Ok, you win. You get what you want. I lose, I fold.
The next two words are a game changer. What are they?
“What glorious fun!” said the wicked sprite, for he had created a mirror that failed to reflect the good and beautiful in people, that magnified only the ugly… Yet if a good thought passed through a man’s mind, still it appeared as a grin…
The Devil’s Mirror (pic from fairytale.fandom.com)
When the sprites had had their fun on Earth they decided to cause trouble in Heaven, to use the Devil’s Mirror and make the angels see as they did. But the closer the mirror got to Heaven, the more it grinned. Higher still, and higher, grinning ever wider, until it shattered into thousands of shards and fell back to Earth, there to be lodged in people’s hearts and eyes…
– adaptation of The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Andersen
Did you like the story of Kai and Gerda in the Snow Queen – Kai, with shards of Devil’s Mirror lodged in his eye and heart, who can no longer see the good in things. Gerda, who befriends the river, the birds, the flowers, each helping her just the little they can, toward her goal?
pic from dara3299.blogspot.com
Author Hans Christian Andersen created many fairytales – Snow Queen, Emperor’s New Clothes, The Tinder Box, Princess and the Pea….. How many can you name – 5? 10? 50? He wrote 3,381. For which we can only name a handful. He was also mocked for wanting to be a writer, likely dyslexic, and abused in childhood. He had a penchant for falling for unattainable women, thus taking a vow of celibacy and sparking all kinds speculations as people pored over his writings that became his outlet. He created all these enduring stories and is mostly hailed as a Danish national hero.
Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert failed often, receiving rejection after rejection for 6 years straight, before the success of EPL. Then on the (arguably inevitable) failure of whatever she wrote immediately following EPL she said, “I had to make sure my creativity survived its own success… I found it by how it had once survived its failure. You have to find your way home again… Your home is whatever you love in this world more than yourself. …It’s what you can dedicate your energies to regardless of whether you fail or succeed. …Whereby the ultimate results become inconsequential…” (THANK you, Cathay Pacific and Dragonair, for having all those TED talks in your inflight entertainment!!)
If you can only see the win, if your yardstick of measurement is only a string of As on your report card, your actual learning journey is that much weaker. (Not… that “only As” can ever be construed as a bad thing, but I think that “- and what else?” could go with. Like… Fish and chips. Burger and fries. Steak and fries. Grilled salmon and fries. Sushi and fries. (I eat them sparingly, but darn do I love my fries – everything tastes better with fries))
Ok but seriously. Years ago I met an intern who had always been a good student, she had a strong second-upper Law degree from the UK… then she said very honestly that coming out to work she had no idea how to translate that into doing well at a job/ career and it was terrifying. I know how she feels, I once had no idea what I was going to do with an Accounting degree**, possibly from initial lack of imagination though –
Take these two nerds. (pic from businesswire.com)
Economists Levitt and Dubner made “Freakonomics” a real thing. After these guys, people said things like “If Indiana Jones were an Economist“. S-o let’s try that again –
A tad much? Nahhhhhhh.
<ends aside, begins another>
In some of the more rural areas of my childhood, every now and again the monkey population would swell, and the animals would start coming out of the jungles to steal food, attack humans especially little kids with snacks… The villagers fix monkey problems with a narrow-necked heavy glass jar and a handful of nuts.
The monkeys close their fist on the nuts at the bottom of the jar and in so doing can no longer remove their fist. Escape is hampered by the heavy glass jar around the monkey’s fist, it’s what makes him easy to catch. At any time if Alpha Monkey had simply let go, he could have removed his hand from the jar. The more aggressive the Alpha, the less likely he is to yield in time to escape.
“Ok, you win. You get what you want. I lose, I fold. So what.“
Aggression and ego have more than a healthy correlation to insecurity and envy. Take this guy –
Mark Strong’s Dr Sivana in Shazam! (pic from tvandmovienews.com)
SPOILER ALERT…
Shazam The Movie’s latest super villain is, as the story goes, born after Dr Sivana, as a tween boy, cannot live up to his father’s expectations and remains resentfully in his older brother’s shadow. When vying for the role of the wizard Shazam’s Champion, the demons of the 7 Deadly Sins tempt him with power enough to finally impress his dad. When he easily succumbs, the wizard dismisses him as unworthy of inheriting his magic (not that there ever turns out to be someone truly worthy). What Sivana hears ONLY, is “You will never be good enough.”
And then he starts on this whole self-important, self-pitying rant re Does Age-old Wizard Know what it’s like to be a child and have this said to him???
Thus is a super villain born – Sivana makes it his life’s goal to find the portal and seize the Evil Eye so he can finally impress Dad and throw older brother out the window, right before feeding Dad to a demon. Sure. We’ve all been there. <shrugs> (NO, ok… NO WE HAVEN’T. Someone gonna say the Crazy Blogging Lady is at it again – lemme put the proverbial Not A Toy, Do Not Eat disclaimers on all kinds of very obviously non-edible not-meant-to-be-played-with things) There is however a real reason the demons say they’ve found their champion in Sivana, why they keep pursuing him – so many mortals tested over the years in the wizard’s search, but it is Sivana’s particular weakness they like best. Ever thought of that? Oh, and if you have a weakness people love to exploit, that is a helluva motivation to um, not have that weakness anymore 😀
Wizard on the other hand never finds the “perfect pure-hearted mortal”and settles on –
This Dude. 14yr old Billy who morphs into Big Guy With Cartoony Face (pic from tvandmovies.com)
Anyone get the irony? Sivana grows up “privileged and accomplished” – his father owns some large company with swanky offices and Sivana himself achieves enough to attach the prefix “Dr” to his name. His father, despite the scorn he receives (some of which seemingly Dad’s misguided attempt to get his “whine-y” son to stop well, whining), is still supportive enough to fund the research that goes towards finding the wizard’s cave (regardless he obviously doesn’t think very much of it). Yet Sivana can see only his father’s lack of approval and preference for his older brother, and his brother’s disrespect towards him.
Billy Batson, “Chosen One,” is by contrast an orphan bouncing from one foster home to another, as he searches for his birth mother because of what he believes to be a terrible mistake, that they simply got separated one day at an amusement park when he was 3 years old. When the wizard abducts chooses him, he says “I’m not sure anyone (pure of heart) exists.” Also, he doesn’t want to talk to strangers offering him “super powers” (kids! take note! 😀 ) Remember Sivana has this whole rant about how he made it his life’s goal (paid for by Dad – and then he says Dad Not Respectin’ him?! Like, no kidding.) after some… stranger tells him he is “unworthy.”
OK, how do I put this? In the fashion of Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga*, DIS… IS… AN EXCUSE. He wants to be this way. Evil villain, for the power. And then the dad, the wizard, the bro, the childhood, the french fries, the magic 8 ball are all excuses (*Kishimi and Koga, Japanese Philosopher who also specialises in Classic Western Philosophy, and award winning professional development writer respectively, wrote The Courage To Be Disliked, based on Freud rival Alfred Adler’s work.) Broadly, that we are not determined by our experiences but the meaning we give them, how we see them. And that these are largely choices we make (Here‘s a summary). Broadly, places the age point at 10 years. Around 10yrs old is when we can start to actively choose who we want to be.
When 14yr old Billy finally finds his birth mother, she tells him she was 17, and chose to abandon him with police authorities in the park because she had no idea how to give him a better life. Billy experiences what must be a most wrenching let-down for anyone, let alone a 14yr old orphan who made reuniting with his mother practically his only goal in life – only to learn she deliberately abandoned him and does not want a relationship.
Instead of turning to a lifetime of super villain-ry fuelled by Shazam! powers though, Billy wishes her well, hands her the dinky little toy compass keyring he’s been holding on to his entire childhood – the last thing she had given him 11 years ago (she doesn’t remember it btw) – then he lets go – and returns to his real family, with a “real” mum and dad, also former foster children at least one of whom also did a lot of running away from foster homes.
So yeah there’s a wizard and some magic spells. What. Ever. The “perfect human” may not exist, but tell me that ole’ wizard didn’t know a thing or two when he picked Billy over Sivana to morph into an action figure superhero.
Our society at large prizes winning. Adulation to the victors, correspondingly communicating the extent to which everything else matters less. We remember the name Neil Armstrong…. n-ot so much the army of engineers, health professionals and what-not who also had a hand in putting him up there.
Now, let’s imagine if families, workplaces, teams, were made up ONLY of people who always had to come in first, who always had to have their way. Like, if everyone just wants to be the first letter of the alphabet then we would just have no words 😀 Yet it is the humble, those who do not need to prove something, even to themselves, who hold families, societies, teams together.
**What I ended up doing with “that” Accounting degree – in the end my “big break” job was to do the “gofer” and seemingly very boring task of printing thousands of financial statements off the Bloomberg and typing the numbers into a default probability calculator. But I loved the noise and activity all around the dealing room (even though most of it had nothing to do with me haha) – accounting and auditing by contrast is mostly in quiet offices – until today I still prefer to work or write with lots of noise and activity around me… After some time, one of the older quants on the project (who btw could debate anyone brave enough as readily on further maths topics as on Christian theology, he attended church regularly) mentioned that the research papers behind the default probability calculator’s methodology were (at the time) freely available online. He was also the guy who taught me the term “gofer” and set me to inputting those financial statements btw 🙂
So I took out a gym membership in the building next door so I could have shower and sauna privileges (and the occasional Hip Hop dance class) before returning after dinner to read the research papers. Auditors (in Singapore where I graduated, and I’m guessing here too) famously work very, very long hours and I figured getting a night or two off a week was already a huge step up. The rest of the time, I only went home to sleep (also very privileged – I remember former classmates who only went home the next morning at 6am to change their clothes). Because I didn’t have nearly as much further maths in my degree as the engineers did, sometimes it took me a whole evening to understand a half page of research paper. But it was enough to follow what was discussed in meetings when I was allowed to be a fly on the wall. After a couple years (and the first merger of my former career), I managed to pick up enough to get through a several months-long interview process at a large international bank. That’s how I ended up the only zero-honours local grad and classified as a “junior but experienced hire” in a dealing room where the few other people my age were first class honours grads. We viewed each other with absolute respect. Bearing in mind I came from
