Hanging In There

    We used to have two cats and a dog living with us. One cat, Sasha, was female, about eight years old and had been declawed before we adopted her. The other cat, Fluffy, (no, we didn’t name her) we had inherited from a relative. Like Sasha, Fluffy was female, declawed and around eight years old. And then, of course, there was that other pet, Banjo, the terrier who loved chasing cats. Sasha let Banjo know early on how she felt about terriers. She gave him a gratuitous slap of the paw whenever she happened to pass him. She often sat in the middle of the stairs and dared him to come up. Fluffy had a different approach. She ran and hid in a closet whenever she heard him coming. After about six weeks, the cats had Banjo trained. He never went near Sasha. He would turn around if he saw her on the stairs or in the doorway. He had a great time chasing Fluffy around and terrorizing her. This was a great lesson to me on how personality affects destiny.

    One of Shakespeare’s characters says the gods treat us like little boys pulling the wings off of flies, arbitrarily and cruelly. And although life is certainly arbitrary, we do have some tiny control over whether we are selected for wing-pulling. When we are younger, we tend to put more emphasis on being smarter or more talented and we think that raw ability will lead to success. But as an article in The New York Times Magazine pointed out a few weeks ago, students with grit, zest, curiosity and a few other key personality traits had more sustained school achievement than students who had the best academic test scores. In my experience, talent and brains are great, but passion and stick-to-itiveness are what bring in the goods. As Woody Allen once said “Eighty per-cent of success is just showing up.”

    My husband and mother are both fantastic examples of people with grit and passion. For most of her life, my mother was an artist without a medium. She painted, she redesigned our house, knocking out a wall here, inserting an alcove there. She designed and put together a four-panel mosaic that went around the fireplace. Then in her fifties, she discovered sculpting. At first she sculpted in stone. For the last twenty years or more she has been designing sculptures that a fabricator later builds out of steel. The sculptures are 10–16 feet tall and are made for the garden or outside space. A friend of hers convinced her to create a website, so at 87 years old, she had a friend take pictures of her work and hired someone to design her a website. This month she sold one of her works to someone who had found her on the Web. She also had a sculpture park approach her and offer her a show on their grounds, although it turned out they did not have sufficient funds to transport her large sculptures. At 87, my mother finally got some validation as an artist.

    My husband has been composing music every day now for the last forty years and only now identifies himself to others as a composer. He thought if he hadn’t written a movie score or had a piece played by The New York Phil, maybe it didn’t count—even though this is what he spends 80% of his time doing! This is a person whose fingers are tapping out a tune before his eyes are opened while he is lying in bed in the morning or who used to bring crumpled wads of paper with notes on them home from work so he wouldn’t forget what he had composed in the subway. Undoubtedly, even if no one ever played his music he would still be writing it. He doesn’t know how not to be a composer. Composing is a tricky business. When my husband started out he was too jazz-oriented to enter a conservatory (conservatories used to frown on jazz and none of them had jazz programs) and his music was too written-out for some jazz players. He is not the product of a school of like-minds. He is just a guy with a lot of talent and skill and a passion to write music. This week he did glean some recognition for his efforts. He got a rave review for one of his pieces in an on-line newspaper, was praised by a heavy who curates the jazz program at The Smithsonian Museum. A program of his music will be played at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in the coming week. Once again personality plays a role. My husband is a serious non-showbiz type and is not particularly good at networking or glad-handing. His talent and passion have carried him along, but it has taken him a long time to get out there.

    Obviously, success can be measured in many ways. Popular success is elusive at best, and should never be used as the barometer of personal success. It is especially fickle and arbitrary, being appreciated and recognized for what you do and sharing your work with others is achievable by most, however if they hang in there long enough. It helps to live past 40, for instance. Bizet died in his mid-thirties thinking that Carmen had been a huge flop when only years later it became the most performed and recognized opera of all time. Schubert, who died at 31 years-old, never heard any of his nine symphonies played by an orchestra.

    It is very appealing to think if we just sing better, act better or are smarter, we will be successful, but that is rarely the case.The best SAT score does not feed the soul. Even those with such overwhelming ability that they quickly rise to the top rarely stay there if they do not have depth of purpose, the consuming passion to do what they do and the curiosity to be constantly pushing the envelope. Personality isn’t set in stone. We need to imbue youngsters with the personal depth of character to achieve long-terms goals. These are not acquired by hiring experts to help them with their college essays or buying their way into Ivy League schools. The lesson that money talks is not lost on kids and it is true to some extent, but its words ring hollow in the long run.

 

Comments

[Caroline Hagood]

This is touching. I really liked that Times article, too. The importance of embracing failure is something you don't hear about often enough in discussions of success.

[Dr. Judith Weinstock]

Learning how to navigate rough waters is part of the growing process and a parent's job is not to make sure the water is never rough, but to help give the child the skills to work through it and to gain long-term perspective.

[Joan Erskine]

YEA CHARLIE!!!!

[Mitch Levenberg]

I figure we've got another 30 years before we have to worry. Meanwhile Julie I look at Julie each now across the breakfast table and I ask: "Gee I hope there's more pickled herring left".