Life Advice Archives - Page 7 of 10

Choose Your Friends Wisely

Yes, your friends are more popular than you.

They are also having more fun than you. And people care more about what your friends think than about what you think. They are also more likely to dress like your friends and act like your friends.

But don’t despair. There is nothing you can do about it.

Matthew Jackson explains why in The Human Network: How Your Social Position Determines Your Power, Beliefs, and Behaviors. The book is an explanation of network theory—how things relate to one another. Curiously, the same sort of models can explain not just the relationships you have with your friends, but how disease spreads and how financial panics occur. It’s all about the network.

Start with why your friends are more popular than you. Draw a picture with a circle representing each person. Draw a line connecting your circle to every one of your friends. Then imagine doing this for everyone else—a line for every friendship. (It’s a messy picture.)

Now the obvious statement: popular people have more connecting lines. That is the definition of “popular” after all.

But, it has an additional implication that is not so obvious. Suppose you have a dozen friends, and your popular friend has four dozen friends. That means there are 11 other people who have you as a friend, but 47 other people have your popular friend as a friend. It is, in other words, way more likely that someone else is friends with your popular friend than they are with you. In fact, it is also way more likely that your 11 other friends are people who have lots of friends, so they are also more popular than you. It is highly unlikely, for example, that one of your 11 other friends only has one friend who happens to be you. So, on average, your friends really are more popular than you.

The ripple effect of this observation is incredible. Consider a college student. How much time do the friends of the college student spend socializing? How much time do the friends spend studying? It turns out students overestimate the amount of time the average student spends socializing and underestimate the time spent studying.

Why? Socializing is a public act which generates more friend connections. So, people who socialize a lot have more friends and are seen socializing. Studying on the other hand is a private activity. You don’t see people studying as much. And people who are studying a lot make fewer friends.

So, our hypothetical student will have more friends who socialize a lot and will see them socializing a lot, so will think college students must socialize a lot. Our hypothetical student will have fewer friends who study a lot and will not see them studying, so will think college students don’t study that much.

Now add in the phenomenon of homophily—liking people who are the same as you. People like people who are like them. Even if this is only a slight preference, it has dramatic effects. You want friends who are like you means that you want to be like your friends. You see your friends socializing more than you see them studying for the reasons above. So, you change your behavior to spend more time socializing than you otherwise would or even more than you would if you knew the actual average amount of time the average person spends socializing.

Fads come about for the same reason. Suppose two relatively popular people for some reason or another decide to wear purple tennis shoes. Then, since these first two purple tennis shoe wearers are popular, many people are friends with both and thus will think that wearing purple tennis shoes is a good idea and adopt the style. Now there are more people doing this, so even more people conform. Next thing you know, everyone is wearing purple tennis shoes solely because of an unrelated decision to do so by a very small number of popular people.

(This is the same model as health epidemics. A few sick people with lots of connections can infect a disproportionate number of other people, who in turn have a relatively disproportionate number of other people who will also be infected and so on.)

Now replace “wear purple tennis shoes” with “have a particular political belief.” And now add in a technology that allows people to announce their political beliefs to their friends. (Yeah, stretch your mind to imagine what such a technological innovation could possibly be.)

A relatively small number of relatively popular people announcing a particular political view will ripple through the friend network until everyone in the friend network is announcing the same political view. It doesn’t take any nefarious outside influencers. It doesn’t even take particularly influential popularizers. It just takes the fact that some people have more friend connections than others and everyone has at least a small degree of desire to be like their friends. The simple power of network connections along with homophily is all you need.

Now really stretch your mind and imagine that two separate groups emerge. Suddenly nobody knows very many people, and maybe even anybody at all, with different opinions, despite the fact that half the population has a different opinion. No brainwashing is necessary. News organizations devoted to one or the other set of views may even emerge as an effect, not a cause, of the spread of views in a network.

Of course this is all hypothetical.

Outsmarting Economists

Sometimes a book title seems very, very promising.

Can You Outsmart an Economist? 100+ Puzzles to Train Your Brain is such a title.

Economics! Puzzles! Together in one place!

I really wanted to love this book. I mean I really, really, really wanted to love this book.

Sigh.

It’s good, not great.

Oddly, with a different title, I think I would have liked it more. Then again, with a different title, I don’t think I would have ever read it.

The problem: there isn’t very much economics in this book. It is really just a puzzle book. Don’t get me wrong: if you are an economist or an economist in training, there is much in this book that will be very helpful in showing how to think through puzzles.

There are some interesting puzzles in which you have to use backward reasoning. There are quite a few problems in which you have to think deeply about probability. There are some interesting game theory exercises.

So, it is true that if you want to be a good economist, you need to learn to think through these sorts of problems.

But, does that make it an economics book? Does this book merit a title asking if you can outsmart an economist? Hardly.

Consider an algebra book or a calculus book or a graduate level mathematics textbook. If you read a book about how to solve mathematical problems, you will be a better economist. The same is true with reading books on statistics. So, can we take a book on probability and retitle it Can You Outsmart an Economist?

No need to stop there. An economist would benefit from reading philosophy or history or political science or literature. Should we retitle Pride and Prejudice while we are at it? Lots of economic insights in that novel (really, this is true).

So, if the book were more correctly entitled: Some Fun Problems to Help You Learn About Deductive Reasoning, Probability, and Game Theory, then I would not have been nearly as disappointed in the contents. Obviously the book would not sell as well. Which is an economic problem: if the point of a title is to help sell the book, then Landsburg and his publisher chose wisely.

That raises an interesting another economic problem: how far can a title deviate from the content of the book and still have the benefit of more sales from the better title outweigh the cost of risking future sales if people are disappointed in the content of the book?

A book about thinking like an economist should be hyper-focused on thinking about tradeoffs like that. If there is one thing that economists do and do very well it is always applying this principle:

People act in a way that the perceived marginal benefit of their choice is greater than the perceived marginal cost of their choice.

Enough on my disappointment about the misleading title. How does the book do on the terms of being a book of problems? OK.

Landsburg writes well and tells stories nicely with a humorous air. That is, after all, how he made his name. The puzzles are always told with an amusing story. There are tales about a guy trying not to be eaten by dinosaurs, ferocious pirates, and the Slobbovian czar of agriculture.

For the most part, the problems are interesting. The trick in a book like this is to quickly form an initial instinct, and then take the time to work the problem out to see when your initial instinct is wrong. It often is—well, unless you have seen a problem of type X before and know that your initial instinct is wrong and so you have the opposite initial instinct.

So, if you like puzzles, particularly probability puzzles, there is a fair amount of good material herein told by a skilled raconteur. Enjoy.

However, some of the problems are downright annoying. In the quest to show that your initial instinct is wrong, Landsburg is perfectly willing to engage is sly little word games where the question is written ever so slightly differently than the question you thought was being asked. This can lead to pages and pages of explanation about why if you were answering the question you are thinking he is asking, your instinct is right, but because of this seemingly irrelevant change in the wording right here, you get some crazy answer which is mathematically correct.

This sort of exercise in minutia is all fine if you just want to argue about trivialities. And if the title of the book was different, it would not bother me at all. But, remember the title: it is about outsmarting an economist.

Economists, as noted above are really good at one thing: they ignore trivialities. If you have a question, and you figure out the answer to the question you actually have, then you did what you wanted to do. Then along comes someone who says, well, if you alter the question in this seemingly trivial way, then you get a different answer. You then have a choice: you can spend hours and hours arguing about this matter, or you can say, I have already answered the question I set out to answer, you agree with me that I have answered the question I was actually asking, so why do I need to spend hours debating this?

The example which was the most egregious case is about the expected numbers of boys and girls in a population in which every couple wants to have a son. As Landsburg notes it is completely true that in expectation the number of boys will equal the number of girls. However, it is not true, Landsburg notes, that in expectation half of all children are girls.

If you look at those two statements, it is obvious they are in fact identical statements, so one cannot be true while the other is false. So, in this case, Landsburg is obviously engaged in some subtle changing of the question.

If you want to spend your time figuring out the verbal sleight of hand that Landsburg is playing there, then you are going to love every part of this book.

But, don’t think that you are committing some crime against economics if you think the marginal cost of figuring out what Landsburg is doing exceeds the marginal benefit of doing so.

The Golden Rule Redux

“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” Zig Ziglar said that. According to his son, Tom, it is the most famous of all Zig Ziglar quotes. It’s an upbeat and memorable rephrasing of Adam Smith’s key insight into how an economy works.

But, Ziglar isn’t talking about theoretical economics; he wants to sell you an idea.

Before his death in 2012, Ziglar had become one of the more famous motivational speakers, the type of speaker who holds a convention and firms pay for their employees to go hear what he has to say. Naturally enough, he put much of his advice into books offering advice not just to the sales force of large firms, but to people in all walks of life. (For example, Raising Positive Kids in a Negative World, Confessions of a Happy Christian.)

Top Performance: How to Develop Excellence in Yourself and Others has just come out in a new edition, a 2019 reprint of a 2003 reprint of a 1986 book. The new edition adds three new chapters, one by Zig’s son (more about that anon).

The book is very much a pep rally for the harried business executive. As such it fits into a rather large genre of books on that theme. I am obviously not the target audience for books in this genre, but every time I read them, I do get to wondering why this genre is so popular. It is not exactly true to say that when you have read one book in this genre, you have read them all, but there is no doubt that the books are, at their heart, remarkably similar.

The formula: Create pithy aphorisms and cute acronyms, and then tell a bunch of stories with very well defined moral lessons. I suspect part of the reason the books do so well is that if you are a mid-level manager and you need something to fill the time in your monthly or quarterly staff meeting, relating a new motto or acronym gives you a good solid hour of material and maybe someone will remember something from it and work a bit better for the next month or so. That is not a criticism, by the way; if you are a mid-level manager, this is, after all, exactly your job.

On that front, this book fits the formula. We have GEL (Goodfinder, Expect the Best, Loyalty); the Five Ps (Purpose, People, Plan, Process, Profit (side note: this is one of the new chapters)); and the Four As (Awareness, Assumptions, Analysis, Action).

So, what makes this book different? Ziglar explains in what sure seems like an uncharacteristic dig at another writer in the same genre:

It’s true that a pleasing personality helps win friends and influence people. However, when we add character and integrity to that formula, we are able to keep those friends and maintain the influence.

That sounds right; indeed, it would be hard to disagree with it. But, how do you go from a statement like that to an hour long talk, let alone a series of talks plus an entire business enterprise selling talks and seminars? (And make no mistake: Ziglar Enterprises is in the market of selling. One, slightly uncharitable, way in which this particular book could be read is a commercial (e.g., “Am I recommending that your organization get involved with one of these personality profile analyses? The answer is yes. We also have a consulting team that specializes in developing personalized personnel programs for your organization.”))

How does this work? The new chapter by Tom Ziglar provides an interesting example. Tom shares with us “The Ziglar Performance Formula.” It is a math equation!

Attitude x Effort x Skill = Performance

A new employee starts with ones in all three variable on the left hand side. What do you, the manager, do? On day one, make sure the new employee has a really nice time getting to know everyone. That moves Attitude to a 2, and Performance has literally doubled overnight! On day 2, give the new employee small tasks that can be accomplished. Now Effort moves to a 2 and performance doubles again. On day 3, teach the person how to do the job, and you guessed it, skill moves to a 2, performance doubles again and is now at an 8 compared to the 1 it was at on the first day. Presto! You are a managing genius!

But, there is more. Imagine a disgruntled employee. Then attitude is negative. And if attitude is negative, then performance will also be negative. Indeed, the more skilled the employee is, the more damage a bad attitude does. So, Attitude is what matters most.

Now, I read that and instantly think (I can’t help myself): if attitude is negative and effort is also negative, then when you multiply the two negatives together you get a positive, so a highly skilled employee with a really bad attitude engaged in destructive effort would generate really high performance!

Obviously, like I said above, I am not the target audience for this book. In thinking like that, I entirely missed the point Tom was making.

What is the point? You don’t have to take my summary of it. Zig Ziglar tells us:

It is my firm conviction that if you only take one thought or one idea out of Top Performance, it should be […] People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care…about them.

Or, as Zig summarizes his book:

I want to share with you one phrase that I honestly believe is worth the price of this book…Logic will not change an emotion, but action will!

Or, as Zig says in the last chapter

The primary reason for this chapter, which I consider to be the most important one in the book is to encourage you to become a Top Performer in your spiritual, personal, family, and social life as well as in your business career.

How do you do that last bit? Take time for several things: to get started, to grow, to be healthy, to play, to be quiet, and for those you love.

As you look at the things Ziglar is emphasizing, the message of the book is obvious. Character matters. Attitude matters. It makes no difference how skilled or knowledgeable you are; it makes no difference if you are an extrovert or an introvert; if you don’t have a good attitude, you will not be a top performer.

If nothing else this book is an excellent reminder that the one thing you should do today is be a little bit nicer to everyone you meet. As Ziglar notes, that lesson alone is worth the price of the book.

The message, as Ziglar would be quick to note, is not original with him. Jesus said it: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Apostle Paul said it: If I have not love, I am nothing.

So, take Ziglar up on his challenge today. Smile at a stranger. Say a kind word to everyone you meet; it doesn’t take long to say just one nice thing to the person who answers the phones or cleans the building or stocks the shelves at the store or gives you your coffee. If you do that, not only will you set off on the path to be a top performer, but you’ll also make this world a little bit of a nicer place to live for someone else.

Quite a Little Fellow

“Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand bringing them about yourself? You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!”

That is Gandalf talking to Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit.

First things first, if you don’t know about Gandalf or Bilbo or Hobbits, then…well I have no idea what to say to you. How is that possible?

The immediate problem in discussing The Hobbit is not that nobody knows the book. Tolkien’s books are right there with Rowling’s in being cultural landmarks.

The problem is that many people do not take The Hobbit seriously as literature. On the other hand, some people take Tolkien as the be-all, end-all of literature. Tolkien Studies is a genre unto itself.

How big is Tolkien Studies? Consider this: Touchstone Magazine has a section on their website describing the process of submitting a book review. At the end of the discussion, there is this paragraph:

On Lewis and Tolkien: Touchstone has a special interest in the work of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, but the massive proliferation of secondary literature on these authors, including submissions to this journal, has made it necessary that we only accept the especially interesting or illuminating. As their lives and writings are parsed ever finer we find less of what we receive passing these tests. This being said, we will be glad to read over what we are sent, but ask the author not to be excessively disappointed if even a well-written manuscript is turned down.

Here is the challenge, Dear Reader. Find something interesting to say about The Hobbit that a) has not already been said before and b) will be of interest to the entire range of people between those who have never read the book and those who have read all those books about Tolkien that Touchstone is no longer reviewing.

Having stated the challenge I herewith ignore it. I’m not even going to try to be original here.

To return the Gandalf’s statement at the outset. (Just to be clear: the outset of this blog post; it is at the end of the novel.) We have here a novel, a famous novel, a great novel, a wonderful, beloved and charming novel, in which the protagonist is merely “quite a little fellow” in the big world.

Part of us wants to reject that description of Bilbo Baggins. He is a hero, right? He has a book detailing his adventures and he is the starting place for the even grander, truly epic, story of The Lord of the Rings. We very much want to think of Bilbo as larger than life.

But, when you look at the story, Gandalf is exactly right. Bilbo is not larger than life. He is a little fellow, both in stature and in his place in society. He muddles through the tale of this novel, and seemingly through blind chance and a whole lot of luck, he ends up doing all sorts of important things. But, it is all just chance.

Think about it: what does he actually do? (If you do not know the story, the following paragraph will make zero sense.) Gandalf arranges to have Bilbo on the quest. Gandalf saves everyone from the trolls. Bilbo finds the ring by chance (or as we find out in The Lord of the Rings, the ring actually finds Bilbo). He is daring in the spider episode, but doesn’t actually succeed in much; the elves are the ones who save the dwarves. He rescues the dwarves only by the mere luck of everyone in the castle getting drunk on the same night they ship out the barrels. He finds the secret tunnel only by the complete luck of literally and accidentally being in the right place on the right day at the right time. He does cleverly get Smaug to reveal the chink in his armor (we can give him that). But, others kill Smaug. He does beat the dwarves in his game with the Arkenstone—but it isn’t clear that this helps matters. And since he accidentally gets knocked out while invisible in the final war, he survives it.

And now you, Dear Reader, want to object that this is all just belittling Bilbo. Ah, but it isn’t. The fact that Bilbo is not classically Heroic or Great is exactly what makes him so Amazing. He is just a Little Fellow in the Wide World. Yet, he is important. He is important because he is quite a little fellow in a wide world.

Consider his journey. He joins up with the dwarves on what can only be described as a whim. But, then he keeps going. There is a constant refrain in the book:

“Bother burgling and everything to do with it! I wish I was at home in my nice hall by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!” It was not the last time that he wished that!

Not for the last time indeed. Bilbo has this wish through the entire story. Bilbo would vastly prefer his quiet life in his little hole, but he agrees to do something without having any idea at all what he was agreeing to do. When the road gets rough, Bilbo just keeps going. He doesn’t keep going because he sees himself as a Hero. He doesn’t keep going because he wants to change the world. He doesn’t keep going because he has no fondness for a return to his old life. He just keeps going because the future beckons and Bilbo wants to see what is ahead.

Life is like that.

You and I, Dear Reader, are just like Bilbo Baggins. Quite a little fellow in a wide world. The choice before us is whether to just keep trudging along the path even when we want to retreat to our comfortable little hole in the ground. Just keep trudging. There is a nobility in that. Indeed, as The Hobbit teaches us, it is the most noble life of all.

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The Personal is Not Political

“The personal is political” is easily one of the most pernicious claims made in the history of political thought.

Rather impressively, it simultaneously degrades both political thought and personal life.

Are you defined by your politics?

Sadly, far too many people go off to college and are taught that their fundamental identity as a person is nothing more than the set of political beliefs they espouse. It is quite tragic.

Philip Roth explores this matter in the novel I Married a Communist. Nathan Zuckerman (Roth’s alter ego in 9 of his novels) and Murray Ringold reminisce about Murray’s younger brother and Nathan’s youthful idol, Ira, the communist of the title.

At one point, Zuckerman expresses astonishment at what he is learning from Murray:

Murray, laughing, said, “That a man has a lot of sides that are unbelievable is, I thought, the subject of your books. About a man, as your fiction tells it, everything is believable.

That sometimes we learn surprising things about people is well known. We are surprised at the particular instances, but not at the general phenomena. Obviously, people are complex and obviously we don’t know everything about anyone. So, why is this novel of discovery worth reading?

The earliest events discussed in this novel involve teenage Nathan discovering the world of politics via a book praising Thomas Paine for demanding the compete transformation of the world. He has a conversation with Murray and Ira, in which he is told that the genius of Paine “was to articulate the cause in English. The revolution was totally improvised, total disorganized. Isn’t that the sense you get from this book Nathan? Well, these guys had to find a language for their revolution. To find the words for a great purpose.”

That may be the most perfect description of the allure of developing an absolutist political self. Nathan is attracted to Ira and Ira’s communism not because of the beliefs themselves, but because of the language in which they are expressed. The language itself is stirring and new. It is exciting. It is like an entry into an adult world where childish ideas are thrown off and the world is complex and full of evil and good and there are all these magic phrases which can be used to signal that you are on the side of the righteous.

It isn’t, in other words, the ideas themselves that excite youth; it is the language expressing the ideas themselves.

When someone is first being educated and his head is becoming transformed into an arsenal armed with books, when he is young and impudent and leaping with joy to discover all the intelligence tucked away on this planet, he is apt to exaggerate the importance of the churning new reality and to deprecate as unimportant everything else.

So, what happens after that first encounter? That is exactly what this book traces. Zuckerman gets bored with the language. It takes a few years, but eventually, hearing the rhetoric repeated endlessly, the lack of any new language, becomes so boring that Zuckerman wanders off (to write a scandalous novel, as we find out in Zuckerman Unbound).

Becoming bored wasn’t the only option. Ira’s political mentor O’Day is a True Believer to the end, sacrificing everything, all of life’s comforts for the cause.

Ira tries to straddle the worlds of zealotry and comfortable living, and, well, it doesn’t work out.

Therein lies the problem. What is the proper place for one’s political beliefs? Zuckerman wanders off looking for a new language to excite him; O’Day sacrifices everything for his beliefs; Ira fails to balance the zeal of his communist political beliefs and living a normal bourgeois life with his famous wife, Eve. None of these options seem desirable.

Murray stands in for another option; keep politics in its proper place. Murray’s political beliefs seem to be vaguely leftist, probably what was once called a fellow traveler. He gets hauled before a McCarthyite committee, refuse to denounce his brother, and loses his job as a high school teacher. But, he cheerfully spends a few years as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, before being reinstated to his job as a teacher. He is married to a great wife, has a great kid, meets Zuckerman again to have the conversation in this book when he is in his eighties taking a class on Shakespeare, and then dies quietly two months later. A good life all in all.

The difference between Murray and all the other options in this book is simply that he does not let his political life control him. While Zuckerman is bouncing from one enthusiasm to the next, Murray was just going through life, observing the political scene, having strong opinions about it (he really doesn’t like Nixon), but never confusing his political beliefs with who he is.

At the end, Zuckerman seems to realize that Murray is implicitly right. Wandering out, staring at the night sky, what does he see?

Neither the ideas of their era nor the expectations of our species were determining destiny: hydrogen alone was determining destiny. There are no longer mistakes for Eve or Ira to make. There is no betrayal. There is no idealism. There are no falsehoods. There is neither conscience nor its absence. There are no mothers and daughters, no fathers and stepfathers. There are no actors. There is no class struggle. There is no discrimination or lynching or Jim Crowe, nor has there ever been. There is no injustice, nor is there justice. There are no utopias….What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain…is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand.
The stars are indispensable.

Perspective matters. This is one of the missing lessons in the modern college. It is one of the missing lessons in the world of news and social media.

I have had strong political beliefs since I was in high school. I too was wooed by the beat of the rhetoric of all these ideas and I too once thought that the political battles of the moment were life and death battles. While my political beliefs have not moderated, I have come to realize that while politics is fun and interesting and generates those incredibly marvelous debates, it really should be kept in its place.

A pleasant cup of coffee with your kid or cocktail hour with your spouse or an impassioned debate about sports with your friends, these things matter. None of these things is worth sacrificing on the altar of politics.

I Married a Communist is a curious warning tale. It is in some ways a bitter book in which Roth settles scores with his ex-wife. But Roth is too great of an artist to let the bitterness dwarf the message. Our hearts long for peace. That peace is not going to be found by constantly seeking to praise or condemn Caesar.

A Failed Life?

From the first page of John Williams’ Stoner, we know this is the tale of a failure.

Not a Grand Failure whose failures are in any way noteworthy. Just the routine kind of failure where nothing in life ever really works out very well and then after death nobody ever thinks about the person again.

Lest you be worried that this review contains spoilers, this is all on the first page of the story of William Stoner.

He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses…An occasional student who comes upon the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers

Before thinking about the interesting idea underneath this novel, a word about the prose style. In the passage above, did you catch the almost unbearable sense of a vague sadness? Not the sharp sadness of a tragedy, but the sort of resigned unrelenting sadness about a thing which you really don’t want to think about too much because then you will get really sad? The sadness that comes when the brief fleeting thought goes through your mind, and you ignore the thought, but that sense of sadness remains like the faint odor of a perfume which triggers some subconscious reminder of something which you know would be unbearably sad if you could just remember where you smelled that odor before.

The whole book has exactly that tone. It is remarkable. Unrelentingly, the prose carries that vague sense of loss. I have no idea how Williams pulled that off. This is either a master at work or an author knows no other tone because his whole life has that sense about it.

But, the story. William Stoner grows up on a farm, goes to college, becomes a professor of English, marries, has a kid and an affair, publishes a book nobody reads, gives a bunch of lectures nobody remembers, has an argument with a colleague about something relatively unimportant, and eventually dies.

William Stoner, in other words, is a failure. Nothing he does ever really succeeds. He fails at being a scholar, a teacher, a colleague and a mentor. He fails at being a husband and a father and a lover. He fails at being a son, and a son-in-law, and a friend, and a student.

And yet, despite all that failure, when looking back at his life, the only conclusion that can be drawn is this: William Stoner led a good life.

On his deathbed, on the last page of the novel, Stoner reflects

What did you expect? he thought again.
A kind of joy came upon him, as if borne in on a summer breeze. He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure—as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.

What had his life been? At every moment in the book, faced with a decision, Stoner did exactly what he thought he needed to do. He muddled through life, doing the best he could.

The decisions he makes never really turn out all that well. The problems at work could easily have been avoided, but Stoner felt the need to do the right thing even though he knows full well the stakes are small and the personal consequences are potentially large. The signs that his marriage would be a failure were obvious even to Stoner before he was married, but he had made the decision, so he stuck with it.

His life is periodically punctuated by happiness. At times in his life, he actually teaches well. He is for a time a good father. His affair brings him fleeting joy. None of those moments of happiness last.

And yet, what did you expect?

The question of what you expected is the key. This book is the antidote to the message we send the young all the time about what they should expect their lives to be. We tell them over and over to go out and do great things and change the world. We teach them that Love is this enormous emotional high lasting forever and that work is always fulfilling.

And then, the young go through life and discover that most of life is not a psychological high. Few people really do change the world. Few people really are the best in their profession. Few people really are the perfect spouse or parent.

And in this way, we have set up the young to suffer from crushing disappointment later in life. What do they do when they realize they will not be the success they imagined they would be back when they were young? What do they do when reality intrudes into the dream and says there is no castle on the hill, no happily ever after? They feel like failures.

Shame on us for teaching that lesson. William Stoner’s life is not a failure. It looks like a failure because we have collectively told him it is a failure. But, it was a life well-lived. He did his part faithfully. He tried to make good decisions. He lived with the consequences of his decisions without complaining. He never said that life was unfair.

Stoner endures. The dude abides. When did we stop thinking that such a thing was the very definition of a successful life?