The Most Important Thing I Learned
Originally Published in the Faithfulness of God (Spring 2010) Issue
Perhaps the single most important word of advice I’ve ever heard is that my worth is grounded not in what I do but in what I am.
There is a contradiction at Stanford today: a contradiction that gnaws away at students, undermines friendships, and inhibits contentment.
This contradiction is idolized meritocracy. Meritocracy itself is a powerful driving force that is built upon notions of rewarding people for the work that they pursue—whether they started an organization or earned a 4.0 GPA.
Idolized meritocracy, however, moves beyond rewarding people for what they do to a more pernicious form: it attributes value to people themselves based solely on what they do. Whereas Jesus brings “life and brings it abundantly,” chaining significance and worth to accomplishment is submitting to a mercurial god whose thirst is never sated.
The contradiction is that while achievement and the things we do are foremost in our quotidian consciousness, in truth what matters most to ourselves and others is character. By character, I refer to whether you are a moral person, whether you are living up to values you hold dear, and what—no— who you care about. When we look at our resumes, a good number of us wonder why there is a gaping void
instead of solid substance. I contend that this void arises from realizing that we have not made any gains in our character.
For most of us, idolized meritocracy is a never-satiated desire to do more, because the accomplishment is never a true reward. Any time we can either be busy or be busily pursuing some leisure activity that we’ve scheduled to avoid burn-out (so we can accomplish more later), we drown out this void. To avoid dealing with our uncertainties, we just keep ourselves working.
Simply put, one symptom of our idolized meritocracy is that we are perennially busy. The question, “how are you?” is often answered with something on the lines of “Oh! Busy!” or a simple “tired.” Perhaps you too have experienced times when the amiable question “how are you?” ends up being answered with a list of what needs to be done.
But the consequences of idolized meritocracy stretch beyond just being obsessively busy. A community that values being productive beyond anything else is one that ignores its members and ends up being so fragmented that it cannot function as a whole.
By idolizing meritocracy, we ignore the needs of ourselves and others. Of all the things I hear about this campus— fantastic, beautiful, entrepreneurial, exciting, stimulating—loving has never been an adjective I’ve heard to describe Stanford students.
At some time or other I have felt unloved at a place that prides itself on endless achievement. More than one of my friends has taken leave of absence from this campus because he/she felt completely overwhelmed with stress. This is not a stress of having too much work, but rather of finding the stakes of failure so high, so monumental, that to leave is preferable. I hate sounding pedantic, but if you haven’t heard, suicide is still very much an issue on this campus.
Take time to listen as one speaks of a grandparent’s death or a family divorce. Most of all, please stop to listen to those of us who are afraid of even letting any other Stanford student know—because that means we’re not quite up to par.
Furthermore, as a community we are fragmented. The congratulations of accomplishment are poisoned with the jealous undercurrent that your forward momentum calls my sluggish progress into question. Accomplishment only exists in the field of competition— whether with oneself or with others. Granted, competition is a fantastic force that has powered the market and motivated countless people to create the lives that we enjoy today. However, idolized meritocracy assumes that what you do is what you are worth. When self-worth is the item being bought or sold on the competitive market, we have created a destructive system. This idolized meritocracy leads at best to burn-out, perhaps to depression and at its worst, to a fear of telling others about personal vulnerabilities. When your self-worth hinges on your performance, how difficult admitting vulnerabilities must be.
And so the story goes: your friend is doing a fantastic service project and instead of forwarding the email along to help her out, you hesitate ever so slightly because your own project is floundering. Perhaps more seriously, Stanford students want to feel like they were the founder of a project even if they recognize that their decision will not necessarily serve needs better. Our resources end up fragmented.
I want to offer a hopeful, life-affirming alternative that allows space to applaud accomplishment, cooperate, and ultimately achieve more, not less. In short, I want to suggest that we pursue a character-driven life.
Character enables us to both appreciate accomplishment fully and offer our criticisms. Because I recognize that your value is rooted in who you are and not in what you’re doing, I freely offer my constructive criticisms for why you are not being effective. Because applauding your work has no sway on my personal worth—whether you get an A+ or not may mean I score lower on the curve, but it does not change my self-value—I freely offer my compliments to work that I admire.
Character, furthermore, is a cooperative enterprise. Developing character demands that we listen with empathy to what others have said and done in the past and are doing and saying in the present. When what matters to me is who I am, I am not obsessed with being busy. I am willing to challenge you, learn from you, and engage on a deep level with you. In idolized meritocracy, on the other hand, your better performance necessarily suggests my lesser performance—and worth.
Most importantly, a character-driven life is both fulfilling and productive. This is not a zero-sum game. Character is about who you are and what you believe—not what you accomplish. If you have truly come to believe that child slavery is morally wrong, your efforts will carry a burning passion that will ignite those around you. Character gives us the courage and urgency to speak up and act.
Martin Luther King Jr. knew he was going to face a very real possibility of being killed if he continued, but he did so anyway because he knew that God’s heart is for those who are oppressed in this world. His character wasn’t the analytical kind that we students often easily partake in—“I think that’s the right thing to do.” His character was one that he so fully understood God’s heart and burning anger at the injustices of this broken world that he acted.
I am not proposing that one needs to develop character before acting. The two are intrinsically linked. Character without action is stagnant and burdensome. By going into the world and engaging with it, one clarifies personal values. Merely sitting in a room attempting to clarify exactly what one believes can be frustrating.
Neither am I suggesting that to be a character-grounded person is to ignore outcomes or to suddenly forget about the importance of effort or processes, either. On the contrary, the one who works only to find a vague sense of self-worth will stop whenever he/she has surpassed his/her peers. It will not guide us to end slavery or reform civil rights, because idolized meritocracy does not ask who we are or whether we are righteous and just. It asks not toward what ends I achieve, only that I continue to achieve.
I of course do not want to suggest that accomplishment is meaningless. If my parents have sacrificed everything to let me come to Stanford, out of filial piety that A+ could very well be an act of admirable character on my part. However, unlike the one who works because of a vague sense of needing to find value in the accomplishment, my worth does not lie in getting that A+ but rather in knowing I have put forth my very best effort. At this point, you might wonder how Christianity modifies this picture. Is it not written that we are saved by God’s mercy and by faith alone? The God we ought to serve demands nothing in return for our significance. By contrast, He commits himself to insignificance, to humility, and even to death for the sake of building a relationship with us. Our significance is found in Him, yet all too often we worship the manifold forms of merit. Where I dismiss the Greeks for worshipping so many different gods that an altar was crafted for “the unknown God”, perhaps in our day and age I am no different. As such, there is no space for idolized meritocracy within a Christian worldview.
More importantly, I argue that character nurtures our Christian identity and draws us to Christ. Ultimately, a life concerned with character necessarily realizes the depth of sin in this world. To simply consider one’s own moral standing is almost inevitably to recognize one’s own inability to achieve even a personal moral standard, much less God’s. Without Christ, I am unable to achieve righteousness. A character-centered life thus remembers that Christ is quite literally at the crux, and reorients all other priorities in succession.
Yet even as we recognize that we are “in this world but not of it”, we frequently are part and parcel of idolized meritocracy. We trade in the answer to “how are you?” with a list of commitments. Even the evangelizing Christian may fall prey. Holding idolized meritocracy in stride, he treats the sacred mission as another task to accomplish, the people but benchmarks and crops to be harvested. It’s not difficult to recognize why others shun Christians who treat them as benchmarks: our actions reek of hypocrisy because they treat relationships as a means to an end.
In sum, when our work is detached from the drive and foundation of character—again, who we are, what/ who we care about, and our moral standing—we frequently lack the fiery passion and meaning that further drives us, and more importantly, we live lives that seem shallow, unfulfilling, and lonely. A character-driven life, I contend, is what as a university whole most—but definitely not all—of us lack. We have idolized accomplishment rather than focused on character. By the time we awake from our drive to accomplish and stay busy, college is already over. We are left with a huge resume and a network that spans the globe, but no sense of what really matters, of what is right and needs to change in the world, of who and what we love.
Now that’s tragic.