"If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of me".
---Dwight L. Moody
As I pointed out in my previous posts, we as parents don't have much control over how smart our kids turned out. It seems by the time they turn 17, up to 85% of their IQs are genetically determined. The remaining environmental factors were mostly not related to how parents raise their kids. If, at the end of the day, all the work to enhance their abilities have come to naught, perhaps we should focus our effort on something that we could influence.
In my life, I have seen many cases of smart people that are so flawed in their character that their intellect simply did not matter at all. Take the case of Fanny(not her real name), a first generation Chinese immigrant who grew up in San Francisco. When she was young, her family lived with relatives. Her family did not have good relationship with the host. She developed a victim mentality at a young age. Fanny got into one of the U.C. schools and later into a medical school. While in school, Fanny always try to minimize paying for anything, to the detriment of her friends and roommates. Before she leaves for home, she would write down the reading on the watt meter and again when she returns. She would argue that she is not responsible for that portion of the electric bill. When it was her turn to provide toilet paper, she would go around the campus and steal the cheap toilet paper that was in the campus bathrooms. However, when the shoe is on the other foot, she would never be shy about asking people for favors, again, totally disregarding the well being of the person she is asking the favor. When school ended, she asked one of her roommates to take her home, but she had not packed, so she made them wait for four hours while she packed up her stuff. In addition, it was very out of the way for the roommate since she was not going to San Francisco. Fanny even asked to move into the parents of one of her acquaintance during her medical internship and ask to use their car! The end result? Fanny went through her life without any friends. People, once they knew her, avoided her. She went through a bout of depression and needed to consult a psychologist for her depression. If Fanny was an anomaly, it might have been funny, but based on my experience, she was just an extreme example of how many Chinese immigrants behaved. Some of the enmity White people have for the Chinese were due to racism and jealousy, but some of their anger were directed at the behavior of people like Fanny, who shows complete lack of respect or concern for other people. Many of the Chinese from China, who were raised as a single spoiled child, are equally flawed in their characters. Character building, not learning more knowledge, is the number one job for the parents. I would say that it is also the number two and number three jobs of the parents.
Of all the character traits, by far the most important is integrity. Integrity means keeping your promises and treating others like you want to be treated. Integrity is the basis of all human transactions. As we meet people, we are learning who we can trust and who can get things done. Treating others as we like to be treated help us form that bond in knowing that we could be counted on to help our friends in good times and bad. Keeping our promises, under promise and over deliver shows that we can get things done. Opportunities in life come to us because people know they can count on us to get things done.
Sports are supposed to teach kids about cooperation and competition. However, many parents have taken this to the extreme. I have seen parents bribing coaches to get their kids more play time or play a more important role in the sport. One of the girls even trampled on her friends to get ahead in her sport, citing her dad who taught her that "friends are there to be used". In a modern society, in order to compete, we form groups, companies, political parties, churches, circle of friends. To be an effective competitor, we need to work well within the group. That means having integrity within our group and even toward the competition, because your competitor today maybe your group tomorrow. To cheat and to trample on your friends is precisely the wrong lessons that the kids should be learning. They will go through life cheating and trampling on people that they know. I have known many people in high place in a corporation. My kids were playing sports with their kids. They were CEOs, CFOs, VPs and directors in small companies, large corporations and important start ups like LinkedIn. None of the people who made it to high places in a corporation teach their kids to cheat or trample on their friends, or treat their friends as someone to be "used". They all teach their kids to have integrity and to treat their teammates well. Some of them coach the team. Instead of giving more play time to their kids, they mostly assign play time and roles based on ability of the kids. What they teach their kids speaks volumes on what it takes to get ahead in the work place.
Tenaciousness and follow through are also important traits to have. To get anywhere in life, we will experience our share of failures. The important thing is to get up after you failed and do it again. Follow through means when we start something, we should see to it that what we started gets completed. Many of the angel investors who fund start ups have expressed that even more important than a good idea, they are looking for a team that is tenacious, because they knew that the start up process is full of setbacks and disappointments. It is how the team handles them that determines if they will succeed.
We Chinese are a practical people, but intellectual curiosity is not our strong suit. Take Chinese medicine, There were a few pioneers like Hua Tuo, the father of Chinese herbal medicine who tried to find out what impact different plants have on the human body, but most who practice Chinese medicine just took what they learned as gospel and not investigate further about how the human body works. It was the West that had discovered the workings of different organs. The Chinese had a lot of inventions early on, but with something like compass and gun powder, we never tried to understand why it worked. Interestingly, in American college campuses today, there is also a stifling lack of intellectual curiosity. Charles Murray was to give a talk at Middlebury College the other day, a bunch of thugs just prevented him from making the speech. They are not interested in a debate as a college should be doing, they just want to shut people up when they encounter views that are different from theirs. Intellectual curiosity is the engine of new discovery and human progress. We need to teach our kids to get into the habit of always asking a lot of questions. When we encounter something that we don't understand, don't just pass it by. Try to understand it. When we half understand something, ask more questions until we completely understand it.
Self direction is another trait that the Chinese can do more of. Perhaps due to our heavy handed style of parenting, many of our kids just know to study, but do not have an internal compass and know what they want to do with their own lives. This goes back to making kids do things on their own and making more decisions early on.
Many people are not very punctual. However, if you ask them to examine their lives and see how many important meetings they were late to, they will be the first to admit that they were on time for these important meetings. Being punctual is showing respect for the other people involved. It goes back to having integrity. We should have integrity with every person that we deal with, not just the important ones.
Finally, exercising regularly and having discipline are important. Exercising keeps our body in prime condition. Discipline helps us control our behavior. both are prerequisite for everything else that we do in life.
We don't have much control over how smart our kids are, but we can shapes their character and their habits. Things like integrity, learn to compete and cooperate with a team, tenaciousness, follow through, intellectual curiosity and self direction are characters that we can teach our kids. In addition, they should get into the habit of being punctual, exercise regularly and have discipline.
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