“Tiger Mum” need not be elaborated on, but the first time I ever heard the term “Eagle Dad” was in the SCMP Post years ago when Chinese businessman He Liesheng was interviewed about his then-4yr old son. (Eagle Dad = Parent Who Drops Eaglet Off High Place, forcing him to Fly Or Die; young He Yide is now 9, studying a syllabus 3 years ahead of his chronological age, and has in fact neither run away from home nor murdered his dad in his sleep.)
While not dropped from a high place per se, Urban Meyer Baseball Player was “not welcome in the family car” if he struck out. On those days, he walked the 10 miles home. He went further (in the game) than 99% of all semi-pro 17 year old baseball players. It wasn’t enough. Soon, he was failing in every game and at every position so his dad (a.k.a. Guy Who Kicks Him Out Of Family Car For Striking Out) told him that if he quit he would not be welcome home ever. He could call his mum at Christmas, but Dad would not be coming to the phone.
Meyer Jr was failing spectacularly at practically the only career and future he had ever really seen himself in. His dad was about to disown him because he wanted to quit.
What was Urban Meyer’s solution to his problem?
He became one of the most successful coaches in college football. He leveraged his upbringing in a way only he could know how, given the unique confluence of his natural talents and childhood. I love this, for surely we are all meant to do the creative best with the hand we are dealt in life.
I care very much because OCD, as I often agree among all the dedicated dog spoilers owners in our area, pets exist so you can be incredibly irresponsible about discipline are for spoiling! 😀 Allow your child to be a horse’s behind to everyone else in the name of the child being your “precious” however (remember the last time someone called something their “prrreciousssss”*?), put anything less than your absolute best judgement and effort into their upbringing, and someday you could be causing countless other humans immense pain and suffering, from yet another dysfunctional adult with massive hangups joining society. (That’s not self-righteous bull. That’s from having friends I cared about on the receiving end because they loved someone dysfunctional.) And I say this despite being aware many humans are @ssholes in a way most animals aren’t 😀 (Except cats. Cats and those yappy little Pom things have awful personalities. I’m going to get hate mail from the cat and Pomeranian people now.)
*Golem’s precioussssss (pic from forexlive.com)
(And here’s the kids’ “precious-es” (umm..) from when they visited Entopia (love the play on “Entomology” and “Utopia” 🙂 ), the Penang Butterly Farm, just before CNY. #yesitsreal : butterfly, giant millipede, cat gecko…
…HN nearly fell head first into that earth pit which is a couple feet deep, so intent was she on digging up her prize #oneunhappymillipede which turned out to be fatter than her fingers…
…and here they are placing as many butterflies on her as they can:
(Rockstar got really good at scooping up butterflies to put on HN, you can see the flapping wings above her head… You can find butterflies of all shapes and sizes resting everywhere, from fruity feeding stations to garden flowers to…. one tourist’s legs. There was a young mum there whose legs kept getting covered in (only) that large white butterfly HN is holding top left – she would tell us she had happened to apply a moisturiser (Nivea After-Sun – of course we asked her what she used 🙂 ) not too long before her visit to the farm…)
More “precious gems” – Entopia sells live cocoon souvenirs! (Some of those look like jade, wonder what comes out of them)
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Back to The Answer… I thought it interesting that while He is Chinese, and featured in SCMP’s Rise of the Tiger Dad in June 2017, Meyer is American. It would seem a myth that “eagle parents” are exclusively of a particular race, though maybe the choice of what to be “eagle” about might differ… But… if the kid is a fish, it still ain’t flyin’ (or well, climbing a tree – Einstein’s original quote: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”)
Speaking of fish….. See how I did that? Smooth, huh? (pic off ebay.com)
(Quick aside – at press time the original movie poster, creased up and all, was selling for USD 71.00 on eBay. And it had 5 bids. Know where’s a potential place to find these things? Try the old DVD shops all over HK, or your average old disc rental place in most of Asia, for that matter. Preferably not in a place that has a lot of people who like vintage Spielberg. Then try to sell ’em to some Spielberg fan in the States (or Spielberg himself! What d’you give a guy who has everything? An original poster of a movie with huge personal sentimentality, first edition print books…… ))
Steven Spielberg was a relatively young movie director when he had a problem. The kind that threatens to end your budding career. Someone had created this expensive realistic shark for the Jaws movie, painstakingly and extensively testing the thing before movie production………………… in fresh water.
(No judgement; in hindsight “everyone” knows “everything.” It is a humbling reminder if you’re getting full of it at having invented the Next New Thing, that something that has been around since the (real) dinosaurs and is free and available in abundance can end you. Salt. I’m talking about the salt eating into the water-proofing). When they actually tried to shoot the Jaws movie in the ocean, the salt water was quickly shorting out the robot shark. It was a time before computer graphics and animations a la the Transformers. They were losing money, huge amounts of money, fast, because their state-of-the-art horribly expensive remote control shark couldn’t swim in salt water.
What was Mr Spielberg’s solution to this problem?
He shot a movie about a monster shark largely without the shark. The scariest parts of Jaws are when the presence of the shark is implied. Arguably the most powerful scenes he produced were on days when the shark didn’t work and he had to use his own ingenuity. He turned what others would’ve seen as the greatest “weakness” in the hand he was dealt into his greatest “strength,” the movie’s greatest asset. This is also one inspiration for when I said there is nothing that can replace human judgement and experience, no matter how clever we think we get with technology, innovation and inventions – they are still tools, though some are no less impressive and super fun to use 😀 . Sir Anthony Hopkins is Sir Anthony Hopkins (who has Asperger’s, the high-functioning autism) whether he is doing black and white low-tech Lear onstage, or whether he’s being shot against a green screen and appears in the final cut standing next to a huge shape-shifting alien life form with a French accent.
SAME DIFFERENCE
Moving on…
Yet, as with every “package” of goods and bads, the double-edged sword cuts both ways… Sometimes a trade hedge is referred to as the double-edged sword. (Because a hedge of the original trade is in the opposite direction. When your trade is making money, your hedge is losing it. You can understand why hedging is both crucial and erm, heart-breaking 🙂 It requires huge discipline and restraint to follow Risk and Compliance’s assessment of what you need to hedge, because when you’re making that hard-earned money from that meticulously analysed trade, it is very hard to accept that part of it is required to be hedged away.)
With vision and judgement that goes beyond that of Artificial Intelligence and Technology, is also the potential for jarring human error…
This statistic I’m gonna plagiarise share straight out of Dr Niven’s book: After you’ve entered an irreversible decision, your belief in the correctness of that decision increases by about 38%.
Did your odds really get better? Nope. They’re the same as before you entered a trade. But you will have about 38% more conviction that you are right if you can’t walk yourself back from the decision.
So I’ve been stomping on investors… what about doctors? Now, I myself cannot imagine going to work every day where your “bad day at work” is someone dying on your watch and you having to inform their loved ones that you couldn’t save them. You would assume doctors take the proverbial “Hippocratic Oath,” among others, to first do no harm. When you are a doctor however, you could become so dedicated to the fact that, despite insurmountable evidence, it’s hard to believe another doctor could be doing the opposite. In that way in which life sucks Ironically, that’s when you most need to shake off your blind spot. It was by their very education and training that they had worked so hard for, their very belief in the responsibilities of their profession, that made them blinder than people without their training.
A serial killer who is a doctor? Unbelievable. (And truly terrifying.) It’s why the other doctors at Ohio State University Medical Centre chose to give Dr Michael Swango the benefit of doubt despite patient and nurse witnesses that he was seen with mysterious syringes in toilets, in rooms of patients he had no business being in, despite having an actual sample of the stuff he was injecting into patients. (They didn’t test the sample, and it was eventually thrown away.) Know when they finally caught and convicted him? About 16 years and 60 victims later.
Yes, professionals can make mistakes. Yes, a human’s judgement can be so skewed.
And since I haven’t figured how to end this post, there might be a part III…
