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We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser.
We spend a lot of time thinking about the ways that prestige and resources and belonging to elite institutions make us better off. We don’t spend enough time thinking about the ways in which those kinds of material advantages limit our options.
He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.
“Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.”
“People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth. It’s difficult at both ends of the spectrum. There’s some place in the middle which probably works best of all.”
Inverted-U curves have three parts, and each part follows a different logic.* There’s the left side, where doing more or having more makes things better. There’s the flat middle, where doing more doesn’t make much of a difference. And there’s the right side, where doing more or having more makes things worse.†
It is good to be bigger and stronger than your opponent. It is not so good to be so big and strong that you are a sitting duck for a rock fired at 150 miles per hour.
Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne weighed prestige against visibility, selectivity against freedom, and decided the costs of the Big Pond were too great. Caroline Sacks faced the same choice. She could be a Big Fish at the University of Maryland, or a Little Fish at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. She chose the Salon over the three rooms on Boulevard des Capucines—and she ended up paying a high price.
Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War.
we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative.
How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.
The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more
Not all difficulties have a silver lining, of course. What Caroline Sacks went through, in her organic chemistry class at Brown was an undesirable difficulty. She is a curious, hardworking, talented student who loves science—and there was no advantage to putting her in a situation where she felt demoralized and inadequate. The struggle did not give her a new appreciation of science. It scared her away from science. But there are times and places where struggles have the opposite effect—where what seems like the kind of obstacle that ought to cripple an underdog’s chances is actually like Alter
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Five Factor Model, or “Big Five” inventory, which assesses who we are across the following dimensions.* Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous versus secure/confident) Extraversion (energetic/gregarious versus solitary/reserved) Openness (inventive/curious versus consistent/cautious) Conscientiousness (orderly/industrious versus easygoing/careless) Agreeableness (cooperative/empathic versus self-interested/antagonistic)
Jordan Peterson argues that innovators and revolutionaries tend to have a very particular mix of these traits—particularly the last three: openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness.
Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.
In 1965, Freireich and Frei published “Progress and Perspectives in the Chemotherapy of Acute Leukemia” in Advances in Chemotherapy, announcing that they had developed a successful treatment for childhood leukemia.† Today, the cure rate for this form of cancer is more than 90 percent. The number of children whose lives have been saved by the efforts of Freireich and Frei and the researchers who followed in their footsteps is in the many, many thousands.
At the center of many of the world’s oppressed cultures stands the figure of the “trickster hero.” In legend and song, he appears in the form of a seemingly innocuous animal that triumphs over others much larger than himself through cunning and guile.
“It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments,”
When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the “principle of legitimacy,” and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice—that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can’t treat one group differently from another.
Now, why was Jaffe so obsessed with meeting her J-RIPpers’ families? Because she didn’t think the police in Brownsville were perceived as legitimate. Across the United States, an astonishing number of black men have spent some time in prison.
69 percent of black male high school dropouts born in the late seventies have done time behind bars.)
This is what Jaffe was talking about in Brownsville. The damage she was trying to repair with her hugs and turkeys wasn’t caused by an absence of law and order. It was caused by too much law and order: so many fathers and brothers and cousins in prison that people in the neighborhood had come to see the law as their enemy.
A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive—and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.
