There is no doubt that Steve Jobs was a great engineer and a great businessman but a few weeks ago, just a few days after his death, I linked on my facebook to an article saying he was a bad role model. At the time I didn’t know quite whether I agreed or thought it was BS. The article on forbes.com said basically that he was arrogant for not following his doctors’ recommendations and that he gave bad advice for people to follow what they love, not settle, and keep looking for what they love until they find it, quoting him from a famous Stanford commencement speech.
I’m all for making kids feel good about themselves and encouraging people to try hard but in a way this is giving false hope to the masses. For Jobs, yes, he was successful and found a job he loved, but for the vast majority of people, even Stanford grads, we won’t find the ideal job or ideal spouse, and looking tirelessly for it would cause most of us frustration and unhappiness.
It’s one thing to tell a 6 year old that he can grow up to be a professional baseball player if he wants to and works hard at it. It’s another thing to tell a 16 year old C student that he can become a doctor or to tell engineers as a whole that they should get a master’s degree and pursue a promotion to management. We shouldn’t be encouraging people so much to work highly skilled positions, thereby making the laborers and even the engineers who have held the same decent position for 20 years feel like second class citizens.
I’ve always felt that Americans encourage people to get higher education and strive to get promotions entirely too much to the point that it is unrealistic for many people. Many people are better off not going to college or not going to grad school or not pressuring themselves to get a promotion – after all, along with more money, promotions mean more responsibility and more headaches and the majority of us would not be happier or couldn’t handle those jobs.
In Jobs’ famous commencement speech, Jobs says “the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do” but if we are telling people they need to keep striving for bigger things and searching for their ideal job, only a small fraction of the people will love what they do. People need to be happy with their job so I think we should focus more on encouraging people to learn to like what they do rather than striving for the ideal – how to be satisfied with your current job as a salesman or engineer or clerk rather than being told time and time again that in order to be successful and happy, you have to be a manager or executive. There are relatively few managers in the world.
I’ll leave you with a line from a Sheryl Crow song: “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.”
This is generally good advice. It is good to achieve to the extent which is consistent with their abilities and interests. Generally, high ability increases the probability that one will be interested and if one is interested in a certain field they are more likely to be able to develop their abilities, but striving for goals which are unachievable generally leads to discontent. A good example is weak students failing courses in pre-med programs. Many of these students have difficulty accepting their fate and become depressed.
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