你具備了成功需要的特質嗎？
摘錄自：天下雜誌 經濟學人電子報 2014/4/25
2014-04-17 Web
only 作者：經濟學人
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| 圖片來源：flickr.com/photos/evilerin/ |
麥克阿朵（Megan McArdle）在《The Up Side of Down》中指出，想找出失敗的光明面，通常得放開直覺、忽視傳統看法、去做從來沒有人做過的事。美國人的祖先擁抱風險、寬待他人的失敗，進而建立了地球上最富庶的國家。
願意投資於風險極高的新創企業，幾乎就等於是美國人專有的特質。在此同時，美國破產法規十分寬容，讓創業的風險更易於承受，也縮短了失敗的苦痛。這都是一個願意投資未來的國家所具備的特質。
蔡美兒（Amy Chua，也就是虎媽）與她的丈夫魯本菲德（Jed Rubenfeld）都是耶魯的法律教授，他們在《The Triple
Package》提出了三項讓某些族群得以在商業上極為成功的特質：深度內化的優越感、極度不安全感，以及堅定的衝動控制力，特別是在面對困難時拒絕放棄的能力。
移民大多擁有前述三項特質，但擁有這些特質的不是只有美國新移民，猶太人和摩門教家庭的平均收入一直是中位數收入的3～4倍。在這些族群身上，此三重文化特質帶來了動力、耐力，以及承受失敗重新開始的能力。
美國曾是同時具備這三重特質，深信自己擁有獨特的命運、深信自己是獲選之人，擁有清教徒的強大工作倫理，卻也在歐洲文化帝國主義面前顯得非常沒有安全感。最近數十年，不安全感和工作意願已然消失，只留下了自豪、自滿和自以為是。
美國能否恢復其三重氣魄？實在很難說，或許中國崛起可以像半世紀前的蘇聯一樣，再次激發美國。當然，這取決於美國是否願意有所犧牲，告訴千禧世代努力雖然痛苦、但也無法避免，告訴他們科學和數學真的很重要。那需要全國上下的全心奉獻才辦得到。
波伊西州立大學的社會心理學家瑞德（Heidi Reeder），在《Commit to Win》中，將奉獻定義為在心理上投資於某事，並決心不計一切成本投入。瑞德提出了奉獻的4個關鍵元素，也正是這4項元素讓夢想得以轉化為成就：朝目標前行帶來的益處，克服困難，投資時間、金錢與心力，以及檢視其他選項。這本書務實、充滿資訊且極為易讀，實在是難得的美好體驗。（黃維德編譯）
©The Economist
Newspaper Limited 2014
Business advice
Sweet smell of success
Do you have what
it takes?
Apr 12th 2014 |
From the print edition
The Up Side of
Down: Bouncing Back in Business and in Life. By Megan McArdle. Viking Adult;
299 pages; $27.95. Head of Zeus; £15. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
The Triple
Package: What Really Determines Success. By Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. Penguin
Press; 320 pages; $27.95. Bloomsbury; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
In this section
Sweet smell of
success
Hops and dreams
Avon falling
Ghost of glory
past
Brand old man
Reprints
Related topics
United States
Amazon
Megan McArdle
Commit to Win: How
to Harness the Four Elements of Commitment to Reach Your Goals. By Heidi
Reeder. Hudson Street Press; 256 pages; $25.95. Buy from Amazon.com,
Amazon.co.uk
FAILURE, as a
precursor for success, threads its way through each of these books. None more
so than in Megan McArdle’s compelling account of her own misfortunes, as one
employer after another folds beneath her and a personal relationship goes sour.
Disaster piles on disaster, until the author (like the alcoholic who hits
bottom) embraces failure as an opportunity to learn. From then on, every step
forward brings fresh insights that build an armoury for future growth and
success.
Getting the upside
of down, notes the author (who used to work for The Economist), often means
letting go of your instincts, ignoring conventional wisdom, and leaping for
something no one has done before. America has a long history of doing this. As
Ms McArdle explains, “We’re the descendants of failures who fled to these
shores from their creditors, their failed farms, their disastrous love
affairs.” Embracing risk and forgiving failure in others, they built the
richest nation on earth.
The willingness to
invest at the riskiest part of any new venture’s discounted-cashflow curve is
almost uniquely American. Meanwhile, the forgiving nature of America’s Chapter
11 bankruptcy law has made the risk of doing so easier to take; the sting of
failure less arduous to endure. These are signs of a country with more invested
in the future than in the past.
In “The Triple
Package”, Amy Chua (of “Tiger Mother” fame) and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld,
both law professors at Yale, identify three traits that characterise racial,
religious and ethnic groups that excel in business: a deeply internalised sense
of superiority, deep feelings of insecurity and an unshakable capacity for
impulse control, especially the ability to resist giving up in the face of
hardship.
Immigrants tend to
have all three attributes. But successful newcomers to America like Cuban
exiles and Asian Indians are not the only ones to share such traits. Jewish and
Mormon households have long earned three to four times the median income. In
all such groups, this triple cultural package instils drive, the capacity to
endure, to take a hit and to start all over again. They are also often
outsiders.
America was once
the quintessential triple-package nation, convinced of its own exceptional
destiny, a chosen people with a strong Protestant work ethic and yet riddled
with insecurity in the face of Europe’s cultural imperialism. In recent decades
insecurity and the will to work have all but vanished. What is left is
essentially the swagger, complacency and entitlement of a perverted sense of
exceptionalism.
Can America
recover its triple-package verve? Hard to say. Perhaps the rise of a Chinese
colossus will yet stir the country the way Sputnik and the Soviet Union did
half a century ago. That will depend, of course, on whether America has the
stomach for sacrifice—for telling its “trophy generation” that sweating the
hard stuff is painful but unavoidable; that science and mathematics really do
matter. It will take huge commitments at all levels, from the Oval Office to
the kitchen table.
Commitment is
something Heidi Reeder, an award-wining social psychologist at Boise State
University, has devoted much of her academic career to understanding. In
“Commit to Win”, she defines commitment as being psychologically invested in
something and determined to stay with it at all cost. Dr Reeder identifies four
key elements of commitment that allow pipe-dreams to be turned into positive
achievements: the benefits of working towards a goal, overcoming difficulties,
investing time, money and effort, and examining alternative choices. Her book
is delightfully practical as well as informative, packed with intelligence and
clarity of both thought and expression. Learned, yet eminently accessible, it
is a rare pleasure.
From the print
edition: Business books quarterly
