The Drudge Report
During the mercifully brief Boy Inventor phase of my childhood, I became enthralled with the inspirational lessons embedded in the life of Thomas Edison. Even at nine years old, I got a whiff of the tedium that Edison endured as he tested six thousand different vegetable materials to find the perfect slow-burning ingredient for the filament in the incandescent lightbulb. This long, hard slog was the essence of what my elementary school teachers called “stick-to-it-iveness” — their made-up synonym for that hard word perseverance.
Only when I was a little older did I realize that Edison had been a self-defeating drudge. What could have been more ineffectual than burning the midnight oil in his lab as he checked on the glow-in-the-dark properties of a stalk from an exotic Venus flytrap that a helpful explorer had sent via native bearer from a remote corner of the Orinoco Delta? If Edison had followed proper alphabetical order instead of flailing about like a mad scientist, the star-crossed inventor would have almost immediately hit on his mystery substance: B is for the bamboo filament that burned for 1,200 hours with a reddish glow. The life-changing moral that I derived from all this was that hard work and perseverance are the province of the less fortunate. Far better, I realized, was to glide through life with graceful languor — and to depend on an occasional burst of inspiration and the blessings of Lady Luck to vault you into the winner’s circle.
Any chance that I would be gulled by Edison’s oft-quoted claim, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration,” ended when my junior high school embarked on one of those well-intentioned educational experiments that take the merit out of meritocracy. It was not fair, decreed the mandarins of my suburban Connecticut public school system, that students should be graded solely on their mastery of eighth-grade social studies and science. Justice required that effort — regardless of outcome — should receive equal consideration. So for a while junior high report cards combined the traditional letter grades with an effort number ranging from 1 for a Stakhanovite drone to 3 for a narcoleptic slacker. The result was immediately obvious to everyone other than professional educators: the prized grade became, of course, an A-3 (perfect results with John Belushi–level effort) while nothing could be more shameful than a C-1, the ultimate badge of inescapable no-matter-how-hard-you-try mediocrity.
Before we leave the sepia-toned memories of a baby boomer childhood, full disclosure requires me to confess that after being seduced by an easy-money come-on in a Nancy & Sluggo comic book, I spent a week demonstrating my perseverance and foolhardiness by vainly going door to door trying to peddle copies of the rural newspaper Grit in the middle of John Cheever country. If you think Sisyphean challenges like this build youthful character, try sending your children out to hawk the New York Review of Books on the NASCAR circuit.
Please understand that I do not scorn conventional measures of accomplishment, though I have noticed that these days most hedge funds are being outstripped by shrubbery and lawn care services. What baffles me as an adult — as it did in junior high school — is the national mythology that there is a causal link between hard work and success in the workaday world. This attitude can create a perverse sense of entitlement (“I exert therefore I must excel”) even though, in truth, arduous labor is most likely to produce nothing more than higher-than-normal dry cleaning bills. When AIG executive Jake DeSantis published an angry open letter in the New York Times attempting to justify his $742,000 bonus (after taxes), he stressed his “twelve months of hard work dismantling the company.” Sensing that the image of his self-sacrificing late nights hunched over a spreadsheet in a corner office might not be enough to win public sympathy, DeSantis also went out of his way to depict his hardscrabble roots: “I was raised by schoolteachers working multiple jobs in a world of closing steel mills. My hard work earned me acceptance to M.I.T.” Was it hard work or sterling SAT scores? M.I.T. has never developed a reputation for admitting determined pluggers on the basis of billable hours doing homework.
American culture reveres the marathon rather than the sprint because stubborn feel-the-burn endurance is deemed more, well, puritanical than the permissive notion that fame and fortune can flow from short bursts of genius. But consider songwriting, a profession that has unquestionably contributed more to societal well-being than the Gyro Gearloose creators of credit default swaps down at AIG. On a magical day in 1937, the melancholic Lorenz Hart wrote what may be the best line in the history of musical theater: “When love congeals/It soon reveals/The faint aroma of performing seals.” Do you really think that Hart owed it all to a laborious workout regimen power-lifting rhyming dictionaries?
On a less exalted level, Jack Norworth spent the final half-century of his life living off the royalties from a few inspired minutes on a New York City streetcar in 1908 after he spied an advertising sign: “Baseball Today — Polo Grounds.” The doggerel that the far-from-dogged Norworth scrawled on the back of an envelope became the lyrics (soon to be registered with the Copyright Office) to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” reckoned among the top ten played and recorded songs of the twentieth century. But success stories like this were not limited to the era when the removable Arrow collar was the height of men’s fashion. In 1962, it took twenty-four-year-old Bobby “Boris” Pickett just an hour to turn his open-mike-night-at-a-comedy-club Boris Karloff impression into that top-of-the-pop-charts novelty hit “Monster Mash.” For those too busy reading Proust to ever turn on the radio around Halloween, the signature lyric is “The Monster Mash/It was a graveyard smash.”
Skeptics may argue that politics offers a truer window into society’s values than esoteric callings like cemetery-based dance-party organizer. Well, the hard work that matters most here lies in the exertions that accompanied the romantic couplings that spawned future United States senators. For all the self-made-man bushwa concocted by political image-makers, nepotism is more likely to produce a six-year term under the Capitol dome than a long soul-deadening apprenticeship in a backwater state legislature. (Unless, of course, you are named Barack Obama, and seemingly an exception to all natural laws, including gravity.)
Family lineage remains the bipartisan trump card from Maine (or, at least, New England) to Alaska. The children-of-power caucus includes New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg (son of a governor), Connecticut’s Chris Dodd (son of a senator), and a fellow from Massachusetts named Kennedy. Alaska, a state where Sarah Palin is a lonely exception to “I voted for your dad” politics, features Senator Lisa Murkowski (originally appointed by her father, a former senator turned governor) and newly elected Mark Begich (the son of a congressman who died in a mysterious plane crash). The 2008 campaign also brought with it a dynastic breakthrough: two first cousins elected to the Senate in the same election. Colorado’s Mark Udall (the son of legendary congressional humorist Mo Udall) and New Mexico’s Tom Udall (the son of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall) prompted the catchy campaign slogan “Vote for the Udall of your choice.”
Political nepotism, to be sure, does not preclude other virtues. All these well-born senators demonstrate persistence in calling wealthy strangers to grub for campaign cash, perseverance in attaching extraneous amendments to omnibus appropriations bills, endurance in staying awake with a plastic smile pinned to their faces during stultifying political dinners, and grit in reading every word of fawning press profiles. But, still, they all got their first leg up in politics when their fathers lifted them into their high chairs for a dinner of Gerber’s strained peas.
More than a quarter-century ago, Fortune magazine ran what remains the bravest cover story in the history of business journalism: “Luck and Careers.” No captain of industry during the heady Reagan years could possibly conceive that his position astride a Fortune 500 company was anything other than the free market recognizing superior accomplishment. Picking up their favorite magazine, these CEOs and CFOs and COBs and CAAs and CIAs must have been asking themselves, in Tina Turner fashion, “What’s luck got to do with it?” The elderly balancing paper cups filled with quarters on their walkers as they robotically play the slot machines in Atlantic City fervently believe in luck, as do shifty men drinking Colt 45 from brown paper bags at ten in the morning as they buy a sheaf of lottery tickets. But business titans arrogantly insist, “I don’t get luck, I give it.”
In the 1981 Fortune article, Daniel Seligman sketched out three intriguing propositions: “(1) Luck matters plenty. (2) It matters more in the careers of people who start out with fewer advantages. (3) The big breaks ... are apt to come early in careers.” All this brings us back to the role model of my childhood, the Wizard of Menlo Park. Edison, it turns out, owed his entire career to an early Horatio Alger–style break: as a teen-ager, he had rescued the son of a railroad telegraph operator from being crushed by a rolling boxcar. Edison was rewarded with a free course in Morse code and an eventual job as a telegraph operator, which was akin to being hired as apprentice programmer at Google. Viewed in this incandescent light, Edison’s 1,093 patents owed a far greater debt to serendipity (in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1862 how many small children were available to be plucked off the train tracks in the nick of time?) than they did to overrated virtues like stick-to-it-iveness. It just goes to show that luck beats pluck every time.
