Hidden Half, argues that much of the variation we see in the world around us is essentially mysterious. Mr Blastland’s opening example is the marmorkrebs, a kind of crayfish that reproduces parthenogenetically — that is, marmorkrebs lay eggs without mating and those eggs develop into clones of their mothers.
Place two clones into two identical fish tanks and feed them identical food. These genetically identical creatures raised in apparently identical environments produce genetically identical offspring who nevertheless vary dramatically in their size, form, lifespan, fecundity, and behaviour. Sometimes things turn out very differently for no reason that we can discern. We might as well call that reason “luck” as anything else.
This is not to say that skill doesn’t matter — merely that in a competition in which all the leaders are highly skilled, randomness may explain the difference between triumph and failure. Good luck plus skill beats bad luck plus skill any time.
It is easy to underestimate how much chance is at play all around us. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman has recently been studying what he calls “noise”: the variability of judgments for no obvious reason.
A wine expert blind-tasting two glasses from the same bottle will often rate them differently. Pathologists disagree with each other in their judgments of the same biopsy. More disconcertingly, they also disagree with their own prior judgments of the case.
We rarely appreciate just how much inconsistency there is in the judgments we and others make, argues Prof Kahneman. It can hardly be a surprise, then, if past performance is no guarantee of future success.
We should remember, too, that people often achieve outsized success by taking risks or being contrarian. When John Kay examined the forecasting record of economists in the 1990s, he noted that Patrick Minford, an idiosyncratic forecaster, would often produce the best forecast one year and the worst forecast the next. If the consensus is wrong, being an outlier gives you a high chance both of dramatic success and spectacular failure.
We perceive all this randomness through a particular filter, too. Few people make the cover of Sports Illustrated after a run of mediocre luck. They appear after things have been going well, and if the good luck fails to hold then it seems like the SI jinx. More likely it is “regression to the mean”, or in simple terms, a return to business as usual.
We begin paying attention only when someone is producing a remarkable performance. Genius followed by mediocrity is a story arc we all notice. Mediocrity followed by genius just looks like genius — assuming the mediocre performer gets a second chance. Not all do.
So I wish Mr Woodford well. Perhaps he has lost his touch, perhaps the world has changed, or perhaps he has simply been unlucky. It would be nice to know which, but in such matters the world does not always satisfy our curiosity.
Sunday 17 March 2019
Why we should be honest about failure
Disappointment is the natural order of life. Most people achieve less than they would like writes JANAN GANESH in The FT
On a long-haul flight, Can You Ever Forgive Me? becomes the first film I have ever watched twice in immediate succession. Released last month in Britain, it recounts the (true) story of Lee Israel, a once-admired, now-marginal writer who resorts to literary forgery to make the rent on her fetid New York hovel. Her one friend is himself a washout who, as per the English tradition, passes off his insolvency as bohemia. Lee pleads with her agent to answer her calls and, in the rawest scene, confesses her crime with a wistful pang for the success it brought her.
There are serviceable jokes (including the profane farewell between the two friends) but the film is ultimately about failure: social, financial, romantic, professional. Put it down to the lachrymose effects of air travel — a phenomenon that has no definitive explanation — but I found the film unusually affecting. Or perhaps it was the shock of seeing failure addressed so unsentimentally, and from so many angles.
Failure — not spectacular failure, but failure as gnawing disappointment — is the natural order of life. Most people will achieve at least a little bit less than they would have liked in their careers. Most marriages wind down from intense passion to a kind of elevated friendship, and even this does not count the roughly four in 10 that collapse entirely. Most businesses fail. Most books fail. Most films fail.
You would hope that something so endemic to the human experience would be constantly discussed and actively prepared for. Instead, what we hear about is failure as a great “teacher”, or as a staging post before eventual success. There are management books about “failing forward”. There are educational methods that teach children the uses of failure. Consult an anthology of quotations about the subject, and it is not just the Paulo Coelho types who sugar-coat it. Churchill, Edison, Capote, at least one Roosevelt: people who should know better almost deny the existence of failure as anything other than a character-building phase.
There are good intentions behind all this. There is also a lot of naivety and squeamishness. For many people, failure will be just that, not a nourishing experience or a bridge to something else. It will be a lasting condition, and it will sting a fair bit.
Our seeming inability to look this fact in the eye is not just unbecoming in and of itself, it also inadvertently makes the experience of failure more harrowing than it needs to be. By reimagining it as just a holding pen before ultimate triumph, those who find themselves stuck there must feel like aberrations, when their experience could not be more banal.
I have known lots of Lee Israels: sensations at 25, under-achievers at 40. Sometimes, there was an identifiable wrong turn — a duff career move, say, or the pram in the hallway. But in most cases, it was just the law of numbers doing its impersonal work.
In almost all professions, there are too few places at the top for too many hopefuls. Lots of blameless people will miss out. Whether at school or through those excruciating management guides, a wiser culture would not romanticise failure as a means to success. It would normalise it as an end.
Look again at that list of names who have minted smarmy epigrams about the utility of failure. It is, you realise, a kind of winner’s wisdom. Those who overcome setbacks to achieve epic feats tend to universalise their atypical experience. Amazingly bad givers of advice, they encourage people to proceed with ambitions that are best sat on, and despise “quitters” when quitting is often the purest common sense.
At the end of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Lee is an unambiguous failure. There is (and you will excuse the spoilers) no rapprochement with an ex-lover she is plainly not over. There is no conquest of her drink habit. The film could dwell on the real-life Lee’s successful memoir, on which it is based, but only mentions it in text as the screen goes dark. She loses her solitary friend to illness. Even the cat croaks. Why, then, is the film so moreish as to demand an instant repeat over the Atlantic? It is, I think, the honest ventilation of a universal human subject. It is the novelty of being treated as a grown-up.
On a long-haul flight, Can You Ever Forgive Me? becomes the first film I have ever watched twice in immediate succession. Released last month in Britain, it recounts the (true) story of Lee Israel, a once-admired, now-marginal writer who resorts to literary forgery to make the rent on her fetid New York hovel. Her one friend is himself a washout who, as per the English tradition, passes off his insolvency as bohemia. Lee pleads with her agent to answer her calls and, in the rawest scene, confesses her crime with a wistful pang for the success it brought her.
There are serviceable jokes (including the profane farewell between the two friends) but the film is ultimately about failure: social, financial, romantic, professional. Put it down to the lachrymose effects of air travel — a phenomenon that has no definitive explanation — but I found the film unusually affecting. Or perhaps it was the shock of seeing failure addressed so unsentimentally, and from so many angles.
Failure — not spectacular failure, but failure as gnawing disappointment — is the natural order of life. Most people will achieve at least a little bit less than they would have liked in their careers. Most marriages wind down from intense passion to a kind of elevated friendship, and even this does not count the roughly four in 10 that collapse entirely. Most businesses fail. Most books fail. Most films fail.
You would hope that something so endemic to the human experience would be constantly discussed and actively prepared for. Instead, what we hear about is failure as a great “teacher”, or as a staging post before eventual success. There are management books about “failing forward”. There are educational methods that teach children the uses of failure. Consult an anthology of quotations about the subject, and it is not just the Paulo Coelho types who sugar-coat it. Churchill, Edison, Capote, at least one Roosevelt: people who should know better almost deny the existence of failure as anything other than a character-building phase.
There are good intentions behind all this. There is also a lot of naivety and squeamishness. For many people, failure will be just that, not a nourishing experience or a bridge to something else. It will be a lasting condition, and it will sting a fair bit.
Our seeming inability to look this fact in the eye is not just unbecoming in and of itself, it also inadvertently makes the experience of failure more harrowing than it needs to be. By reimagining it as just a holding pen before ultimate triumph, those who find themselves stuck there must feel like aberrations, when their experience could not be more banal.
I have known lots of Lee Israels: sensations at 25, under-achievers at 40. Sometimes, there was an identifiable wrong turn — a duff career move, say, or the pram in the hallway. But in most cases, it was just the law of numbers doing its impersonal work.
In almost all professions, there are too few places at the top for too many hopefuls. Lots of blameless people will miss out. Whether at school or through those excruciating management guides, a wiser culture would not romanticise failure as a means to success. It would normalise it as an end.
Look again at that list of names who have minted smarmy epigrams about the utility of failure. It is, you realise, a kind of winner’s wisdom. Those who overcome setbacks to achieve epic feats tend to universalise their atypical experience. Amazingly bad givers of advice, they encourage people to proceed with ambitions that are best sat on, and despise “quitters” when quitting is often the purest common sense.
At the end of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Lee is an unambiguous failure. There is (and you will excuse the spoilers) no rapprochement with an ex-lover she is plainly not over. There is no conquest of her drink habit. The film could dwell on the real-life Lee’s successful memoir, on which it is based, but only mentions it in text as the screen goes dark. She loses her solitary friend to illness. Even the cat croaks. Why, then, is the film so moreish as to demand an instant repeat over the Atlantic? It is, I think, the honest ventilation of a universal human subject. It is the novelty of being treated as a grown-up.
Monday 20 March 2017
Meritocracy: the great delusion that ingrains inequality
Jo Littler in The Guardian
We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers!” shouted Donald Trump in his first address to Congress last month, before announcing that tighter immigration controls would take the form of a “merit-based” system.
Like so many before him, Trump was wrapping political reforms in the language of meritocracy, conjuring up the image of a “fair” system where people are free to work hard to activate their talent and climb the ladder of success.
Since becoming prime minister, Theresa May has also promised to make Britain “the world’s great meritocracy” (or, in The Sun’s phrase, a “Mayritocracy”). She reiterated this pledge when announcing her revival of the grammar schools system, abandoned in the 1960s. “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege,” she proclaimed, “where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.”
In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, many people noticed that the meritocracy they had been taught to believe in wasn’t working. The idea you could be anything you wanted to be, if only you tried hard enough, was increasingly hard to swallow. Even for the relatively pampered middle classes, jobs had dried up, become downgraded and over-pressured, debt had soared and housing was increasingly unaffordable.
Even Thatcher presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility
This social context, created through 40 years of neoliberalism, was reflected on TV: in Breaking Bad, being brilliant at chemistry was not enough to guarantee mainstream career progression or even survival; the evisceration of social support was the backdrop to The Wire; and the precarious creative labour depicted in Girls was very different to the glamorous stability shown a decade earlier in Sex and the City.
In the face of this instability, May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality. They use different cultural accents: Trump’s brash rhetoric panders overtly to racism and misogyny; May presents herself as a fair-minded headmistress of the home counties. But their political logic is intertwined, as indicated by the indecent haste with which May rushed to the White House post-election. Both acknowledge inequality but prescribe meritocracy, capitalism and nationalism as the solution. Both want to create economic havens for the uber-rich while deepening the marketisation of public welfare systems and extending the logic of competition in everyday life.
When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.
‘May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed, arguing in a 1958 essay: “Meritocracy contradicts the principle of equality … no less than any other oligarchy.” She was particularly disparaging about the UK’s introduction of grammar schools and its institutional segregation of children according to one narrow measure of “ability”. This subject also troubled the social democratic polymath Michael Young, whose 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy used the M-word in an affably disparaging fashion. The first half of his book outlined the rise of democracy; the second told the story of a dystopian, meritocratic future complete with black market trade in brainy babies.
But in 1972, Young’s friend the American sociologist Daniel Bell gave the concept a more positive spin when he suggested that meritocracy might actually be a productive engine for the new “knowledge economy”. By the 1980s the word was being used approvingly by a range of new-right thinktanks to describe their version of a world of extreme income difference and high social mobility. The word meritocracy had flipped in meaning.
Over the past few decades, neoliberal meritocracy has been characterised by two key features. First, the sheer scale of its attempt to extend entrepreneurial competition into the nooks and crannies of everyday life. Second, the power it has gathered by drawing from 20th-century movements for equality. Meritocracy has been presented as a means of breaking down established hierarchies of privilege.
Even Margaret Thatcher, despite her social conservatism, presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility. Under New Labour, meritocracy embraced social liberalism, rejecting homophobia, sexism and racism. Now, we were told, really anyone could “make it”.
Those who did “make it” – the enterprising mumpreneur, the black vlogger, the council estate boy-turned-CEO – were spotlighted as parables of progress. But climbing up the social ladder became an increasing individualised matter, and as the rich got richer the ladders became longer. Those who didn’t make it were ignored or positioned as having personally failed. Under the coalition and Conservative governments, meritocratic yearning took a more punitive turn. In David Cameron’s “aspiration nation”, you were either a striver or a skiver; the very act of hoping to reach upwards became a moral obligation. Those who could not draw on existing reservoirs of privilege were told to worker harder to catch up.
The fact is, meritocracy is a myth. Social systems that reward through wealth, and which increase inequality, don’t aid social mobility, and people pass on their privilege to their children. The Conservatives have made this situation far worse by raising the inheritance tax threshold. And their reintroduction of grammar schools would involve using extremely narrow educational measures to divide children and to privilege the already privileged (often with the help of expensive private tutors). As the geographer Danny Dorling has said, it is a system of “educational apartheid”.
“Merit” itself, moreover, is a malleable, easily manipulated term. The American scholar Lani Guinier has shown how, in the 1920s, Harvard University curbed the number of Jewish students admitted by stipulating a new form of “merit”: that of “well-rounded character”. A more recent example was supplied by the reality TV filmmaking contest Project Greenlight, in which the white actor Matt Damon repeatedly interrupted black producer Effie Brown to tell her that diversity wasn’t important in film production: decisions, he explained, have to be “based entirely on merit”. This “Damonsplaining” was widely ridiculed on social media (“Can Matt Damon tell me why the caged bird sings?”). But it illustrated how versions of “merit” can be used to ingrain privilege – unlike clear criteria for specific roles, combined with anti-discrimination policies.
It is not hard to see why people find the idea of meritocracy appealing: it carries with it the idea of moving beyond where you start in life, of creative flourishing and fairness. But all the evidence shows it is a smokescreen for inequality. As Trump, May and their supporters attempt to resurrect it, there has never been a better moment to bury meritocracy for ever.
We must create a level playing field for American companies and workers!” shouted Donald Trump in his first address to Congress last month, before announcing that tighter immigration controls would take the form of a “merit-based” system.
Like so many before him, Trump was wrapping political reforms in the language of meritocracy, conjuring up the image of a “fair” system where people are free to work hard to activate their talent and climb the ladder of success.
Since becoming prime minister, Theresa May has also promised to make Britain “the world’s great meritocracy” (or, in The Sun’s phrase, a “Mayritocracy”). She reiterated this pledge when announcing her revival of the grammar schools system, abandoned in the 1960s. “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege,” she proclaimed, “where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.”
In the wake of the 2008 financial crash, many people noticed that the meritocracy they had been taught to believe in wasn’t working. The idea you could be anything you wanted to be, if only you tried hard enough, was increasingly hard to swallow. Even for the relatively pampered middle classes, jobs had dried up, become downgraded and over-pressured, debt had soared and housing was increasingly unaffordable.
Even Thatcher presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility
This social context, created through 40 years of neoliberalism, was reflected on TV: in Breaking Bad, being brilliant at chemistry was not enough to guarantee mainstream career progression or even survival; the evisceration of social support was the backdrop to The Wire; and the precarious creative labour depicted in Girls was very different to the glamorous stability shown a decade earlier in Sex and the City.
In the face of this instability, May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality. They use different cultural accents: Trump’s brash rhetoric panders overtly to racism and misogyny; May presents herself as a fair-minded headmistress of the home counties. But their political logic is intertwined, as indicated by the indecent haste with which May rushed to the White House post-election. Both acknowledge inequality but prescribe meritocracy, capitalism and nationalism as the solution. Both want to create economic havens for the uber-rich while deepening the marketisation of public welfare systems and extending the logic of competition in everyday life.
When the word meritocracy made its first recorded appearance, in 1956 in the obscure British journal Socialist Commentary, it was a term of abuse, describing a ludicrously unequal state that surely no one would want to live in. Why, mused the industrial sociologist Alan Fox, would you want to give more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted? Instead, he argued, we should think about “cross-grading”: how to give those doing difficult or unattractive jobs more leisure time, and share out wealth more equitably so we all have a better quality of life and a happier society.
‘May and Trump have managed to resuscitate the idea of meritocracy to justify policies that will increase inequality.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The philosopher Hannah Arendt agreed, arguing in a 1958 essay: “Meritocracy contradicts the principle of equality … no less than any other oligarchy.” She was particularly disparaging about the UK’s introduction of grammar schools and its institutional segregation of children according to one narrow measure of “ability”. This subject also troubled the social democratic polymath Michael Young, whose 1958 bestseller The Rise of the Meritocracy used the M-word in an affably disparaging fashion. The first half of his book outlined the rise of democracy; the second told the story of a dystopian, meritocratic future complete with black market trade in brainy babies.
But in 1972, Young’s friend the American sociologist Daniel Bell gave the concept a more positive spin when he suggested that meritocracy might actually be a productive engine for the new “knowledge economy”. By the 1980s the word was being used approvingly by a range of new-right thinktanks to describe their version of a world of extreme income difference and high social mobility. The word meritocracy had flipped in meaning.
Over the past few decades, neoliberal meritocracy has been characterised by two key features. First, the sheer scale of its attempt to extend entrepreneurial competition into the nooks and crannies of everyday life. Second, the power it has gathered by drawing from 20th-century movements for equality. Meritocracy has been presented as a means of breaking down established hierarchies of privilege.
Even Margaret Thatcher, despite her social conservatism, presented herself as an enemy of vested interests and a promoter of social mobility. Under New Labour, meritocracy embraced social liberalism, rejecting homophobia, sexism and racism. Now, we were told, really anyone could “make it”.
Those who did “make it” – the enterprising mumpreneur, the black vlogger, the council estate boy-turned-CEO – were spotlighted as parables of progress. But climbing up the social ladder became an increasing individualised matter, and as the rich got richer the ladders became longer. Those who didn’t make it were ignored or positioned as having personally failed. Under the coalition and Conservative governments, meritocratic yearning took a more punitive turn. In David Cameron’s “aspiration nation”, you were either a striver or a skiver; the very act of hoping to reach upwards became a moral obligation. Those who could not draw on existing reservoirs of privilege were told to worker harder to catch up.
The fact is, meritocracy is a myth. Social systems that reward through wealth, and which increase inequality, don’t aid social mobility, and people pass on their privilege to their children. The Conservatives have made this situation far worse by raising the inheritance tax threshold. And their reintroduction of grammar schools would involve using extremely narrow educational measures to divide children and to privilege the already privileged (often with the help of expensive private tutors). As the geographer Danny Dorling has said, it is a system of “educational apartheid”.
“Merit” itself, moreover, is a malleable, easily manipulated term. The American scholar Lani Guinier has shown how, in the 1920s, Harvard University curbed the number of Jewish students admitted by stipulating a new form of “merit”: that of “well-rounded character”. A more recent example was supplied by the reality TV filmmaking contest Project Greenlight, in which the white actor Matt Damon repeatedly interrupted black producer Effie Brown to tell her that diversity wasn’t important in film production: decisions, he explained, have to be “based entirely on merit”. This “Damonsplaining” was widely ridiculed on social media (“Can Matt Damon tell me why the caged bird sings?”). But it illustrated how versions of “merit” can be used to ingrain privilege – unlike clear criteria for specific roles, combined with anti-discrimination policies.
It is not hard to see why people find the idea of meritocracy appealing: it carries with it the idea of moving beyond where you start in life, of creative flourishing and fairness. But all the evidence shows it is a smokescreen for inequality. As Trump, May and their supporters attempt to resurrect it, there has never been a better moment to bury meritocracy for ever.
Sunday 19 February 2017
Saturday 11 February 2017
The 100-year-old couple – still married, still going strong
Paul Laity in The Guardian
We don’t know anyone else over 100. We are really oddities: two people married for 78 years, one 103, the other 100. We’ve outlived everybody. And it’s rare, I recognise that. We’re very lucky. The best I can wish you is our luck.”
Morrie Markoff is sitting on the sofa in his downtown Los Angeles apartment next to his wife, Betty. They are delighted that someone from the “Manchester Guardian” has come to talk to them, though these days they are used to a degree of attention. When Morrie was 100, a gallery in the city put on his first art show, exhibiting his scrap-metal sculptures, photographs and paintings. “Ease up on the 100 business,” he remarked at the time. “I’m trying to pass as 90.” Now the Markoffs are to appear in Aging Gracefully, a book of photos of centenarians by Karsten Thormaehlen; they are the only married couple in its pages.
We don’t know anyone else over 100. We are really oddities: two people married for 78 years, one 103, the other 100. We’ve outlived everybody. And it’s rare, I recognise that. We’re very lucky. The best I can wish you is our luck.”
Morrie Markoff is sitting on the sofa in his downtown Los Angeles apartment next to his wife, Betty. They are delighted that someone from the “Manchester Guardian” has come to talk to them, though these days they are used to a degree of attention. When Morrie was 100, a gallery in the city put on his first art show, exhibiting his scrap-metal sculptures, photographs and paintings. “Ease up on the 100 business,” he remarked at the time. “I’m trying to pass as 90.” Now the Markoffs are to appear in Aging Gracefully, a book of photos of centenarians by Karsten Thormaehlen; they are the only married couple in its pages.
“We’ve been together for nearly eight decades, and we still haven’t killed each other!” Morrie says.
“Though we’ve tried a few times,” chimes in Betty. “We’ve had plenty of run-ins, oh my God … but he never hit me, and I never hit him. Though I think I pushed him once.”
In turn, Morrie jokes about trading her in for two 50-year-old women. But whatever arguments they had are a thing of the past. “Now it’s peaceful,” Betty says, her hand touching the back of Morrie’s neck. She dismisses any idea of there being a secret to making a marriage work so long. “Just don’t let every complaint turn to anger. Tolerance and respect. And you’ve got to like them. Morrie would never use the word love; I do, but the actions are the same on either part.”
Why not the word “love”? Morrie replies that “to me, love is possessive; it’s controlling and demanding. The word that I would rather use instead is ‘caring’. You care about people. ‘Care’, to me, has a much deeper meaning. Love is an esoteric word, but one that people also use to mean all sorts of off-hand things. ‘I love playing tennis,’ and such. I hug Betty constantly, I kiss her constantly, I care very much about her.” Morrie assures me that the day they got together was the most fortunate of his life.
They met in New York City in 1938, at the wedding of Betty’s cousin, who happened to be the brother of one of Morrie’s friends. Betty was sitting at the table on Morrie’s left. “On my right,” he picks up the story, “was Rose Lebovsky, a very pretty girl, sophisticated, with wealthy parents. Betty has asked: why did you pick me? And I say: it’s because you ate less.”
Betty’s friends were unsure about the charming machinist, who had grown up in a tenement in East Harlem. But she let him drive her back home to College Point, in Queens.
“He was so handsome, with curly black hair. And on one of our first dates, the car broke down and he fixed it quietly and uncomplainingly, just like that. No fuss, unlike other men. I was impressed. And,” she repeats, “he was so handsome.” What else appealed to you, I ask: his sense of humour? She looks doubtful. “Er, yes, well, I guess so!”
“Though we’ve tried a few times,” chimes in Betty. “We’ve had plenty of run-ins, oh my God … but he never hit me, and I never hit him. Though I think I pushed him once.”
In turn, Morrie jokes about trading her in for two 50-year-old women. But whatever arguments they had are a thing of the past. “Now it’s peaceful,” Betty says, her hand touching the back of Morrie’s neck. She dismisses any idea of there being a secret to making a marriage work so long. “Just don’t let every complaint turn to anger. Tolerance and respect. And you’ve got to like them. Morrie would never use the word love; I do, but the actions are the same on either part.”
Why not the word “love”? Morrie replies that “to me, love is possessive; it’s controlling and demanding. The word that I would rather use instead is ‘caring’. You care about people. ‘Care’, to me, has a much deeper meaning. Love is an esoteric word, but one that people also use to mean all sorts of off-hand things. ‘I love playing tennis,’ and such. I hug Betty constantly, I kiss her constantly, I care very much about her.” Morrie assures me that the day they got together was the most fortunate of his life.
They met in New York City in 1938, at the wedding of Betty’s cousin, who happened to be the brother of one of Morrie’s friends. Betty was sitting at the table on Morrie’s left. “On my right,” he picks up the story, “was Rose Lebovsky, a very pretty girl, sophisticated, with wealthy parents. Betty has asked: why did you pick me? And I say: it’s because you ate less.”
Betty’s friends were unsure about the charming machinist, who had grown up in a tenement in East Harlem. But she let him drive her back home to College Point, in Queens.
“He was so handsome, with curly black hair. And on one of our first dates, the car broke down and he fixed it quietly and uncomplainingly, just like that. No fuss, unlike other men. I was impressed. And,” she repeats, “he was so handsome.” What else appealed to you, I ask: his sense of humour? She looks doubtful. “Er, yes, well, I guess so!”
Morrie and Betty with their children, Judith and Steven in the 1940s.
The dating didn’t last long; Morrie left the East Coast and returned to California, where he had lived for some time having taken a road trip there with friends and fallen in love with the sunshine and easy atmosphere. Was it a memorable marriage proposal? “Oh hell no,” Betty replies. “He never proposed. He just asked: would you like to live in California?”
Morrie sent her the fare for the bus, and picked her up in LA after the four-day journey. They “found a rabbi in our price range” and had a simple ceremony, during which the rabbi said: “May the marriage be as pure as the gold in the ring.” Betty and Morrie “looked at each other and almost burst into laughter” – they had a fake gold ring bought at Woolworths.
For Betty, LA is a fabulous city. “You’ve got the beach, the mountains, and the climate is so nice; I think it’s like paradise.” She shows off the one-room condo where they’ve lived for five years, since moving out of their much-loved modernist home a few miles away. The flat is decorated with Morrie’s artwork, most of it from the 1950s and 60s. There’s a view of blue skies and Bunker Hill skyscrapers; Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, with its luminous swoops and curves, is almost next door.
Betty says that old age for her has meant a great loss of energy: “My walking isn’t good, and I get confused.” These days, Morrie uses a mobility scooter. “He can’t forgive them for taking his car away,” says Betty. But they still go out for breakfast, and declining vigour is in part made up for by a sharpened appreciation of the world around them. Betty enjoys sitting outside a local cafe to see the play of sunlight and shadow, and likes to watch young children splashing in a nearby fountain, wondering which ones will brave the water, and which, too cautious, will turn away.
“I’ve lived a long life and a full one,” Morrie reflects. “I’ve never known a minute of boredom. I’ve always been busy, with work, or making things, or photography or travel, or most recently writing [he’s finished a memoir]. And there’s always another book to read. I sometimes say: I have so much to do, I don’t have time to die.”
Morrie Markoff. Photograph: Karsten Thormaehlen
The day before his 99th birthday, he did die, at least for a few moments. Having had a heart attack – “Betty acted quickly and dialled 911; she saved my life” – Morrie was undergoing an operation to put in a pacemaker when something went wrong and he flatlined. “The surgeons killed me – not a good idea as I have relations who are attorneys.” Apparently, his mouth fell open, his tongue dropped out and the grieving family retreated to the hospital’s meditation room – only to be called back a little later to find Morrie alive and joking.
“If I were a religious man, I’d put my longevity down to divine intervention,” Morrie says. “As I’m not, I simply say it’s luck.” Though the fact that his father, a very heavy smoker, died aged 94 suggests his genes aren’t bad.
Morrie’s early life was far from pampered. He remembers the tenement he grew up in as rat-ridden, with a kitchen filled with cockroaches and mattresses alive with bedbugs. Six people lived in three rooms; he slept on two chairs his mother put together, piled with cushions, in front of the stove. But he was never hungry, he insists, even in the Depression years, and was given complete freedom.
He remembers swimming naked as a boy in an East River that was full of floating rubbish, condoms, faeces and flotsam; he loved to dive off the flour barges tied to the dock. Perhaps he built up a great immune system, he wonders. And diet? He relishes the memory of hot dogs on Coney Island, with mustard and sauerkraut, washed down with Dr Brown’s celery tonic. Until he got tongue cancer, Morrie also smoked cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. When working as a machinist, he’d leave the cigarettes in his mouth because his hands were so oily; the smoke would fill his eyes, and in the morning he couldn’t open them.
Betty, on the other hand, puts her long life down to her “seventh grade nutrition class”. She was always aware of preparing a meal with protein and vegetables. Plus every morning for decades they’d walk the three miles or so around the local lake, before breakfast.
They always had energy, they insist, and boredom is not in the family. One of their early drives was politics. Morrie was a member of the Communist Party USA and would often go on protests; Betty was once put in prison for an hour for handing out its leaflets. But the aim was never an overthrow of government, just a fairer society. They were devotees of Roosevelt and even more enthusiastic about Barack Obama. As for Trump: “In my lifetime, he’s the oddest person to be elected president … he’s an egomaniac, a wildcard, a casino-owner: how much tax does he pay?”
“He’s so prejudiced,” Betty adds.
Betty Markoff. Photograph: Karsten Thormaehlen
Politics spawned friendships, and they had a close circle when bringing up their two kids, Judith and Steven. (One odd thing about getting to a very advanced age, Betty has said, is seeing your children becoming senior citizens.) The LA house they lived in for decades was part of a progressive housing co-operative; it was designed as a community, and its residents were in and out of each other’s houses all the time. “The friends are not there any more … they are long since gone,” Betty says. I ask her how that feels. She’s quiet but brisk in reply: “Oh, I’m very adaptable.”
After the war, during which he was deferred from the army to make detonators and contour rockets, Morrie ended up owning his own appliance shop. He used the scrap metal from air-conditioner repairs to make the small, dynamic sculptures that were exhibited decades later. But then a passion for travel and photography took over, and Morrie and Betty shine a bit more brightly when remembering their camping trips and tourist escapades. The photos they show me of their trips around the world, from Mexico to Macau, are of an astonishing quality. What camera did you use, I ask? Morrie begins to enthuse about his Rolleiflex and Leica, before Betty groans and changes the subject.
She is clearly proud of him, however. “He’s very talented in lots of directions,” she says in a moment when he’s not around. “If he had grown up differently, who knows what he might have achieved?”
Morrie still feels his days are not long enough, and insists you don’t need much money to live an active and involved life. Their daughter lives in the next building, so even the death of one of the couple won’t spell utter loneliness. Yet again, he mentions their luck.
As I prepare to leave, he chides me mischievously: “You haven’t asked us about our sex life!” Then he laughs: “that’s just a memory”. With his hand on Betty’s knee, Morrie looks at the woman whom he has never told he loves, and says: “After 78 years, I can say I didn’t make a mistake. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re still here.”
Sunday 19 June 2016
Why failure is the key to flying high
If at first you don’t succeed: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock
Matthew Syed in The Guardian
We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?
The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.
Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”
Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.
In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.
But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.
We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.
Matthew Syed in The Guardian
We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?
The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.
Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”
Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.
In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.
But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.
We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.
Tuesday 3 May 2016
A CV of failure shows not every venture has a happy ending – and that’s OK
Julian Baggini in The Guardian
CV of failures: Princeton professor publishes résumé of his career lows
But the irony runs deeper. Haushofer probably would not have paraded his failures in the first place if he were not now a high-flying Princeton professor. Admitting to past defeats is easy if ultimately you have emerged the victor.
Haushofer’s confession has been praised as a breath of fresh air, a brave display of honesty. But sharing our past trials and tribulations is mainstream, not radical. No success story is complete without the chapter about overcoming adversity. Indeed, I often suspect that many people exaggerate their earlier problems in order to fit this standard narrative and if they don’t, others will do it for them. JK Rowling was a single mother on benefits, but others talked this up into a “rags to riches” fairy story. She has explicitly denied that she ever wrote in cafes to escape from an unheated flat, a story that never made much sense, given the price of a cappuccino in Edinburgh.
It is much harder to, if not celebrate, at least embrace failures when they are more than temporary setbacks. Would Hausfhofer have shared his list of rejections had they not been followed by acceptances? If so, he is braver and more honest than most. Increasingly our culture peddles the myth that with enough belief, determination, and perhaps even hard work, you can achieve anything you want. So if you do terminally fail, that can only mean that you have not tried, believed, or worked enough.
This is pernicious nonsense. The harder truth to accept is that success is never guaranteed. Luck plays its part, but there is also the simple fact that we do not know what we can achieve until we try. Success requires a happy coincidence of talent, effort and fortune, so if you try to do anything of any ambition, the possibility of failure is ever present. When our plans fail, there is no reason to think that necessarily reveals a deep failure in ourselves.
I’m not sure what I was thinking when I saved all those rejection letters. At the time, I didn’t know whether they would record mere setbacks or a thwarted ambition. But either way, they would have served a purpose. Had I not go on to have a writing career, they would have reminded me that I did at least try and that the reason I did not succeed was not for want of effort. That reminder would be sobering and humbling, which is why it would have been so valuable. If we are to go to our graves at peace with ourselves, we must be able to accept our disappointments and limitations as well as our successes.
Since I have gone on to earn my living by writing, I could wrongly take them to be proof of how my refusal to take no for an answer ensured that my talents were eventually recognised. The more honest way to see them is as evidence of how fortunate I was that eventually someone chose to take a punt on me.
In Hollywood, every failure simply serves to make the eventual success more inevitable. In real life, every past failure should be a reminder that a happy outcome was never guaranteed. Our failed relationships, terrible jobs and bad holidays reflect our characters and the reality of our lives at least as much as the good times, which often hang on a thread. Thinking more about our failures might just help us to be more grateful for the successes we enjoy and kinder to ourselves when, more often, they elude us.
‘JK Rowling was a single mother on benefits, but others talked this up into a rags to riches fairy story.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
In my memory box I have a fine collection of rejection letters from editors and agents unimpressed with my first attempt at a book. Unsurprisingly, these mementoes of failure are the odd ones out in a collection that generally catalogues the highs rather than the lows of my life. We do not generally keep pictures of ex-partners from disastrous relationships on our mantelpieces, or photos of our sullen selves trapped inside a rain-swept, half-built motel.
But according to Princeton psychology professor Johannes Haushofer, we should do more to remember our failures. He has tweeted a CV of his setbacks, including lists of degree programmes he did not get into; papers that were rejected by journals; and academic positions, research funding and fellowships he did not get. Ironically, this little stunt has been a huge hit. “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention that my entire body of academic work,” he said. Expect a TED talk and book to follow.
In my memory box I have a fine collection of rejection letters from editors and agents unimpressed with my first attempt at a book. Unsurprisingly, these mementoes of failure are the odd ones out in a collection that generally catalogues the highs rather than the lows of my life. We do not generally keep pictures of ex-partners from disastrous relationships on our mantelpieces, or photos of our sullen selves trapped inside a rain-swept, half-built motel.
But according to Princeton psychology professor Johannes Haushofer, we should do more to remember our failures. He has tweeted a CV of his setbacks, including lists of degree programmes he did not get into; papers that were rejected by journals; and academic positions, research funding and fellowships he did not get. Ironically, this little stunt has been a huge hit. “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention that my entire body of academic work,” he said. Expect a TED talk and book to follow.
CV of failures: Princeton professor publishes résumé of his career lows
But the irony runs deeper. Haushofer probably would not have paraded his failures in the first place if he were not now a high-flying Princeton professor. Admitting to past defeats is easy if ultimately you have emerged the victor.
Haushofer’s confession has been praised as a breath of fresh air, a brave display of honesty. But sharing our past trials and tribulations is mainstream, not radical. No success story is complete without the chapter about overcoming adversity. Indeed, I often suspect that many people exaggerate their earlier problems in order to fit this standard narrative and if they don’t, others will do it for them. JK Rowling was a single mother on benefits, but others talked this up into a “rags to riches” fairy story. She has explicitly denied that she ever wrote in cafes to escape from an unheated flat, a story that never made much sense, given the price of a cappuccino in Edinburgh.
It is much harder to, if not celebrate, at least embrace failures when they are more than temporary setbacks. Would Hausfhofer have shared his list of rejections had they not been followed by acceptances? If so, he is braver and more honest than most. Increasingly our culture peddles the myth that with enough belief, determination, and perhaps even hard work, you can achieve anything you want. So if you do terminally fail, that can only mean that you have not tried, believed, or worked enough.
This is pernicious nonsense. The harder truth to accept is that success is never guaranteed. Luck plays its part, but there is also the simple fact that we do not know what we can achieve until we try. Success requires a happy coincidence of talent, effort and fortune, so if you try to do anything of any ambition, the possibility of failure is ever present. When our plans fail, there is no reason to think that necessarily reveals a deep failure in ourselves.
I’m not sure what I was thinking when I saved all those rejection letters. At the time, I didn’t know whether they would record mere setbacks or a thwarted ambition. But either way, they would have served a purpose. Had I not go on to have a writing career, they would have reminded me that I did at least try and that the reason I did not succeed was not for want of effort. That reminder would be sobering and humbling, which is why it would have been so valuable. If we are to go to our graves at peace with ourselves, we must be able to accept our disappointments and limitations as well as our successes.
Since I have gone on to earn my living by writing, I could wrongly take them to be proof of how my refusal to take no for an answer ensured that my talents were eventually recognised. The more honest way to see them is as evidence of how fortunate I was that eventually someone chose to take a punt on me.
In Hollywood, every failure simply serves to make the eventual success more inevitable. In real life, every past failure should be a reminder that a happy outcome was never guaranteed. Our failed relationships, terrible jobs and bad holidays reflect our characters and the reality of our lives at least as much as the good times, which often hang on a thread. Thinking more about our failures might just help us to be more grateful for the successes we enjoy and kinder to ourselves when, more often, they elude us.
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