by Todd Rose
It wasn’t exactly gratifying to think that I needed to become another person to be accepted. When you’re growing up, everyone tells you, “Just be yourself!” So at first, copying Jimmy seemed like I’d accepted that I could never be liked for myself. Only later did I recognize that I wasn’t really changing who I was, but merely abandoning ways of behaving that had backfired for me for years.
Besides, it’s hard to argue with success. Especially when you look around one day, as I did, and realize you’re sitting at the apex of teenage social status.
Alpha Male
* * *
The inner sanctum of juvenile prestige at Layton High was an otherwise ordinary row of carpeted stairs set against a wall in an indoor hallway in the middle of campus. Set off by two pillars, the area was known as the Commons, and it was understood throughout the school that if you didn’t fit in, you couldn’t hang out there. Most kids would detour around those pillars rather than walk through them, while the elite group that I was so delighted to have joined sat or stood on the stairs. We looked like a Nordstrom back-to-school ad, the girls in their cheerleader skirts and the boys in our Girbaud jeans and sports jerseys, emitting a faint cloud of sweat and cheap cologne.
A couple of burly members of our crowd kept an eye out for any outsider so clueless as to trespass on our privileged real estate. The fiercest of these watchmen was a talented basketball player and chronic troublemaker named Blake, who also happened to be one of my new friends. We had started playing basketball after school, and as point guard—and once again following a strategy I’d learned from Jimmy—I’d pass to him as often as I could, rather than hogging the ball, as I’d always done before then. Blake appreciated that, and we hit it off. Given that Blake’s loyalty was as fierce as his appearance, I could relax in the knowledge that my days of being bullied were over.
With my safety assured, I could finally focus on getting some dates, and this, too, turned out to be surprisingly easy. Within my first three weeks at Layton High, I was going out with two of the most sought-after girls in the school. Sandra and Mary were both in my chemistry class, where I not only hadn’t thrown any stink bombs that year, but had charmed both the teacher and my fellow students. Sandra already had a boyfriend, who threatened to beat me up after I took her to a Utah Jazz basketball game. But he backed off after I stood up to him.
Hmmm. Stood up to him? Okay, that’s not quite what happened. Frankly, I froze in fear when he approached me and threatened to kick my teeth in if I didn’t stop seeing his girlfriend. The truth is that I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. My feet wouldn’t move! Yet just like with the Rosenthal effect, which I told you about in chapter 1, circumstances shaped other people’s perceptions, which in turn shaped reality. My new peers, who knew I was friends with Blake and frequented the Commons, already assumed I was a tough guy and interpreted my deer-in-headlights stance accordingly. Through their eyes, I was bravely standing my ground.
My mom and dad continued to fret about my appalling academic record, but to my lasting gratitude, my mom never once grounded me for bad grades, even as she didn’t let me slide. She made it clear how disappointed she was with my school performance, and also insisted that I attend summer school. Keeping my social life out of bounds was one of those out-of-the-box decisions, but she knew how important it was for me to finally make friends, and was clearly enjoying watching me succeed. In this way, she contributed to a positive feedback loop that would have impacts reaching far into my future.
By that point, my mom was feeling more confident about a lot of her decisions. My dad’s move up in life had inspired her, and her kids were at last becoming independent enough to give her more free time, so she resolved at last to pursue her old dream of becoming a nurse, following her spouse to Weber State.
As she spent less time at home, she had to rely on me and her other older kids more than before, and I relished that she was treating me as if I really was becoming more mature. We also occasionally even enjoyed each other’s company.
Early one morning, near the end of my junior year at Layton High, I drove with my mom to sign up for a summer class she needed. While we were waiting in the line, which stretched clear into the parking lot, we watched a gorgeous blond college student drive up in a red Mazda Miata. My mom caught me drooling, and laughed, “Yeah, right, Todd. You’re in high school, remember?”
I accepted the challenge, hopping out of the car but looking back to tell her, “Just watch.” Within just an hour, I’d not only made a date, but had also convinced my new friend to let me drive her car. I slowed down as we passed my mother, still standing in line, to make sure to catch the look on her face when she recognized me.
I spent the rest of that day with the girl in the red Miata, and we went out on several more dates in the weeks thereafter. She came from an extremely wealthy family and must have assumed I did, too. She never realized I didn’t have a car of my own, because after that first spin in her Miata, we always double-dated with a friend of mine who would drive. One evening, however, she said she wanted to park at my house and have me drive for a change.
I didn’t know what to do. There was no way I was going to take this girl out in my mom’s beat-up Chevy Cavalier, and my dad was adamant about not lending me his brand-new Toyota truck. My parents gave me that old If she doesn’t like you because you drive an old car, she isn’t worth dating blah blah blah. But then, as she pulled into our driveway, my mom happened to look out the window and saw she was driving her grandfather’s car.
“Oh no, Todd, she’s driving a Mercedes!” my mom blurted out. “A Mercedes!”
I pleaded with my dad one last time, but he refused to respond, instead silently turning away from me to head up the stairs. My mom answered the door and made some small talk with the girl, but then excused herself, saying she had to talk to me in private.
I followed her upstairs, where I heard my dad running the sink in their bathroom. My mom got out her purse and was starting to hand me twenty dollars, saying, “I’m sorry about the truck,” but suddenly seemed to change her mind. Grabbing my dad’s keys from the nightstand, she tossed them to me, shouting, “Run, Todd!” and then holding the bathroom door closed with all her might.
I rushed downstairs, hurried my date into the truck, and bolted out of the garage before my dad could get downstairs. We had a terrific time, and I got the truck back without a scratch, after which he nevertheless gave me (and my mom) the silent treatment for nearly a week.
By this time, my father had gotten used to his wife’s thwarting his attempts to control me. If that hadn’t been the case, I would doubtless have been sent off to military school well before then. Even so, Lyda was taking some risks with her marriage for the sake of my fledgling self-esteem. She more than anyone knew just how much I’d been hurting for so many years, and how giddy I was over my new social success.
Sure, dating a college girl isn’t quite like hitting a game-winning shot for the varsity basketball team, or giving the valedictorian speech. At the time, however, it was the one activity that made me feel good about myself. So it meant everything to me that my mom would risk even my father’s wrath to help me shine.
The Driver’s Seat
* * *
My parents were both doing anything they could think of to get me to take school more seriously and improve my grades. They pleaded, nagged, threatened, and attempted bribes. At one point, my dad even offered to buy me a Porsche if I got all A’s, likely because he assumed it would take a miracle for me even to get close. They were wasting their time and energy, however. Sure, bribes might have gotten me to go along with a few short-term objectives, like taking out the trash or finishing a homework assignment or two. But there was no way that money or promise of a fancy sports car was going to change my behavior in any serious or lasting way. It’s not that I was lazy or stupid, or even uninterested in money. The reason I didn’t care about my parents’ objective for me is that I was already motivated, just by a different
goal. The lure of social acceptance, at last, was far more potent than anything my parents had to offer.
Once again, modern neuroscience findings support my tales of woe. Researchers have shown that all behavior is goal-directed in one way or another. Brains simply don’t function without goals. This may not seem like earth-shattering news, but just think how often you’ve heard a so-called expert—whether in education or psychology—talk about how some children are just not as “goal-directed” as other children. It’s nonsense that gets in the way of many efforts to influence behavior for the better.
Plenty of recent research has made clear that people get significantly more engaged and motivated about doing things when they’re pursuing goals that are authentic to them, rather than externally imposed. As the bestselling author Daniel Pink has pointed out in his excellent book, Drive, using carrots and sticks to shape behavior can therefore in fact be counterproductive, encouraging short-term thinking and even cheating, and snuffing out creativity. People’s yearning for autonomy and mastery will beat carrots and sticks every time.
That’s why parents and teachers who strategically work to first recognize what kids are trying to accomplish, and then help them achieve their initial, genuine goals, will get the best results down the line.
My younger son, Nathan, gave me a brilliant illustration of this rule a few years ago when he was in fifth grade. At this writing, Nathan is starting his sophomore year in high school, and is an excellent student. Back in elementary school, however, he’d acquired a reputation as a sweet kid who wasn’t always as motivated as he should have been. Just before the holidays, his teacher sent me a greeting card with a picture of him in class and a note that said, “See what I mean?”
I looked at the photograph. Nathan looked absolutely joyful. He was sitting in front of a gingerbread structure he’d just made, with a huge smile on his face, and his arms in the air in a gesture of triumph. When I next saw his teacher and asked what was going on, she told me, with a sigh, that she’d assigned the class to make gingerbread houses, and doled out candy to decorate them. When Nathan, who has always had a sweet tooth, asked how much candy they could use, the teacher replied that they were free to take home as much as could fit on their houses.
This was when Nathan’s drive kicked in. He realized that by building a gingerbread fort, he could take home the maximum amount of candy. By careful trial and error, he figured out a way to reinforce the walls with licorice so that they could bear the maximum amount of weight. The reason Nathan was so pleased with himself in the picture was that it had taken him ten minutes just to get the walls of the fort to stay up. The end result wasn’t pretty, but it was beautifully functional. And he was proud.
Taking Care of Scooter
* * *
Once a kid starts to build up his self-esteem, as I was slowly doing at Layton High, it can lead to a lot of collateral progress. In my case, my new social standing gave me the self-assurance, for the first time in my life, to start showing more empathy toward other kids. I’m making a careful distinction here, between feeling and showing empathy, which “experts” on kids like I was seem to miss. I was always able to feel empathy. I knew quite well when other kids were hurting or struggling, as I was. I had simply rarely before felt moved (or sufficiently safe) to behave in an empathetic way. I’d experienced some of the worst of human nature in the way other kids had bullied me, and as far as I was concerned, anyone I noticed suffering had probably done something to deserve it.
But this, at least as I was now able to recognize, was not the case with Scooter. Scooter was a sophomore at Layton High, with fairly nondescript looks, and just a bit shorter than the rest of the kids his age. You might not remember him if you’d met him only once. He wasn’t athletic, but he so eagerly wanted to belong that he volunteered to be the equipment manager for the football team. Scooter’s dream was a seat in the Commons, and in pursuit of that ambition he used to ask me out to lunch and always volunteer to pay, because he knew I was usually short of cash. Sometimes, when I was really hungry, I’d let him.
One afternoon when I hadn’t brought lunch money and was hankering for nachos, I suggested that Scooter take me to Taco Bell.
He turned pale at the mere mention of it. “There’s no way we can go there,” he muttered.
Apparently, some punk skateboarders had been tormenting Scooter’s brother, who’d dated one of their girlfriends, and Scooter had been drawn into the fray as well. The punks had beaten them both up a couple of times, and also kicked the brother’s car door in. Taco Bell was their hangout, and they’d warned Scooter that they’d send him to the hospital if he ever set foot there.
This situation cut way too close to home for me.
“We are going to Taco Bell, and I’m going to make sure nobody messes with you,” I told Scooter.
When we arrived, the punks were already there. They glared at us throughout our meal, and when they left, the ringleader walked past us and muttered to Scooter, “Your babysitter isn’t always going to be around.” I didn’t have the presence of mind to respond at the moment, and Scooter just stared at the ground. But later that day, as I sat in the Commons with my friends, I spotted the bully and his pals walking nearby. Without thinking much about it, I grabbed two stocky pals and headed in their direction, yelling the ringleader’s name, with a few profanities for good measure. He stopped in front of the principal’s office, while a crowd of rubbernecking students converged around us.
I pointed my finger in his face and said, “If you so much as look at Scooter again I am going to kick your ass. Do you understand me?”
“Screw you,” he replied.
At that point, I carefully considered my options, and—okay, not really. I just punched him in the face.
I’d hit people before, but never like this. The head punk flew backward into the Plexiglas window of the principal’s office, landing on the ground. Bloody and crying, he got to his feet and ran off. The principal yelled for me to come into his office, and once there, informed me he couldn’t condone my behavior, and that I’d have to be punished for starting a fight. He suspended me for a day, yet at the end of his speech, caught my eye and gave me a silent thumbs-up. I felt like the punishment was worth it. I knew my dad wasn’t going to be upset, because he’d always told me to stand up to bullies. Plus, from that day on, Scooter and his brother felt safe at school and went to Taco Bell whenever they felt like it.
All Downhill from Here
* * *
My social triumphs as an upperclassman continued to accumulate, offering a dramatic contrast to the generally depressing slide of the rest of my life.
Not only was I failing most of my classes, I was still doing a lot of rash and crazy things that only by great good luck never got me thrown into juvenile hall. I was a senior, for example, when I briefly got involved in the scheme to sell fake IDs, which neither my parents, nor, luckily, the police, ever discovered.
What can I say today, nearly twenty years later? These memories are embarrassing to me, and yet adolescents tend to do stupid things, and adolescent boys with poor self-control, unsurprisingly, do the stupidest things of all. Once again my parents were unaware of most of what was going on, but they knew about the bad grades, and we argued every night about my lack of motivation and poor work ethic. The arguing never really bothered me, but I’ll never forget the sight of my father, shortly after he opened what I later understood would be my final report card from Layton High. This time he didn’t yell—he just sat down on the staircase and sobbed. I’d never seen him cry before, and the sight of it shook me with the realization that I wasn’t the only person affected by my choices. Yet even then, I didn’t start trying to turn things around for the simple reason that I honestly didn’t believe I could.
Whenever I actually showed up in class, all through high school, my teachers would pester me. They’d been telling me the same thing for years now—that it was clear I was smart, so why wasn’t I trying harder? Yet that
tactic, as I’ve since learned, was almost guaranteed to backfire. Telling kids they’re smart but just need to “try harder” rarely if ever gets them to do that. In fact, it often creates a perverse incentive not to try. The child may well have already stopped trying because he has lost faith that he can succeed. So from where he sits, it is better to have someone think he’s smart and is choosing not to try rather than trying and certainly failing. If he tries and fails, he’ll have lost even that slim promise.
Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, when she was based at Columbia University, published pioneering research that underlies this point. In a study of four hundred fifth-graders, the children took two tests, the second of which was made so hard that every child failed. By the third test, children who had been praised for their effort bounced back sufficiently to achieve scores that were 30 percent higher than on the first test. But students who were praised for their smarts had scores that were 20 percent lower. The researchers concluded that parents and teachers can be most effective when they praise kids for abilities, like effort, that are under their control.
As I look back today on my own stubborn stance in high school, it still strikes me as reasonable. Given what I have since found out about learning, and particularly how much it depends on a good “fit” with one’s environment, I honestly don’t believe I could have been successful had I tried harder. The sad truth is that my school could not have supported and challenged me in the way that I needed. So, as is the case with many other struggling students, I was essentially set up to fail. My only available choice was to go down fighting, so that’s what I did.