Generativity

by Andrew Lynn

  What had happened? It wasn’t, contrary to common belief, that anyone had forced the Jews to leave the land. Eckstein found that there was very little in the way of coercion; Jews had been allowed to engage in economic activity of all kinds, including landholding and agriculture.

  The Jews had – quite simply – become literate.

  It had been one of those unpredictable sallies of world history that would have unexpectedly profound consequences. The story that Eckstein tells is one of a massive shift in Jewish practice that in outline went like this. First, a high priest ruled that teachers be appointed in every district and boys be sent to them. Then, the Pharisees took the lead within Judaism, causing the religion to shift from one based upon rituals, sacrifices, and ceremonies to one based upon reading and teaching of the Torah. Accordingly, synagogues were built throughout the Jewish world, one of their central functions being the teaching of the Torah. Then the yeshivah (school for study of the Talmud) at Jabneh organized the vast body of Jewish oral law and began to carry out the role of academy, high court, and parliament to the Jewish people. So began what can perhaps be considered the most sustained literacy drive in history.

  Why did literacy matter so much? The obvious answer is that at the heart of Judaism lies the study of the Torah and the Talmud. Judaism is a textual religion and to do it properly you have to be able to read. The importance of education in Jewish life was such that, in an era of general protectionism and restrictions on trade (the so-called hasagat g’vul), teaching was to be a radical free market. ‘If there is a teacher of children and another comes who is better,’ went one ruling, ‘the better teacher must replace the incumbent.’ The other side of the coin was that this was not going to be a culture hospitable to the uneducated. The Jews had a word for them: the am ha-aretz. You were am ha-aretz if you did not know the Torah and did not teach it to your sons. To be am ha-aretz was to be an outcast in the Jewish community.

  The newly literate Jewish farmers now faced a problem, however: they had equipped themselves with a skill that brought no benefits and imposed considerable costs. Here’s the issue. If you were a Jewish farmer in the first to third centuries AD, your monthly wage would have been 24 to 48 denarii.8 Your monthly bread expenses for your family would have been 10 to 20 denarii. The monthly rent on your house may have been affordable at 4 denarii, but your clothing wasn’t (it would have cost 30 denarii). If you saved up enough – 100 to 200 denarii – you could make a capital investment in an ox or a cow. The real killer? The price of a book – perhaps 200 denarii. Education was a luxury you couldn’t afford – unless you went into the trades and professions where your investment in education would pay off.

  While literacy is of little use to subsistence farmers, it’s highly useful in skilled occupations. A merchant who could read sale and purchase contracts, partnership deeds, and loan documents would, for example, be at a clear advantage over another merchant who could not. The Jewish craftsmen and merchants found that they could enforce sanctions – through the academies – on other merchants who failed to play by the book. Even better, literacy enabled the Jewish merchants and traders to migrate with fewer costs than ever before because it was no longer difficult to maintain business and family connections. The world had just grown smaller.

  That would be true for all peoples – but there was one reason why literacy was especially advantageous for the Jewish people. The Jews have not, for the most of their history, had centralized political power. They have lived in foreign countries where their rights over property and wealth have been dependent on the whims of local rulers and the laws of alien people. When you can’t be sure of your rights over property the safest thing to do is to invest in human capital. Human capital is portable and it’s inalienable. If circumstances change and you have to move on, you can take it with you. Literacy was a safe investment.9

  From now on it’s a story of cumulative advantage. As the Muslim Empire takes off economically, the Jews engage disproportionately in the trade and commerce that would service its needs. They move to the cities and find that the returns on their education exceed anything they could have hoped for as farmers. They have the resources now to invest in their children – and they do just that. And so the success story of the Jewish people begins.

  The Jewish story replays what we have seen on an individual level in American schools. A smallish event, almost a quirk in history, is the beginning of a snowballing process that expands and entrenches a form of advantage. Can others catch up? There’s no reason why not – but it becomes harder as the snowball gathers in size and speed. Once started, says Eckstein, ‘this process will feed upon itself’.

  Serendipity in Practice

  We humans have a natural bias towards linearity; chart progress on a y-axis against time on an x-axis and we expect to see a nice straight line. What cumulative advantage shows, though, is something quite different: career trajectories for the lucky ones look much more exponential than they do linear. The career track of the winner is not a straight line but a shallow curve that at some critical point sweeps decisively upwards.

  * * *

  Have a brief look at Rowswell’s curriculum vitae and you get the picture:

  1984

  Rowswell commences studies at the University of Toronto and enrolls on a Chinese course because the other options were ‘kind of boring’.

  1988

  Rowswell is awarded a full scholarship to study Chinese in Beijing; he makes his first appearance on television there.

  1989

  Rowswell becomes the first foreigner to be formally accepted into the xiangsheng hierarchy as a member of the ninth generation of performers.

  1990s

  Rowswell appears regularly across multiple television channels as freelance host.

  Time magazine selects Rowswell as one of the ‘Leaders for the 21st Century’.

  2005

  Rowswell plays the lead role in a twenty-four-part television series based on the life of the eighteenth-century Italian Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione.

  2006

  Rowswell plays the lead role in a stage play based on the life of American reporter Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China.

  2007

  Rowswell stars in a stage adaptation of the French comedy Le Diner de cons (The Dinner Game).

  Ford names Rowswell spokesperson for its Chinese advertising campaign; Rowswell becomes the face of the motor company’s Chinese-language television, radio, print, and online advertising.

  2008

  Rowswell is selected to serve as Canadian Team Attaché and official torch bearer for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

  Rowswell is awarded the White Magnolia Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Dinner Game (the first time a foreign national has received one of China’s top three arts awards).

  Rowswell is appointed to the Order of Canada.

  2009

  The Canadian government appoints Rowswell as Canada’s Commissioner General for Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

  Rowswell once again appears on the world’s most watched television event to perform xiangsheng.

  * * *

  This isn’t exactly a linear career progression. It’s jumpy. Rowswell starts out as a regular student in Canada, enrols on a few courses at Toronto University, then obtains a scholarship to study overseas. So far, so ordinary. Then comes the big break – Rowswell’s first few television appearances. These launch him into the media and a career of regular TV appearances that will carry him for the next decade.

  Then – more than ten years on from the initial break – comes the next leap when Rowswell gets to play the lead role in a substantial television drama. Suddenly you see a change of direction and a new burst of activity. From television drama Rowswell moves on to stage drama and advertisements; from stage drama and advertisements to Olympics preparation work; and from there to a role as Commissioner General for his nation.

  That’s precisely what cumulative advantage is
all about. Cumulative advantage doesn’t give rise to steady, incremental progress. It gives rise instead to ‘turning point’ moments at which a career just takes off.

  For Rowswell, the first big break – the TV appearance – brought him a double advantage. On the one hand, it made him famous across a country of more than a billion citizens. From then on, Rowswell was a valuable commodity. He could be brought out for anything and benefit from the recognition factor – and each time he was brought out he would become still more recognizable and therefore still more valuable.

  The second advantage may have been more subtle but more profound – something akin to what the children in the NCES study must also have benefited from. In Rowswell’s first television appearance, he is stiff as cardboard. Apart from his language skills, there must have been little to tell between him and the next student. But then – each time he appeared on TV – he gained some confidence and some skills and lost some of the awkwardness. By the time he was appearing to critical acclaim in classic French stage plays and television dramas, Rowswell was already an accomplished performer. And by 2005, when he appeared as Giuseppe Castiglione, he had already cemented an advantage that would be virtually impossible for a 1988 classmate (without Rowswell’s experience) to surpass.

  When Opportunity Comes Calling

  Cumulative advantage teaches us a few important things.

  First, how far we get will depend upon whether we can trigger the phenomenon in the first place. Winners in the game of cumulative advantage are those who are able to lock themselves in to a positive upward cycle – those who find or land in positions from which achievement is rewarded not just by cold hard cash but by further opportunities for recognition and development. It’s true that sometimes this may be an accident of birth; it’s equally true that it may sometimes result from a lucky break. Often it means moving early and it means moving fast: cumulative advantage, as we have seen, isn’t always a friend to the late bloomer.

  Second, we’ve got to be ready to recognize and act upon cumulative advantage when it comes calling. What Rowswell’s career shows us is one element of cumulative advantage: the power of publicity and reputation. It’s not enough just to be good at something – all that means is that you will be good at that thing the next time too, and there’s nothing ‘cumulative’ about that. What really triggers the process is to be known to be good at something – because that increases the chances you will be called upon to do the same thing (or something related or something better) in the future. Each time that happens you learn a little more and perform a little better – and become a little better known.

  The really notable examples of cumulative advantage, though, tend to arise when the benefits that come from reputation converge with the acceleration that comes from learning. The children in the NCES study are testimony to that, as, on a more profound level, are the achievements of the Jewish people. When we say ‘learning’, we’re not necessarily talking about ‘education’: once learning is standardized and widely available, it tends to lose its power to entrench advantage. What we’re talking about is learning that’s hard to get. Nowadays that probably means experiential learning: learning how more than learning what.

  We know the outcome of cumulative advantage isn’t exactly fair – what is? – but we also know that the benefits accrue primarily to those who are able to use the opportunities it brings most effectively. The final secret of cumulative advantage is that it’s precisely when it’s meritocratic that it takes real effect; the really sweeping advantages are reaped only when opportunity and advantage meet with ability and preparedness. The great irony, and the great challenge for us all, is to face up to the fact that the fairer the competition, the more unequal the outcomes may turn out to be.

  Conclusion

  The focus of this book has been on ‘generativity’ rather than the more obvious (but also more dubious) topic of ‘success’. There is a reason for this: ultimate life outcomes are largely outside our own control. Opportunity, good health, economic security, and political stability are not available to all of us in equal measure, and even if they were, we would have no guarantee of their continuance. When we talk about generativity, on the other hand, we are talking not about outcomes but about principles, practices, and positioning – a person’s ability to generate positive change.

  * * *

  What we can do here is to extrapolate from the conclusions we have been able to draw throughout this book. Assuming those conclusions are themselves correct, two questions arise. First, what kind of person is likely to be of the highly generative type? And second, what kind of steps would one take to become such a person?

  * * *

  Our highly generative person would, as a starting point, manifest what could best be described as inner freedom. While there is no doubt that highly generative individuals have been able to change the world, the first step for them would usually be to turn inward and work on themselves. Inner state determines experience of reality, which in turn feeds back to affect inner state. Freedom comes from recognizing that the key element in this cycle is, with some practice and a little effort, within our own grasp.

  The second characteristic that highly generative individuals tend to display is the ability to marshal their own energy. We have seen how we all have an inner resource that can easily be depleted. This resource is the one we call upon when we need to exercise self-control, suppress thoughts or emotions, and make choices. Generative people recognize that this energy is limited and know how to deploy it to its best effect.

  There is a ‘psychic environment’ that lies behind the making of a generative individual. Highly generative people have commonly been trained under other highly generative people. In addition to direct human contact, they tend to look back in time, sometimes across centuries, for guidance and inspiration from their predecessors. It has been said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Highly generative people would probably agree.

  Equally distinctive is the mind that the highly generative person brings to the work in hand: focused, engaged, undistracted. The generative person is, above all, present. This is achieved first of all by engaging in work at just the right degree of difficulty. For immense tasks, that right degree can be found when the task is broken down into smaller, doable steps. It is facilitated when pride and pleasure are sought not in the achievement as much as in the performance of the task itself.

  Typically, as we have seen, the highly generative person thinks independently and is tolerant of complexity. This person may well be an outsider or a dissident, a reactionary or a rebel. The English poet John Keats once referred to a concept he called ‘negative capability’ – the ability to hold in mind contradictory perspectives without pushing prematurely for an answer. ‘At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement. . . . I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ We’ve seen how not only thinkers but also leaders and statesmen, as well as successful practical men and women, tend to have developed this ability to an unusual degree.

  The highly generative person develops expertise. The starting point here is time – 10 years or 10,000 hours. But that’s only the starting point. True high achievers don’t just invest time; they engage in deliberate practice, and work with full concentration on improving specific aspects of their performance. And for creative producers, they don’t just dig deep – they also forage widely, taking and synthesizing sources of inspiration from all around.

  And yet the impression some of these people give is of deep calm and acceptance of their lot. Whether knowingly or not, they are likely to be beneficiaries of a hidden law – the law of cumulative advantage. This law favours those who start well, but it also favours those who stay the course, as it is only by staying the course that advantage accumulates. Rien ne réussit comme le succès, as the French say. Nothing succeeds like success.<
br />
  * * *

  Maintain state

  Determine your reality by controlling your inner state.

  Marshal energy

  Your energy is limited. Don’t squander it on trivial matters. Employ it wisely.

  Control context

  Pay attention to your psychic environment.

  It makes you. So do your friends, acquaintances, and predecessors.

  Cultivate presence

  Engage. Be present. Enjoy the process.

  Think differently

  Cultivate independence of mind. Embrace complexity. Appreciate arbitrariness.

  Enlarge expertise

  Put in the hours. Engage in deliberate practice. Experiment in other fields.

  Welcome serendipity

  Sometimes good fortune comes. When it comes, it snowballs. Enjoy!

  * * *

  ‘When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. But I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my country. When I found I couldn’t change my country, I began to focus on my town. However, I discovered that I couldn’t change the town, and so as I grew older, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, but I’ve come to recognize that if long ago I had started with myself, then I could have made an impact on my family. And, my family and I could have made an impact on our town. And that, in turn, could have changed the country and we could all indeed have changed the world.’1