The curmudgeon's guide to getting ahead

good afternoon my name is Carlin Bowman and I'm a senior fellow here at AEI and I'm very happy to welcome all of you to this book forum on Charles Murray's wonderful new book the curmudgeons guide to getting ahead the do's and don'ts of write behavior tough thinking clear writing and living a good life Charles has been a very important part of AI for almost a quarter century and in 2009 he received the Institute's highest honor the Irving Kristol award he gave his first Bradley lecture here in 1994 and in it he took he looked at the argument that he and the late Richard Herrnstein made in the bell curve his next Bradley lecture explored some of the themes in his book human accomplishment and elegant overview of progress in the arts and sciences he spoke about his 2006 book in our hands a radical new approach to social policy that would eliminate all transfer programs and give people over age 21 an annual cash grant a 2008 Bradley lecture looked at the mess our educational system has become and asked fundamental questions about what is education for he has spoken in many forums here about his book coming apart a detailed examination of how America is separating along class lines and the consequences of that divide a marvelous AEI pamphlet from our values and capitalism series titled American exceptionalism and experimented history made its appearance in 2013 all of these works have made Charles Murray the preeminent social thinker of our time he is also one of the most wide-ranging scholars here as you can tell from the titles that I've read and that brings me to the curmudgeons guide Charles I wish I had had this book in my 20s it is an invaluable guide to navigating those difficult ages it's wonderful to have islands of certainty when when plunges into the sea of professional work and this guide provides them the book began is a series of blog posts about grammar and usage for the AI staff written by AI editors Christie Sadler and Hillary Waterman and other volunteers Charles soon became a regular contributor offering tips and tutelage the book that resulted consists of four sections the first on the presentation of oneself in the workplace the second on thinking and writing will the third on the formation of who you are and the final section on the pursuit of happiness it's not an etiquette book in the old-fashioned sense but a guide to behavior and it would make a great gift for new graduates I have only one quarrel with the book Charles I work very closely with you for more than 20 years and I've never thought of you as a curmudgeon only as a courageous companionable and always compelling colleague I give you charles Murray Thank You Carolyn and you know after all the times I have stood at this podium in this room I don't think I've ever taken the time to say a few words about Carlin Bowman she's my boss she's a really good boss which is to say she lets me do whatever I want most of the time unless it cost too much in which you might put the rain stone she has been an absolutely integral part of what not only the work that a e.i does but the spirit that animates AEI and it's been a great privilege to work with you but these years also Carlin however bears responsibility for the cover curmudgeons guide it was garland who said to me after I'd put in a number of the tips on the intranet why don't you make a book out of this so I did and and in doing so I ended up writing some new tips I ended up reorganizing them into the four sections that she that she mentioned but that gives a lot more structure to the book than the book originally had originally it was a chance to vent there are a few things that really irritate me as is true of all grumpy old man I am one and I had a chance to say what those were for example tip number three I think it is says excise the word like from your spoken English you know like if you every third word like say like such-and-such don't do that anymore because even though you may have an IQ of 140 and have really brilliant things to tell the world I can't stay in a conversation with you my mind is whirling all the time saying well this person stopped saying like all the time so I was having a great time saying those kinds of things which were more on the order of satisfying myself than being helpful to my reader but as time went on I found myself starting to talk about some more important things one of them for example I came out in a forum at AEI on the internet which is not the same formats in the book in the internet version I pointed out where I first got the idea it was when I was 11 years old and I was delivering papers on my morning paper of I can remember exactly what house I was in front of as I was thinking of this and I said to myself you know if you don't start your career until you're 30 and you don't retire until you're 65 that gives you 35 years that's enough you don't have to start your career at 20 you can spend your 20s doing other kinds of things there are not many epiphanies that you have at 11 years old that you still have in your 71 okay but that's that was an example of one which stuck with me and I would preach it over the dining room table at our home to all four of our children and actually all four of them followed the advice pretty much and that's now in the book and I think it speaks to some of the important ways in which you can get through this treacherous transition between the time you graduate from college and the time you're well established in your career and so as time went on the tips became more and more serious taking on more and more important topics and I will go through some of those but I have to say this two things first I had more fun doing this just plain old fun than an either book I can remember for a very long time it's not the book that when I go to my grave will give me the most satisfaction you know something like the bell curve or coming apart or human accomplishment we're long intense and and I take great satisfaction in those this was more like a bowl of great hot buttered popcorn putting this book together I have also been asked occasionally is this an attempt to to diss the Millennials are you are you going to complain about the Millennials the answer to that question is not really I think the Millennials have come of age at a time when they have lived deprived childhoods in many cases namely they have been the children of baby boomers and baby boomers have raised them in ways which unfortunately have inculcated in them some of the things baby boomers did themselves that that were not the best possible things they could have done rather it is it is a chance to talk to Millennials since I have two Millennials as children about how they can avoid some of the mistakes that I made and maybe in a few cases take advantage of some of the things that went right I'm going to run through some of the the most important ones in my mind I'm going to try to restrict the amount of time I spend to a little bit shorter time than I would ordinarily take in a lecture like this because look everybody in this room is either in my target audience or is a parent just about there are a few of you in the middle but there are great many who fit into one of those two realms meaning all of you have opinions on the kinds of things I'm saying so when we finish the presentation there is no stricture on please formulate your questions as questions this can be a discussion among all of us the first part of the book which is a presentation of self in the workplace has several of the kinds of pet peeves I have but which are important for people just coming in the workplace to know because you can laugh all you want at how silly these prejudices are as in the case of not liking the word like used as a verbal tic but if the people who are giving you a job interview or the people who are writing your performance reviews share these things it can be a real problem for you in getting ahead so in the first section there are other tips on such as for example regarding tattoos and piercings and hair of a color not known to nature don't don't don't don't don't especially try to reason with us don't tell us that tattoos are a new art form to us we curmudgeons that's like saying that pictures of Elvis on dinner plates are an art form and furthermore we think that every time we see a tattoo what's that going to look like when that person turned 60 and and that bothers us as well similarly work or piercings I understand that women have pierced their ears for millennia that so they can put beautiful earrings in their ears and adorn themselves it has nothing to do with just punching a hole in yourself there is no way in our view that a piercing can be anything other than disfigurement another one on that same score is stop reaching out and sharing for heaven's sakes look if if you confide to your work mate that you have Tourette syndrome and that accounts for some of your weird behavior that's sharing all right but just saying that you're telling somebody something that's not sharing that's telling somebody something similarly reaching out if your work mate is troubled and you want to take him out for a chance to confide that's reaching out you want to go have a drink with him that's just asking to go have a drink with you it's not it's not reaching out and there are a variety of other things stop using the word impact as a verb or excuse me as especially as not just a verb but but to impact something in that sense and be there for you somebody would tell me what be there for you means I would like to hear it as far as I can tell it's a meaningless pretend commitment whereby you try to profess some sort of important relationship with another person without getting specific these kinds of tips are the ones that give the book its title curmudgeons guide oh and off by the way data this isn't really something that's a big deal to anybody but me but the nice thing about writing a book like this who cares if it's only a big deal to me I can put it in there stop using data as if it were singular and associated with a singular noun and this is idiosyncratic perhaps it's data not data I know that the dictionary will tell you that it can be pronounced either way I know that you will hear news anchor people call it data those of us who deal professionally with data call it data and you should too that's that's my view of that there are a few in that section that are substantive the very first tip in the whole book is don't suck up I know the sucking up has been widely touted as a way that not only you can get ahead but is necessary to get ahead if you're talking about politics there's something to be said for that I mean sucking up is part of the politicians job description essentially but if you are working in other kinds of organizations I don't know about the entertainment industry either but but in most kinds of organizations I think it's probably a bad idea for a couple of reasons first is if you are run if you're in an organization that is run by really good people in my experience the highly successful people and the places I've worked have been self-confident they're perfectly aware of being adults they're perfectly aware that they're good at what they do and they don't need to be stroked and furthermore they will detect sucking up they will know what's happening they are not going to respect you for it on the contrary they're going to downgrade you for it the second reason not to suck up is it's it's just a terrible way to spend your work life it's no fun ingratiating yourself with someone even though you don't really mean it your life your vocational life is just about them it's one of the two most important aspects of your life the other having to do with family it and also faith I guess the one of the three most important and to be in a place where you are spending your time pretending is not a good way to spend your life if you if you are in fact in an organization or sucking up works quit go get another job there are other organizations out there you can work for where you won't have to do it and you're going to have lots more fun the second really I think important thing and this is one I really wish I'd known when I was 22 23 years old has to do with standing out so that you're noticed and get promoted and could make a career when I was thinking about this at that age I would think of going into a large organization and here I'd be one of these anonymous many many people at the bottom and I'd really need a break in order for anybody to notice me if you're at the top of that organization looking down it looks completely different you don't have all of these wonderful employees that you just can't pick among what you really yearn for is somebody who comes into work every day on time works hard is cheerful and a good to the colleague to the other people there and when the job isn't done at five o'clock in the afternoon person stays there until it is done doesn't make a big deal out of it doesn't brag about it doesn't moan and groan about not having a life just gets the work done sounds pretty simple a whole lot of employers will tell you exactly what I'm saying to you it's hard to find people who behave like that if you work as hard as you can you'll you'll be noticed because you don't have very many other people who are doing that standing out is not nearly as hard as you think I'm going to skip over the tips in the one involving writing I mean I write professionally that's what I do for a living and like anybody who has a craft that they love I loved the chance to lay out of the way I look at the process of writing and some of the idiosyncrasies that I think people ought to take into account but that kind of thing is rather hard to summarize in a presentation like this I hope some of you who get the book will read that because they're actually some of my favorite tips because my heart's blood is in the in some of the some of the aspects of how to write in the third part the formation of who you are here we get to a variety of issues I think we're the Millennials have been victims of deprived childhoods in the following sense they are encouraged to do things by their parents in a lot of situations at that age that transition from college to adulthood which are not good and they have also been brought to that stage in many instances without the kind of background that they need to know who they are let me give you a couple of specific examples the first of these is the phenomenon that we see now of people living at home after they graduate from college and it is said that this happens because you have a bad job market they can't get jobs for value they can support themselves well it depends what we're talking about if we're talking about a young person who has a $150,000 loan to pay back for his education I can understand why living at home and saving that rent and so forth so you can start to pay back the loan I can I can understand those kinds of constraints but let's consider the young person who has grown up in an upper-middle class household parents may not be really terribly but they've been able to pay for the college education there's no student loan debt and you have now graduated from college you gotta jump out of the nest even if your parents for the most loving of reasons say no no that's okay you can stay with us you're 22 or 23 for heaven's sakes the great thing about being 22 or 23 is to start your life so jump out of the nest even if they're willing to let you stay in and just figure you'll probably learn how to fly before you hit the ground not well perhaps but you'll be flying don't tell me that you can't get a job you can get a job it may be as a barista maybe for 10 bucks an hour you can find a job I can't live on ten bucks an hour I can't read it yeah you can you can't do that in midtown Manhattan that's true you better off working someplace where the cost of living is a little bit less and you won't be living in grand style but you can get together with one or two friends and share the rent you can do a variety of things you can live fine but you can't do probably is live the standard of living to which you have become accustomed with your parents that's irrelevant it's time to get out on your own the second thing that Millennials I think have a special kind of problem with Millennials from upper-middle class homes who've had patient and understanding parents they've had patient and understanding teachers they've gone to colleges which are oftentimes elite colleges but which in which the professor's have wanted to be your buddies when the paper wasn't turned in exactly on time the fact that was a little bit late didn't make any difference and you have lots of res staff in the college that are tending to your every emotional need a college has in many respects instead of being a halfway house between adolescence and adulthood has in recent decades become an institution designed to prolong adolescence it's not your fault that's the way colleges are run these days but it leaves you with a problem another thing that leaves you with a problem is that if you have come all the way through college and you've never held a real job you didn't deliver papers when you were 8 years old you didn't babysit when you were 12 or 13 or 14 15 you didn't clerk at a store you didn't flip burgers you didn't work construction in the summers you didn't wake tables you got internships affirmative action for the rich things from which you cannot get fired okay uh you came to AEI and met all the wonderful people to e aí or he went to Brookings he went to the Museum of Modern Art that's not a job and so you find yourself in a job and you've never held one before you have never been in a supervisor subordinate relationship you have never had a situation where somebody was really gruff to you where they peremptorily told you to do something they didn't say please when he didn't they didn't say thank you oh when you didn't get the work in on time they didn't listen to the way the dog really did eat your homework instead they were unhappy because the work wasn't done and they didn't care why it wasn't done in some cases you will in fact be in a job that has a bad boss a boss who has made unreasonable demands who has not given sufficient time to get the work done who has been imprecise and giving directions and and you hadn't you had good reason not to know how to yeah there is such a thing as bad bosses and it's important to recognize them and recognize it's their fault but if you've never held a job before and you're unhappy with your boss you have to look deep within your soul and ask yourself whether you were a victim or whether you are a self-absorbed naive and and this gets to the question of being a hothouse flower um you can be absolutely sure that over the course of your life you are going to be tested you are going to run into situations where things get very bad and very hard and it's going to be pretty miserable they're going to be under a great deal of stress that is going to happen at that time you really need resilience as part of your practice and the same way you practice the violin or the piano in the same way you would practice a sport you need to live your life at a relatively young age so that you build up your resilience your ability to bounce back I mean the dictionary definition of resilience is this ability to be compressed and then to bounce back um it's quite possible if you've grown up in a certain kind of environment these days that you come to the age of 22 with the resilience of a baccarat champagne flute as opposed to a Super Bowl and what you have to do again it's not your fault in many cases it's just the way you've been raised so you have to actively look for ways in which you can build up your resilience and that means putting yourself in situations which take you way out of your comfort zone and you have to do that yourself how can you do it I offer two alternatives in the book I think the one I recommend the most emphatically is to join the military and in many cases I think that ought to be done before you go to college rather than after my wife formerly was a teacher at Rutgers where they had lots of working-class kids who were paying their own way she was teaching English literature so it's not as if she was teaching a practical vocational course but about I don't mean to wound you when I say that Kathryn uh but but she remarked that the students who were in that course who were back from the military they were older for one thing they were more mature they were more focused they knew why they were in that course as she also remarks Henry James wasn't writing for 19 years old 19 year olds and they weren't 19 years old anymore they they were much a better able to take in the matter so joining the Armed Forces is a really good way to do it and if you think that doesn't fit in with your career plans that it's going to delay you and the rest of that I'll come back to that just a second but for right now I'm saying you can be guaranteed one thing you will be put through situations that stress you even if you don't have to go to a combat zone and if you do have to go to a combat zone you will really be put in situations that stress you and at the end of that process you will have a whole lot of resilience another thing you can do and this is a the course I took the course I recommend for others is is buy a one-way airplane ticket to some interesting place in the world that you want to get to no it has to be an alien place Paris and London are out you can't choose those as the place you go go to Constantinople go to Addis a bit but go to Bangkok I buy a one-way ticket you get off the plane you have a couple of thousand bucks to tide you over while you find a job and then you find a job any job you stay there you live there you don't live exclusively in the expat community to you you you learn the language you become part of the culture and stay there for three years long enough that you were no longer a tourist but somebody who has put yourself in a completely alien situation and come to know that world and be comfortable in that world I did that with Thailand I went there at the age of 22 came back at the age of 28 and I grew up in those years and I would not trade those years for anything they did not in many ways whereas if they weren't as not an efficient use of my time in moving my career ahead but they made me to a great extent what I subsequently became and that brings me to another aspect of putting yourself in situations where you use your twenties to figure out who you are and that goes to a phenomenon I'm so very often where where somebody is twenty two thinks that that puts them your reparable behind you know their friends are going to go to law school and they're going to be out getting on the partner track at the age of 25 or 26 if I don't go back to law school until I'm 28 you know I'll be out and when I'm 30 31 I'll never catch up well one reason that's not such an impressive argument is one of the virtues of staying out is that maybe you'll understand you don't really want to be a lawyer maybe you'll understand during that time out that there's a whole bunch of other things that you love doing that that constitute your vocation which is one of the most important discoveries you can make another aspect of it is this that time you spend before you start your career is not wasted I just got done saying that my time in Thailand was not used as useful as it could have been I'll tell you something it did happen during Thailand where I had a go it was that I had a couple of epiphanies that shaped the intellectual content of my entire body of writing if you go to a book called in pursuit and you read the introduction I describe it explicitly the kinds of things I learned in Thai villages that were absolutely formative in my way of looking at the world so you haven't wasted your time you will bring to whatever your career is a depth of understanding the resilience as well that will enrich whatever career you went into the last part of the book is called on the pursuit of happiness and then where we really get into the big things here's a problem with the pursuit of happiness on one level it's really simple to me I've been published saying this in many of my my works there are essentially four domains within which human beings achieve deep and lasting justified satisfaction with life as a whole which is a good Aristotelian definition of happiness and those four four domains are family and faith and community and vocation and my argument has always been you don't have to be deeply embedded in all four of those domains there are happy atheists and there are happy single people but you better be engaged in at least two or three of them because that's all there is if you were talking about the things that count in life they exist within those four areas here's the problem in writing a book like curmudgeon skyed how do you go through the importance of family faith vocation and community without just having a bunch of platitudes using a bunch of cliches because the fact is most of the clichés are true I found this problem most obvious one I was trying to write a tip about fame and fortune and the ways in which you have to realize at some point in your life that these are truly trivial to a life well-lived it's really hard to say that to my target audience because part of the definition of my target audience is not just that they're twenty-two or twenty-three not just that they're graduating from college it also is that they're smart and ambitious and if you're smart and ambitious in your early 20s trying to tell you not to seek fame and fortune I don't know what the metaphor is it's really hard to convince you of that because that's a natural part of being smart and ambitious at that point in your life I will tell you what my solution was whether it worked or not I don't know but my solution was to say okay you aren't going to believe this when you're in your 20s and 30s that's fine that's healthy go for it it's not until you're in your 40s that you need to rethink it and and I use two episodes that affected me very importantly one was that there was a profile of David Geffen the billionaire music producer many years ago 1980s and he was being interviewed and he said with his very sad smile on his face show me someone who thinks money buys happiness and I'll show you someone who's never had a lot of money it's the same thought as money won't buy happiness but money won't buy happiness goes through your head without ever interacting with any brain cells whatsoever watching him say that a man who obviously had had a lot of money who knew what he was talking about at home with me the wisest thing that I have read about this was written by David Brooks in his recent book the social animal where David Brooks said you know one of his characters in the book he had a fictional character in his book had a very successful career she'd been CEO she'd been a presidential assistant she had been Secretary of Commerce and he was saying at the end of her life she realized that none of those things brought her happiness what they did do was relieved her of ambition anxiety this this anxiety we have when we're pursuing fame and fortune of will we or what we achieve it well it does do that fame and fortune do relieve and ambition anxiety what you need to do if you've hit 40 years old and you have a vocation you love you're raising a couple of terrific kids you're married to your soul mate you understand you're never going to be rich or famous at that point you've got to put aside the ambition Society and realize how trivial fame and fortune are that's how I tried to do in the book I will be very curious to find out whether it has any impact or not I did the same things with with talking about marriage I did the same thing with talking about religion and I guess I will conclude by referring to that I'm in a peculiar position of first being an agnostic I am genuinely an agnostic in that I do not have any kind of firmly held faith but also over the course of the last 20 years realizing that it's important to take religion seriously the observation here is that for the last 50 or 60 years bright young college students have been systematically socialized to be atheists as as intensely as they used to be socialized to be devout when you get to a good college campus when it's a good selective college and you're around other bright kids and and a renowned faculty it's in the air that smart people don't believe that stuff anymore religion is for you know the evangelicals and so forth but smart people don't don't even take don't even think about it and that's that's the whole thing they don't even think about it because it's so obviously stupid and so it's not a case that they have read Aquinas and said no I think he's wrong they've never read Aquinas they identify religion with the sunday-school stories that they were taught when they were seven or eight years old they sure don't believe those anymore and so this don't think about it my wife's experience when she became in her late 30s after the birth of our first child a Quaker and as in the years since then become an increasingly serious Quaker have given me a chance to watch as religion is taken seriously and it has led me to conclude a couple of things that I tried to communicate to my readers one of these is that it's not a road to Damascus experience to get inside the wisdom of one of the great religious traditions requires work it requires as much intellectual effort as getting a law degree does second thing is that the the more you are exposed to people who have taken religion seriously the harder it is to say that there's nothing there that there is in on people who who are wise in the ways of religion a a kind of disquieting ly confident sense of underlying reality behind the world's great religious traditions that you are unable to perceive and a third thing is that it's really important that insofar as faith is one of the major sources of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole you had better give it your best shot so that it's okay to be an atheist or an agnostic don't be an unreflective atheist or agnostic it is a long long way from telling my target audience to stop using the word like to getting into issues of theology and that shows the range of issues which I took on in the book I rescued myself at the end from being too somber by having as my last tip watch Groundhog Day repeatedly as to why I gave that tip well if you're curious I can tell you in the qat it was great fun Carlin I'm glad you told me to make a book out of it but whatever happens you bear the responsibility thank you very much we have quite a bit of time to yeah and we'll have uh are we having microphones coming around well thank you so much I've heard you so many times here and you're always excellent I guess I wanted to focus on the community part and I think like you have been influenced by Iran somewhat and I wanted to know is there in your mind a value judgment that needs to be made when you're making a decision as to whether help someone or give money to charity or is it simply based on need well Aristotle's definition of justice um involves two each according to you should treat each person according to what they deserve or you should treat each person according to the circumstance if exerting stances so in that sense I think there's always a value judgment to be made but that gets to the distinction between being nice and being good which by the way is a one of the tips in the book being nice is just when you give money to the guy on the street who's got his hand out of because right here right now it does good I've not used me it's a nice thing to do Aristotle emphasized the importance of phronesis as of one of the cardinal virtues for nice is being practical wisdom the ability to look ahead at the long-term consequences of decisions that phronesis is absolutely indispensable as one of the cardinal virtues because you cannot be good you cannot be confident that you are acting in ways the benefits your fellow human beings unless you have considered long-term consequences so I would say that that all acts of charity and all acts period when you are trying to do good in the world depend on again a case of hard work in trying to understand how is this ultimately going to affect things you have a hand right here on the aisle by the way the the 20-somethings in the room should not feel shy about coming after me on anything hi garrison editor with the James Wilson Institute Thank You dr. Murray um I wanted to ask you if you've ever heard the old saw that parents want not what's best for us but want what's safe for us in terms of Ella's right in terms of choosing a vocation or a career and I was hoping you might be able to elaborate on that sort of to having those two different views if you're you know in your 20s having your parents guy sort of guiding you in water action versus you having maybe not the clearest idea of what you want to do but you won't you don't necessarily see the wisdom in playing it safe at that at that point yeah there's there's a there's a huge tension every parent in the room knows this that you're always worried about your kids being safe and and and that is what being a parent is all about however this is one reason why it's really helpful to have both a mom and a dad in the house because every time I open my mouth about gender roles I can get myself in trouble recently but here we go here we go generally speaking on average the mother wants that child to be safe period and the dad is usually a little bit more willing to say well let's you know let him climb the tree he can't hurt himself that bad you know and and and the same goes for life decision if the child wants to move back into the home it's usually the mom who says well of course I'd be great to have him it's a dead thing you know maybe it maybe that's not a good idea you need that tension but most of all the responsibility falls on the child you're out of college you have passed is a rite of passage you are on your way to being a grown-up and your parents will at this point want you to do things that are safe for you that you may say to them I love you very much and I'll be as careful as I can but I got to grow up it's on you to do that out the back of the room there yep is coming over there it is thank you thank you so much thank you very much I'm curious as could you give us some examples of how you've tried to take religion seriously other than an intellect possibly an intellectual dive in and also just what you said about Bernice's I'm very fascinated in the differences in how the liberal brain works in the conservative brain and David Horowitz said I'm not sure when that one of the trouble sort of like a Reagan thing the trouble with liberals is they don't really see consequences often they don't see the bigger picture the wider canvas and I just was wondering whether you could comment on that also okay we started about how do how do somebody like me take religion seriously for one thing I have for 20 years tended to a Quaker meeting not as regularly as I should but have attended with with my wife and children another thing that I do is I read a lot there are lots in the books in the house that most of which have been bought by my wife but a whole bunch of which look interesting to me and so I read and I also contemplate these things so a great deal of what goes on in this process is internal what I have not yet done is focus as much as I should and I am very conscious of the fact that that is should be one of my chief priorities in the years ahead and I mean that very seriously as far as the liberal conservative thing I'm certainly on record with my criticisms of the 1960s liberalism and the social engineering and the ways in which we change well the way I put it in losing ground goes exactly to your point we changed the rules of the game for poor young people in the 1960s in ways that gave them incentives to behave in the short-term ways that were absolutely destructive in the long term so in that sense we're on the same page with this book well I can't tell you how sick I am of the partisan divide um and it'll always be there but there are millions of people who vote for Democratic candidates who feel exactly the same way about their kids and what is good for their children as I do who face the same problems as parents I do there are millions of my target audience who are on the other side of the political fence from me but the kinds of things I'm saying apply independent of politics so as much as I could well I think I did a pretty good job certainly there's no overt politics anywhere in the book it is fairly traditional advice in a lot of cases and so in that sense it's philosophically conservative not in a political sense but in a social sense but I am more and more interested in trying to find ways that I can do my work in which I don't have to confine myself to one half of the political spectrum and let's just go up yes though lady in green right there and then we'll go over to the middle of the last row why Thailand well I asked the psychologist in Peace Corps training I was in Peace Corps I said to him you know I went from Newton Iowa to Harvard which is about as far from Newton Iowa as I could get an on want to go to Southeast Asia which is far away from Harvard as I can get you know what what does this say about me and he said it says you have a high need for change and I guess that that's probably that's it I did not know anything about Thailand I wanted to go to exotic places and do exotic things and the Peace Corps seemed like a good vehicle to do it the luck of the draw landed me in one of the most wonderful countries on earth I'm sure the people who go to the Sudan love the sedan - but Thailand in many ways is more fun and and I was lucky in that regard now the middle of the last room I'm just wondering can young people take your advice not to seek fame and fortune seriously now you're obviously not David effing but you've you know your books have been bestsellers I know if a e I advertise me speaking there wouldn't be this many people in the room you obviously have some degree of it yourself some curious as to why you you advise young people not to seek it and if they should take you seriously well it's not that I advise them not to seek it I think it's a natural part of being in your 20s and 30s I'm saying there will come a time in your life when the odds are you're going to have to say you aren't going to be what you're famous certainly there came a time in my life when I said you're never going to be rich and I was never going to be famous in the sense of having people of you know come up to me in restaurants and which sounds to me like one of the worst aspects of being famous but anyway there will come a time in your life when your dream some of your dreams you know we're not going to come true and those dreams had to do with fame and fortune and at that time in your life must come when you say you know what it's not that big a deal in fact it's not a big deal at all I think there's nothing sadder in Washington DC and you see a lot of it in Washington DC of somebody who was once a senator or a congressman or a cabinet secretary or some of the trying desperately to hang on to the fame they see it all so I'm told in Hollywood and and the entertainment industry big-time those people I feel sorry for because it doesn't require discipline to put away this yearning for fame it requires an understanding of how empty it really is from row they hang on it's just second place presentation I'm a leader with a life longevity increasing constantly increasing to 80 90 years degrees what advice could you give to people who are retired across the retirement people like in this audience as far as having a meaningful life if the retirement in terms of service in terms of voluntary work in terms of becoming mentally and spiritually rich or challenging themselves in some way or another hand thank you yeah well I'm facing that right now I'm working on a major book right now and after that's finished I'm saying myself do you really want to take on another major book again and I'm not at all sure I do this is why these four domains of family Faith Community and vocation are so important I am getting to that point in my life as does everybody at some point where the vocation is no longer available as the same kind of source of satisfaction as it used to be either because you've sort of done everything you can do or simply because it can't do it anymore whether physically or mentally at that point if the vocation is the only thing you've had you're in big trouble if on the other hand you have children and grandchildren and a spouse that's a whole bunch of connections right there if you are actively engaged in a faith tradition that's a whole community unto itself if you are part of a geographic community where you are a known quantity where where you have roots where you have connections that is still even as you get older not only is it still a source of satisfaction it's a greater source of satisfaction than it used to be so that's one of the reasons that's the main reason for your old age that you better not have pinned your satisfactions of life on just one of those domains if you have that network if you have those different pools into which you can tap I don't I don't think that there's a problem in spending old-age in a satisfying way that's probably being too Pollyanna about it because there is diminishment of all sorts of our physical and mental abilities as we get old on the other hand there can be enhancement of others and those others are family community faith yes I'd like to respond directly to what the point that you made about Thailand I've just returned from South Korea where I spent the last two years teaching English managing an NGO on the side so I completely love your story my question is how would you or perhaps how did you after Peace Corps respond to the curmudgeonly question great you're back so now when are you going to get a real job I invited that by getting a real job while I was still over there uh Peace Corps is two years long and at the after that was over I stayed in Thailand I this was during the Vietnam War a long time ago when the government was actively trying to build peace and freedom in Thailand as well as in Vietnam and so I worked for government contractors uh during the three years doing doing a lot of ethnographic research I'd like to describe this so everybody in the audience says he was right the CIA you know doing undercover I wasn't I was doing ethnographic research but that but it was a real job so by the time I went back to graduate school I my parents were actually aware that I'd made a living wage and that I was engaged in something that had some promise of eventually be something of a profession he worked out okay in that regard by the way let me ask Harlan what time do we break okay we will take two more if there are two more yes there are two more in the front Edoardo highcharts is just a quick question I've been seeing articles recently on like why did there is no didn't you twenty and why do that and some people advise young professionals not to like wait till they're thirty to start a career and so part of the reasons I think is because it's a there's a competitive market and economy's not doing well so the better you prepare the earlier you start preparing yourself the better chances you have to make a successful career far your thoughts on that I hear what you're saying in a tough economy you'd better acquire all the job skills you can write to and and be in as good as position as possible to compete for relatively rare opportunities in a bad economy I would say simply also consider the degree to which this is the only time in your life I'm referring to before you're married before you have children when you have a great deal of tolerance for mistakes you have a great deal of tolerance for living on a low income of and and it's really important to make sure that you are not acquiring job skills that bore you to tears if you know when I the the saddest words in the English language well some of the saddest words in the English language from a from a college graduate when I talk to them is I am going to law school because it's a general purpose tool you are constraining yourself just as much if you go to law school as if you make any other career choice don't go to law school just because the general purpose tool find something you love to do that is so important that I think yet warrants taking chances finding a vocation there there are you know we are I will this will be my parish all right essentially you have two things you need to do in life to be happy and one of them is to find something you love to do and learn how to do it well your vocation the next thing you need to do is find your soulmate how do i define soulmate your soulmate is somebody who you really really really like and to whom you also feel a sexual attraction that's uh that's that's my definition of soulmate if you do those two things everything else is rounding error all sorts of things can go wrong with your life but if you've done those two things you you are so far along the the road to a satisfying life that everything else is trivial and that I guess is one of the messages of the book which again has some of the aspects of a cliche but the reason it has the aspects of a cliche is because it's true the substance of life the stuff of life the things that lead to happiness are not the glitz not the glamour they are the kinds of participation in the world and intimate relationships with others that the great philosophers have understood from time immemorial and that human beings have understood from time immemorial a lot of what we see in modernity with all the distractions we have I think keep us from focusing on the extent to which these old eternal sources of human satisfaction remain as real today as they ever have this has been my first public discussion enough for an audience like this of emergence guide thank you very much for putting up with it you

Channel: American Enterprise Institute

Views: 31,684

Rating: 4.8407078 out of 5

Keywords: Charles A. Murray (Author), American Enterprise Institute (Organization), AEI, Young Adult Literature (Media Genre), Internship (Job Title), Employment Agency (Industry), Employment (Website Category), Workplace Politics (Literature Subject), Young Professionals, the curmudgeon's guide to getting ahead

Id: zIGNXJsn3z4

Length: 56min 6sec (3366 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 17 2014