Helping Your Kids Beat the Odds
That hostile face staring back at you across the dinner table will someday soon find itself seated across the desk from a potential employer.
You might want to give him or her some idea of what the world is really like before they decide to join the Red Guards and blow it up. I can’t promise them that they’ll all become millionaires. The odds against that are two hundred to one. And though that might seem like a long shot, this is still the only country that has more than 2 million millionaires.
I’ve had a lot of parents ask me, “Harvey, you’re a successful businessman. You’ve been around. I want to give Jeff and Janie some advice that will increase the odds of succeeding. What should I say?”
The first thing you have to realize is that you can’t tell them very much. The more you gush out advice, the more you’ll sound like that old air bag Polonius in Hamlet. Be sparing, but when you talk, give them some silver bullets—things that will really make a difference. Here are some thoughts:
Don’t Plan on Sticking Around Just to Collect the Gold Watch
Tell them about their first job. Not the one they took to keep you off their backs or to earn money to buy a car. I mean their first real job. They will be delighted to be making so much money. You must tell them the truth. They are being overpaid.
They are overpaid because they know next to nothing that has any commercial value and have to be trained and gain some experience before they can be of any real value. “Ridiculous,” they say. “I’m worth it. Why would they be purposely willing to overpay me?” The answer is, they overpay you for the first two years because they reason that once you know what you’re doing, they can underpay you for the next twenty, as, of course, they have to. No company can make money unless they pay out less for their employees than they’re charging for the employees’ labor.
“Well, then, why does anyone stay around?” they may ask. Because if you can get through that next twenty years and get into a position where you reach the top and help run the place, you’ll get overpaid again.
That’s the pattern of modern capitalism. You’re overpaid while you train, underpaid while you work, but you have the incentive to keep on getting underpaid in hopes you climb to the top, where you can watch other people do the work and get overpaid again for a few years. Obviously, the trick is to see to it that those middle years, the underpaid years, are as few as possible. The way to do that is to recognize that once you’ve mastered the job, it’s time to think about moving on, or up.
If you’re working for someone else, as soon as you know what you’re doing you’ll be making money for that someone else that you could be making for yourself. But if you decide to stay, your real weapon against being underpaid is to realize your ignorance. Recognize that you don’t know everything about everything. Challenge yourself, and make yourself learn something new every chance you get.
Do that and you’ll be beating the system. Your employer won’t be able simply to profit off what you’ve already learned because you’ll be forcing that employer to pay you to learn something new, something commercially valuable, every time you walk into the office. And by the way, if you take that approach, chances are you’ll make it to the top a lot more quickly than if you simply lay back and use what you already know.
Would you like to go to a doctor who had taken his last medical course in 1948? Unfortunately, there are still many of them around, but nine-tenths of today’s medical treatments—lasers, CAT scanners, pacemakers, chemotherapy, drugs—were all developed since the 1948 doctor graduated from med school. You have to keep changing and keep learning so that you are constantly challenging yourself, adding a few new songs to your program every chance you get. If you don’t, the world will pass you by. And that’s true whether you’re an employee or an employer.
Find Something You Like to Do and Make It Pay
There is a very unfortunate word in the English language. The name we usually give to work is W-O-R-K. Work isn’t work if you like it, but a lot of people seem to think that in order to make a living at something, you shouldn’t really enjoy doing it…or why would anyone pay you to do it? Not so. Do something you like.
That sounds simpler than it is because so many of us have had childhood experiences in which the people who controlled our lives seemed determined to make us do things we disliked. If that’s what our early life was like, it’s natural to assume that’s what the working world is like, too. It isn’t. The world is full of people who are doing what they like to do and making a very good living at it. And it isn’t just people in the glamour businesses like advertising, writing, acting, and saving the whales. The trick to learn is that if you like something, you can make it pay no matter what business you’re in.
I happen to like languages, and I’ve studied about half a dozen of them. One is Chinese. Now, the truth is that you can make a very good living in my business without being able to speak a word of Chinese. But the superior truth is that you can make an even better living by applying something that seems entirely unrelated, like speaking Chinese, to the envelope business. And you can have a lot more fun.
I used my Chinese speaking ability when I went to China as a leader of a business delegation. The main event, in fact, was reported around the world. I was the first post–World War II American businessman to deliver a speech in Chinese in that country. I made contacts with American businessmen on that trip who started to do business with me, in part because they appreciated my resourcefulness. They didn’t know anything about the Chinese language, and they didn’t know anything about envelopes either, but apparently they reasoned that someone who took the trouble to learn that difficult language might be the sort of person who knew what he was doing in another area—like manufacturing envelopes.
So by speaking Chinese, I was able to sell a whale of a lot of envelopes. That’s putting rule one and rule two together. You don’t stick around just to collect the gold watch. You keep changing and learning. And you find something you like and make it work for you—even if it seems totally unrelated to your own business.
Make Believe Your Parents Are Right Some of the Time
I was invited to Harvard to address an M.B.A. business seminar a few years ago. After I had given my formal speech to a large roomful of people, they seated me at a table with eight students for a give-and-take session, the kind in which the group can question you very closely and get behind all those glittering generalities you thought you got away with during your speech.
Of course, it works both ways. While they were watching me, I was watching them. What I observed was that every one of those students was, naturally, superbright. But of the eight, there were six you could talk with and two who were incapable of rational conversation. One of the two was belligerent, and the other would ask questions in such a complicated, convoluted way that he might as well have been talking quantum physics instead of business.
As parents you have invested time, money, and agony in trying to get your kids to learn a lot of things they totally dislike. “Why, why, why do I have to learn to play tennis/eat with a fork/wear socks/study Spanish when I am going to be a nuclear physicist/famous rock star/the richest person in the world?”
It does matter, and not just because there’s more to life than what you do for a living. No matter how bright you are or how good you are at what you do, we live in an economy based on change. Capitalism constantly devours its own creations and gives birth to new ones.
Social critics used to describe the brief cycle of products in the marketplace as “planned obsolescence.” They would wag their fingers at those greedy American corporations that were forever discarding perfectly good old products so they could sell new ones to docile and naïve customers.
Well, you don’t hear much about “planned obsolescence” anymore. The Japanese proved that our problem wasn’t too many new products, but too many old, inefficient ones. And the consumers proved that they, not the bloated capitalists, decide what they’ll buy—and no amount of hype will sell an inferior, obsolete, or overpriced product.
That pattern of destruction and change not only is repeated over and over again in the marketplace, it also will be an inescapable characteristic of your children’s careers.
Unless they are able to communicate, to master the basic skills of speaking and writing in a forceful, polite, effective way, the day is likely to come when being a nuclear physicist or an envelope-maker won’t be enough. That’s because no matter how safe a little niche they may think they have found for themselves, in a world where capitalism constantly destroys its own creations, their jobs will change, so will the skills needed to perform them, and so will the need for them. As a result, not only will they not be able to stick around for the gold watch, they also may have to go out into the hard, cruel world again and market themselves. And unless they can communicate in an attractive fashion, they’ll be in big, big trouble.
It’s those broad, generalist skills, the ability to communicate in writing, speech, dress, and manners—all those boring things parents and teachers have been driving them nuts about all these years—that someday are going to keep your kids in designer jeans and off the unemployment lines.
There’s No Future in Saying It Can’t Be Done
The old saying is “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The people who make it big are the ones who fix it before it’s broke. They force the competition to play catch-up ball. They make their own rules, and the others have to play by them.
The automotive company TRW used to run an ad in The Wall Street Journal that says it beautifully. It shows pictures of a lot of old-timers with impressive titles offering their sage opinions on the great issues of the day.
One of them is Harry Warner. He was president of Warner Brothers in 1927, at the time talking pictures were just coming onscreen. Mr. Warner’s comment on this technological breakthrough was: “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” Then there’s Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1923. He says, “There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.” There is this classic from Charles Duell, head of the U.S. Patent Office. In 1899 he said, “Everything that can be invented, has been invented.” I used to think Duell’s comment was the whopper of them all. Maybe not. In the early 1970s, Bill Gates projected, “No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer.” What did all four of these gentlemen have in common? They were completely dead wrong. The average kid’s computer today—bought off a grocery store shelf—is likely to have 40 gigabytes or almost 63,000 times the capacity of Gates’s outer limit! Even Gates the Great can get it wrong.
Tell your kids to take chances. The greatest advantage young people have is that without the financial and family encumbrances of older people, they have so little to lose by taking risks. So encourage them to try something new. Defy the odds.
They may fail at times, but to double their success rate you may have to double their failure rate. Just remember: The wheel is tilted in their favor, the system is biased on their side, because it is based on change. On destroying the old. They have a lot less to lose attempting to make a change than attempting to hang on to an old technology, and to the status quo, in a system that rewards change.
It’s Harder to Be a Success When Your Parents Already Are
There’s a saying that goes: “It’s three generations from shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves.” What it means is that if your grandparents were poor and your parents become rich and successful, it’s a common occurrence that you—your generation—will stumble back into the pattern of your grandparents.
Why? For one thing, nature has an immutable leveling process. No life-form keeps improving with every generation. Breeding is an imperfect science. If you don’t think so, just look at the families of the presidents of the United States. The same parents who produced Jimmy Carter produced Billy Carter. The same parents who gave us Lyndon Johnson gave us Sam Johnson—whom LBJ kept out of sight in the White House living quarters. And not the least of Richard Nixon’s problems was his brother Donald.
We can give our children the right ideals, the right education, and open doors for them, but the rest is up to them. Every generation finds its own leaders, and it seldom uses the last generation for its castings.
Some years ago, movie actor Kirk Douglas accepted an award from the people in his hometown, Amsterdam, in upstate New York. His son Michael was there and heard his father say, “I want you to know it was a lot easier for me to become successful than it was for my son. All my dad ever had was a pushcart. If I’d had two pushcarts, I would have been doing twice as well as he did. But Michael made it despite having a famous father, and that takes some doing.”
Your kids don’t have to top the old man or Supermom to be a success. If they will set their own goals, use their own special talents and abilities, take what meets their needs from what we have provided for them and discard the rest, they have all they need to be a success by any standard.