Self-Made Heroes

Today I traveled to my roommate's side of the room and toured her bookshelves.  She is in Japan right now.

Some of you might have heard of my roommate.

She is the one with the librarian glasses, and she owns an impressive selection of nonfiction. I, of course, went straight for the picture book.

A page from What It Is by Lynda Barry

What It Is is a charming personal narrative/how-to book about remembering and writing.  Well, it's charming for a while at any rate.  But each section of narrative is divided by pages and pages of questions like, "Where do we keep bad memories?", "What are we doing when we are looking?", and "Do you wish you could draw?" I simply did not have the patience.  When I got to the, "What happens when we read a story?" question, I decided that if there was one thing that I was NOT doing right then, it was reading a story, and I gave the thing up.

Only later did I discover that What It Is forms part of a genre known as coffee table books that are neither meant to be read all the way through nor stored on a bookshelf.  Which means that all those questions were meant to inspire conversation, and the meandering storyline was only meant to be entertaining in bits and pieces, wherever you chance to start and stop, but not as a whole.  I had no clue.  I guess I never did own a real live coffee table, not being a drinker myself.  And if I had, I probably wouldn't have known what to do with it anyway.

My fool's errand into coffee table literature served as a lesson on the importance of learning basic literary genres.  It also reminded me that I was probably overdue for a book on time management.  So I read the first chapter of Outliers by Malcom Gladwell (also compliments of my absent roommate).

Chapter One "The Matthew Effect" attacks a well-known success archetype, the "billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity," who, "is born into modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way into greatness."  Think of self-made heroes such as Joseph in Egypt or maybe the guy from In Pursuit of Happyness.  Gladwell does not believe in them.  He attributes their success to the chapter's epigraph:

In other words, an initial head start generates success upon success upon success.  And we aren't to be fooled by appearances.  Often, that initial head start takes the form of something as simple as one's birth month.  People born at the beginning of the year are far more likely to be successful athletes and students because of age cutoffs in kindergartens and youth sports teams.

Well, that Biblical allusion did two things for me:

1)  It gave credit to Gladwell's argument.  Apparently, people have been thinking about this "revolutionary" accumulative model of success for centuries.  And not just any people, the Master himself.

2)  It's also very ironic.  In the Matthew 25 parable, a just lord takes the servant's few talents away because he is wicked and slothful.  And many people use this story (or its variation, the self-made hero archetype) to justify disparities between winners and losers.  "He earned it," they say.  I think Gladwell would be more careful about how he applies these stories.  He might take more of a Mosiah 4 approach.  Because in real life, our masters are imperfect.  All too often, successes and failures are not simple functions of individual merit, but consequences of the rules we write as a society.

As for me, I'm still going to go ahead and consider my roommate a self-made hero.  After all, she was born in September not January.

On another quick note, does anyone have this book or know someone who does?  They're out of stock at Amazon...

Reading Outliers +

Our Engl 251 nonfiction unit +

A jam session with my cousins over the three-day weekend +

The slightly out-of-tune piano that I've got in my house until the end of this summer

...together have inspired me to read this book.  Except for a brief, rather grizzly stint as the ward organist, I've never really explored my musical side as much as I should.