"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it"
-- Michelangelo
In the year 1642, in a little hamlet in England, a little pre-matured, under-weighed boy was born. With his illiterate father passed away before his birth, his mother re-married when he was three and placed him with his grandmother. At 1653, he was taken out of school to be a farmer. Failing as a farmer, he returned to school to prepare for college. He was a lackluster student at school. Up to this point, there was nothing remarkable about the boy. Nothing from his heritage nor his work in life suggest that he would amount to much. It was when in college that he really caught the bug of learning. While in college, in addition to studying the prescribed courses, Isaac studied many of the important works on his own time and initiative. While he was just twenty four, he studied lights and colors with prisms to come up with the foundation for what would become the modern theory of light waves. While doing so, he found that the math in his day was not adequate to do his work, so he invented a math which later became calculus.
-- Michelangelo
In the year 1642, in a little hamlet in England, a little pre-matured, under-weighed boy was born. With his illiterate father passed away before his birth, his mother re-married when he was three and placed him with his grandmother. At 1653, he was taken out of school to be a farmer. Failing as a farmer, he returned to school to prepare for college. He was a lackluster student at school. Up to this point, there was nothing remarkable about the boy. Nothing from his heritage nor his work in life suggest that he would amount to much. It was when in college that he really caught the bug of learning. While in college, in addition to studying the prescribed courses, Isaac studied many of the important works on his own time and initiative. While he was just twenty four, he studied lights and colors with prisms to come up with the foundation for what would become the modern theory of light waves. While doing so, he found that the math in his day was not adequate to do his work, so he invented a math which later became calculus.
I was of
course talking about the great Sir Isaac Newton, who went on to make other
major contribution to science, including gravity and laws of motion.
Craig Venter was also a lack luster student in his early years. According to his own biography, he was getting Cs and Ds into eighth grade. He spent most of his youth playing water sports. During the Vietnam war, Craig was working at the intensive care ward of the U.S. Navy. Depressed by the maiming and death that he saw daily, he once tried to commit suicide by swimming out to the sea, but fortunately for humanity, he changed his mind about a mile out. It was what he saw in Vietnam that got him interested in medicine and later biology. Craig started out his college career in the College of San Mateo, a community college. He went on to earn BS in Biochemistry and PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology, both in U.C. San Diego. Craig went on to become the giant of genetics. Beating out the U.S. government in sequencing the first human genome.
If you care to study the greats, past and present, you will find repleted examples where people who started out as mediocre zoom past everyone and became great in their field. What they all have in common are two things. First, they must have great intellects. Most of these people have IQs that are off the charts. But what really set them apart from other people who also have high IQ's is their passion. Once they found their passion, their IQ drove them past their peers and they did great things with their lives.
Many of the great minds, like our two examples here, were raised very different from the way a tiger mom would raise her kids. Unlike a tiger mom, who arranged every minute of her kid's life with practices, tutoring and books, these two were left alone and neglected as children. They went through life on their own terms and found something that they were passionate about.
Passion is very powerful. While we all can't have the IQ and talent of Issac Newton or Craig Venter, we can all find out what in life we are good at and enjoy doing. Passion helps us make the most of our talents, and if we are fortunate to be endowed with great talent, passion helps us achieve great things.
To develop passion for something, a kid must be given the freedom to explore and find out what they like to do in life. Most tiger moms have a preconceived idea of what they want their kid to be. Basically, what they want is everything that confer high social status and make money, becoming a doctor, a lawyer etc. They never took the time to discover, as Michelangelo did, what the statue look like inside the block of stone. They also see college as the end goal in life itself. A kid's entire life was to study and try to get into a good college, in a field that is high social status. If this robs them of their childhood, their motivation and it push them in an area that they are not interested in, a tiger mom is blissfully blind to these shortcomings of their actions.
I am old enough to witness the tragic results of such narrow minded way of raising kids. I can point to multiple members of my wife's family who went to great law schools, passed their bar exams and never practice law because this is not what they enjoy doing. Their parents pushed them to do it. One of them is currently unemployed and the salary of his wife supports him. With their talent, they could have gone to another field that they enjoy and do very well. I also saw many doctors who are miserable in their jobs because, again, they got into the field by taking cues from their family. One of them, whose has a pediatric practice, is struggling. Sensing his antipathy towards them, the patients have either left him or at best fail to recommend their friends. Here is a guy, who got into UC Berkeley and finished medical school, practicing medicine, making less money than someone working as an assistant manager at McDonalds. His temperament was more suited to be a software engineer. had he follow his own voice and pursue that instead, he would have been making far more money, higher status and been happier.
The biggest part of our job as parents is not to get our kids into college to become a doctor. It is to help them discover their passion and encourage them to follow their dreams. Our kids will be more successful in life, they will be happier and they will thank us for it.
Many of the great minds, like our two examples here, were raised very different from the way a tiger mom would raise her kids. Unlike a tiger mom, who arranged every minute of her kid's life with practices, tutoring and books, these two were left alone and neglected as children. They went through life on their own terms and found something that they were passionate about.
Passion is very powerful. While we all can't have the IQ and talent of Issac Newton or Craig Venter, we can all find out what in life we are good at and enjoy doing. Passion helps us make the most of our talents, and if we are fortunate to be endowed with great talent, passion helps us achieve great things.
To develop passion for something, a kid must be given the freedom to explore and find out what they like to do in life. Most tiger moms have a preconceived idea of what they want their kid to be. Basically, what they want is everything that confer high social status and make money, becoming a doctor, a lawyer etc. They never took the time to discover, as Michelangelo did, what the statue look like inside the block of stone. They also see college as the end goal in life itself. A kid's entire life was to study and try to get into a good college, in a field that is high social status. If this robs them of their childhood, their motivation and it push them in an area that they are not interested in, a tiger mom is blissfully blind to these shortcomings of their actions.
I am old enough to witness the tragic results of such narrow minded way of raising kids. I can point to multiple members of my wife's family who went to great law schools, passed their bar exams and never practice law because this is not what they enjoy doing. Their parents pushed them to do it. One of them is currently unemployed and the salary of his wife supports him. With their talent, they could have gone to another field that they enjoy and do very well. I also saw many doctors who are miserable in their jobs because, again, they got into the field by taking cues from their family. One of them, whose has a pediatric practice, is struggling. Sensing his antipathy towards them, the patients have either left him or at best fail to recommend their friends. Here is a guy, who got into UC Berkeley and finished medical school, practicing medicine, making less money than someone working as an assistant manager at McDonalds. His temperament was more suited to be a software engineer. had he follow his own voice and pursue that instead, he would have been making far more money, higher status and been happier.
The biggest part of our job as parents is not to get our kids into college to become a doctor. It is to help them discover their passion and encourage them to follow their dreams. Our kids will be more successful in life, they will be happier and they will thank us for it.
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