Amy Chua - Triple Package: What Really Determines Success - Nordic Business Forum

thanks so much Andre for that wonderful introduction and thank you all for coming today it is a tremendous pleasure and honor for me to be here in beautiful Helsinki in this spectacular space along with such amazing other speakers the last time I was in Helsinki I was 17 years old I actually came with my family and I fell in complete love with the country I remember coming over on the Finn jet which was the fastest boat I'd ever been on and my dad drove us all the way up to Rovaniemi to see the reindeer and it's just a wonderful pleasure to be back so as Andre alluded to and as some of you may know five years ago I published a memoir about how I raised my two daughters called Battle Hymn of the tiger mother let's see did I oops nope there it is that's the Swedish and Finnish covers and since I published that book my life has never been the same things have happened to me both good and bad that I could never have imagined in a million years for example I have had to live Tigers in my house as part of a photo shoot for Time magazine I was told beforehand that they were going to be baby tigers just four weeks and six weeks old and they said they're just going to be like big cute kittens something like this and I remember they said we are going to help you rehabilitate your image everyone in the world thinks you're mean and horrible but we are going to photograph you hugging these two cute tiger cubs and everyone will realize that you're actually warm and nurturing well apparently there was a miscommunication because instead of baby tigers like this this is what showed up at my house I'm not kidding this is the tiger actually showing up at my house two of them imagine what my suburban neighbors thought and obviously they are not sedated and I remember the photographer was a fancy artsy guy from Germany and at one point he said okay for this shot I want you to grab the tiger like this by the scruff back and lift it up like a real tiger mother would and I remember saying you know why don't you try it first show me how it's done and he said you know never mind let's try something else anyway we ended up having a great time that day and the Tigers didn't even eat anybody but there have been some truly tough moments - what happened was three days before my book was published The Wall Street Journal published some provocative parts of the book from the very opening under the headline why Chinese mothers are superior which I didn't write and never saw and suddenly I found myself in the middle of an international firestorm and I was receiving 500 angry emails every hour and the very day my book came out I was invited on to the Today Show which is the largest morning television show in the United States and the first question that the host asked me remember this is at 6:00 in the morning in front of 2 million people I'm terrified I've never been in TV before the first question the host asked me is yes or no are you a monster that's a conversation starter I don't think I did too well meanwhile my daughters were 14 and 17 at the time and reporters descended on their high school looking for dirt and I remember thinking to myself I was on book tour I'd be in some hotel room in the middle of nowhere all myself terrible stuff in the internet and I would think oh my gosh is my family going to fall apart because I published this book in fact much of the intense reaction to that book was based on a misunderstanding I think many people just focused on the Wall Street Journal headline which I totally disagree with I do not think Chinese Mother's are superior when in fact and I'm not sure how many of you know this I actually wrote the book in a moment of total crisis when my younger daughter Lulu rebelled there they are today she's the one in the white on the left so as those of you who are parents know children can be totally different and my oldest one Sofia was an easy kid but then Lulu came along and boy was I in for a lesson I feel like this is the kid born saying no to everything and we're very similar in temperament hot-tempered stubborn very very close and I think that was part of the problem I remember once when she was seven years old we were practicing violin together and at one point Lulu says stop it mommy just stop it and I said what I didn't say anything I didn't say one word and Lulu said your brain is annoying me and she was right she just knew what I was thinking um so you know we really we had these run-ins but we would always make up we were always very close but when she turned 13 she completely rebelled got very angry and alienated and there's a scene in Red Square Moscow where we have this big fight it's in the book and at that moment in the middle of that fight I suddenly realized oh my god I might lose my daughter I could actually lose my daughter and when it hit me that way that I might actually lose her I didn't care about anything and I just stopped I pulled back we adjusted and I actually started writing the memoir that day about the whole thing in three months and it was like a joint project showed my daughter's every page so far from what the whole world thinks it is far from being a parenting manifesto the book is actually about my own journey my own struggle as a parent trying to maintain the culture value and traditions that my own Chinese immigrant parents instilled in me while adapting to the very different personalities of my daughters and like garyvee yesterday my parents they're 80 now they're my heroes I adore them and I feel like oh them everything so after spending almost a year going around the world trying to explain myself I started thinking more and more about the question what is the relationship between culture and success and what is success and how does it relate to happiness and meaning and this brings me to my topic today what I'd like to talk to you about are some very striking findings that I published in the more recent book that Audrey mentioned co-authored with my husband Jed Rubenfeld called the triple package which is about what is it that generates such extraordinary drive and success in certain individuals in certain groups in certain nations and in certain businesses we discovered three qualities accessible to anyone that generate disproportionate success these three qualities are what we deliberately and provocatively call a superiority complex that is a deep-seated belief in your own exceptionality a feeling of being special the second quality is seemingly just the opposite a dash of insecurity a feeling or worry that who you are or what you've done is somehow not good enough yet that's what lights the fire and the third quality is impulse control that is discipline perseverance grit the ability to resist temptation and we call it the triple package and it's really the combination of the first two qualities that is so unusual I mean it must be I don't know maybe weird for you to try to imagine to sort of imagine a person feeling simultaneously insecure and superior but it's precisely that lately even unstable combination that generates drive this feeling almost like a chip on your shoulders that you need to work harder to prove yourself and to be recognized to gain the respect that you feel you deserved to show everyone and Steve Jobs is a perfect example by all accounts Jobs had a legendarily high opinion of his own abilities he had a powerful sense of his own brilliance and importance he believed he could transform the world huge superiority complex at the same time his closest friends also described him as deeply insecure which drove him and made him feel he constantly needed to work harder that he needed to prove himself and of course Jobs was famous for his almost obsessive impulse control and self-discipline actually a student of mine that yellow CEO really recently said to me you know who's an even better example of the triple package than Steve Jobs Jon Snow of the game of throats if you think about this okay the son of Ned Stark Lord of the North Jon Snow was raised in castles and born into superior status but he's also considered a bastard which means he's constantly struggling with feelings of inadequacy and insecurity so much to prove and if you've seen the show you know that Jon Snow has enormous self-control except maybe when he's in a cave with a wildling named Ygritte joking aside the triple package explains success of many kinds not just business success but political success for example now it's not surprising that political leaders leaders tend to have big egos of course but what you may find surprising is that Harvard researchers who recently did a study history's most prominent leaders found that a stunning an extraordinary percentage of these leaders suffered extreme adversity loss or some other form of insecurity in childhood from extreme poverty to losing one or both parents to some kind of disability this surprising fact has actually been observed and noted for a hundred years but it's always been a kind of mystery the triple package explains it it's this childhood insecurity in rare combination with a sense of superiority or exceptionalism that creates drive and success and if you look at their stories you will see exactly this combination in so many leaders from Napoleon to Winston Churchill to Franklin Roosevelt to Mao Zedong Barack Obama is another classic triple package leader President Obama credits his mother with making him feel exceptional that he was destined for greatness she actually said you can be President of the United States he also credits her for instilling him with enormous discipline she used to make him get up at 5 in the morning every day to study but President Obama has also spoken very very openly about the discrimination that he has suffered as an african-american even after he graduated from Harvard Law School and was a successful lawyer he remembers someone mistaken him for being a servant and asking him to pour coffee you also see the triple package in sports and athletics practically every great Olympian athlete exhibits the triple package qualities consider of a local hero the legendary finished runner Paavo Nurmi who earned his nickname I don't need to tell you who earned his nickname the flying Finn after weight winning nine Olympic gold medals and shattering 22 World Records born into bitter poverty Nurmi lost his father as a boy and he would later himself suggest that the hardship and insecurity of his childhood is part of what spurred his intense drive at the same time Nurmi was extremely confident and at a deep sense of his own superior ability and mind and he was famous for his uncompromising almost frightening self discipline so so far we've been talking about the triple package in individuals and I'm guessing from this crowd that many people in this audience will recognize these three qualities in your own success stories but the triple package also applies at the group level so it turns out that in the United States and in Europe as well certain groups are instilling the triple package qualities in their members in their children more than the rest of the country and these groups are disproportionately successful at least in terms of conventional measures of success like income educational and professional attainment obviously there are infinitely many ways to live a good and virtuous and by all accounts successful life but just looking at these conventional measures the statistics are quite stunning for example Jewish Americans although just 1.7 percent of the US population make up a third of the US Supreme Court a third of America's Nobel Prize winners forty percent of America's top earning CEOs and fifty percent of nonfiction Pulitzer Prize winners or Nigerian Americans I'm guessing this is a group you may not be very familiar with but they make up less than 1% of America's black population but over 25% of Harvard Business School's black students Mormons in America also just 1 to 2 percent of the population tiny but extremely disproportionately successful in politics and represented in corporate America including the amazing ed catmull president of Walt Disney and co-founder of Pixar we'll be speaking later this afternoon asian-americans again the statistics are quite jarring although just 5% of America's population they make up nearly 20% of the undergraduates at Ivy League colleges like Harvard Yale and Princeton they represent about 50% of the students in the nation's top music conservatories and a stunning 100 percent of the of the recent Spelling Bee competition National Spelling Bee competitions have all been Indian Americans and by the way you may be thinking it's all about parental education this is interesting many of these Asian high achievers are the children of poor uneducated sometimes illiterate parents so what explains this why are some groups outperforming the rest of the country well first we review the evidence and we show that group success cannot be explained by race skin color parental wealth or background or IQ in fact when it comes to IQ one of the most striking findings in our book is the phenomenon of generational decline groups rise and fall in a very predictable way this is the immigrant story actually so take asian-americans the second generation that is children of Asian immigrants are extraordinarily successful their college admission scores are 140 points above the national average but get this third-generation Asian Americans that is the grandchildren of the immigrants they perform no better academically than the rest of the country so this shows that it's not genetics that produces Asian success Asians are not naturally good at school rather it has to do with something in the culture so work ethic that these immigrants are instilling and creating in their families it has to do with attitudes mindsets and behaviors and when we did a close study of the most successful groups in America today we found a remarkable pattern they all had the triple package they all had a deep sense of group exceptionality but of course just feeling like you're so exceptional is hardly a recipe for success on the contrary that's more likely to lead to arrogance and laziness and complacency what is so striking is that virtually all of America's most successful groups are Outsiders in one way or another giving them a sense of insecurity some have long histories of persecution and many are immigrant groups and of course to be an immigrant is almost by definition to be insecure you're the ones that don't fit in often you're afraid for your very survival you're worried about social acceptance all of which gives you a hunger to strive and succeed finally impulse control all of America's most successful groups tend to have a very different view about childhood they tend to be much tougher on their children when they're very young specifically to impose practices of discipline and impulse control on their children at a much earlier age than the rest of the country so for example one fascinating recent study showed that Chinese American preschoolers these are kids between the ages of four and six that are the children of Chinese immigrants they spent an average of one hour a day on a focused activity which is defined as something like reading or sitting and drawing and doing a puzzle as compared to six minutes a day for Western Americans so there really are cultural differences but I would like to return now to business what does all this mean for you guys well potentially a lot the triple package can be as important for running a successful business as it is for becoming a world-famous athlete succeeding in a new country or getting into college if this audience is anything like last year's a quarter of your companies are small maybe less than 10 employees and half of you are under 50 employees all of that means that you guys have to be smart you have to survive in industries with much bigger players than yourselves you have to be fighters and hustlers you have to do more with less and you have to beat the odds and that's where the triple package can be helpful so let's start with the superiority complex so we all hear a lot about corporate mission these days it's one of those bugs buzzwords why is that so important if you think about it it's all about instilling a sense of exceptionalism in your employees making it a feel that they are part of something special and important and Facebook is famous for this part of Facebook's magic is getting its employees to feel that it's not just quote some measly social network but a dream of a different human experience Facebook's employees are well known for working devotedly around the clock as the business guru simon Sinek has said if you hire people because they can do a job they'll work for your money but if you hire people who believe what you believe they'll work for you with blood sweat and tears and interestingly one way of cultivating a sense of business exceptionalism is by emphasizing good morals good values and here are just a few nordic examples that I found so f-secure although we're now a world leader in security we've never lost the values we were established on integrity transparency and trustworthiness or ethical business conduct is a fundamental aspect of nor Diaz corporate culture and I would say that that's probably the best kind of superiority complex to have a sense of exceptionalism rooted in hard work and humility and perseverance honesty you know and an integrity but even with a mission tied to moral principle there was always a danger in superiority that is the whole point of the triple package and the key here is what Jack Welch who was CEO of General Electric for 20 years and I guess a speaker here a few years ago the key is what he said he said that there is a fine line between arrogance and self-confidence legitimate self-confidence is a winner arrogance is a killer and once again this is where a little insecurity comes in you don't want a corporate culture that is smug or complacent on the contrary you want your employees but also your managers and your leadership as Gary Vee was saying yesterday you want everyone in the firm to want to do better constantly to want to improve to be open to change to feel that they're not necessarily good enough yet mark parker CEO of Nike put it well he said we have a culture where we are incredibly self-critical we don't get comfortable with our success in fact some of the most successful firms in the world actually openly look for insecurity in the people they hire McKinsey for example um actually looks for what they call insecure overachievers um and they specifically recruit people who fit that profile that is people who may not come from the fanciest families or fanciest backgrounds or schools but who they think are driven by a desire for status and a fear of failure and many say that this is what Goldman Sachs actually looks for as well why because a little insecurity is what propels you forward firms that constantly ask what they did wrong and what they can do better are the ones that succeed another way that insecurity can be constructive especially relevant for many of you small business leaders is by harnessing a kind of underdog mentality a feeling like you know we're a little insecure because we're smaller but we can work harder and we have good values and we have a powerful sense of who we are Plus everybody tends to underestimate us and we're going to show everybody in here I was very struck by some words by Al fren this is actually I just fits the triple package perfectly in a fascinating essay on creativity he writes the history of Finland has been a history of David fighting Goliath total underdog mentality also when Finn's talk of Finnish history they talk of survival and beating the odds perseverance standing unbowed despite everything this the idea of a specific Finnish Ness one forged in ice and fire I found that so moving and powerful and it's very triple packaged all the way let me turn now to the final leg yeah let me turn now to the final leg of the triple package impulse control which brings me to something I'm sure you're all familiar with the famous marshmallow test so as I'm sure you know these are these groundbreaking studies that came out of Stanford starting in the 1970s and what they did is they took a whole bunch of three to five-year-olds I think 600 of them ages 3 to 5 and they put them in the room and they asked these children they said you could either have one marshmallow now or you can wait 15 minutes and you can have two marshmallows well they ended up tracking these children over 20 years and what they found was incredibly remarkable it turns out that the kids who waited for the second marshmallow who were able to defer gratification were wildly more successful along every possible dimension not just income and education and corporate success but amazingly better health of happier marriages happier family lives and recent studies for example Angela Duckworth's coming out of a pen have confirmed that impulse control or grit is better for predicting success than IQ or innate talent now how does this translate to business success well to begin with impulse control has to start at the top as everything else and just Bezos of jean is a great example of this for five years Bezos famously didn't take a penny of profits out reinvesting everything back into the company obviously that strategy is not always going to be possible for everyone but it illustrates the bigger point to have a successful business you can't just look at the present you have to invest in the future in developing new products in staying ahead of the curve as garyvee you know told us all yesterday and that in turn means taking risks experimenting sometimes failing recovering picking yourself up and trying again all of which requires patience sometimes some short-term pain and sacrifice absorbing some hits basically the opposite of instant gratification and as another finished company supercell puts it taking risks means that you'll fail more often than you'll succeed but you're looking it's another form of deferring gratification but impulse control is important at another level to the employee level especially in this age of technological distraction impulse control is the secret sauce of productivity emails Twitter texting snapchat Instagram these are all terrible they're fun but they're terrible for concentration and focus but here is the good news it turns out that impulse control can be cultivated and strengthened with training and more and more businesses in the United States are adopting techniques specifically designed to improve impulse control in the workplace the Pomodoro Technique for example trains people to focus on just one task for 25 minutes straight with no interruption and then you could take a five-minute break to relax and recharge followed by another 25 minutes sort of concentrated interval and the Harvard Business Review recently showed that these kinds of techniques dramatically increased workplace productivity and again these are very clear findings with training people can strikingly improve their impulse control and self disciplined I think Donald Trump needs a crash course uh so I I've tried to show today that the triple package can be a potent force for success in individuals in businesses and in groups and Nations but I'd like to end on a more personal note I look around at this incredibly impressive audience and I know that I don't need to tell this crowd that drive and ambition and business success can often come at a price a heavy price we all know highly ambitious driven people who are miserable who live joyous lives it may be motivating but this feeling of not being good enough yet of needing to work harder of always trying to achieve more and more and to prove yourself that can be extremely unpleasant and to bring things full circle I worry about this all the time with my own two daughters I can't believe it they were just infants when I started writing a you know in my book but they are now 20 and 23 and they're both very thriving successful fun girls I'm incredibly proud of them but I've learned that we are never off the hook as a parent the oldest one is actually at Yale Law School she came back where I teach and the younger is in college and they'll often call me with this or that problem and I'm even now I'm always asking myself when they ask me something am i being strong and holding them to a high standard like my own parents did or am I just being too critical am i inspiring them and conveying that I believe in them or am I just putting too much pressure on them am i giving them a good example of how to live a happy and meaningful life and I think there are no easy answers it's always an ongoing struggle to find that right balance and what I want to do is I want to end not with my own words but actually with my oldest daughter Sofia's so at the height of the firestorm it was horrible I was the internet said I was the worst mother in history but we were called the most notorious household in the Western Hemisphere and at that point my oldest daughter wanted to publish something in the New York Post an op-ed defending me and I said no don't go out there don't go to the media don't but she did it anyway and I actually think it turned the tide let me sure about the whole thing yourself and so I'm going to read the opening and the end to you it's actually very funny she's very funny so it opens dear Tiger mom you've been criticized a lot since you published your memoir one problem is that some people just don't get your humor they think you're serious about all this and they assume Lulu and I are oppressed by our evil mother that is so not true every other Thursday you take off our chains and let us play math games in the basement that's a joke they they don't have changed but skipping to the end of the piece she writes and I think relevant for the talk today so what does it really mean to live life to its fullest maybe striving to win a Nobel Prize and going skydiving are just two sides of the same coin to me she writes it's not about achievement or self gratification it's about knowing that you've pushed yourself body and mind to the limits of your own potential you feel it when you're sprint and when the piano piece that you've practiced for hours finally comes to life beneath your fingertips you feel it when you encounter a life-changing idea and when you do something on your own you never thought you could if I died tomorrow I would die feeling I've lived my whole life at a hundred and ten percent the ability to sacrifice and thank you the ability to sacrifice and defer gratification is of course important but what I've come to see the hard way is even more important is don't forget to let yourself experience joy once in a while don't always be delaying so much gratification and looking so far in the future that you miss what makes life worth living it's been a wonderful honor addressing you you've been an amazing audience and thank you all so much

Channel: Nordic Business Forum

Views: 11,503

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Keywords: nbf, nordic, business, forum, nordic business forum, Listenable, public speaking, seminars, personal development

Id: Gt5nvSmQl3s

Length: 36min 57sec (2217 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 10 2017