The Triple Package Read Online Free Page B

of individuals who have risen to eminence, including one conducted by Howard Gardner, most famous for his theory of multiple intelligences. Both studies found that insecurity, particularly stemming from childhood, figured prominently as a surprisingly common driver of success. Gardner quotes Winston Churchill:
    the twinge of adversity, the spur of slights and taunts in early years are needed to evoke that ruthless fixity of purpose and tenacious mother-wit without which great actions are seldom accomplished.
    Lastly, an entire subfield of experimental psychology today is devoted to phenomena variously called “effortful control,” “self-regulation,” “time discounting,” “ego strength,” or (more appealingly) “willpower” and “grit.” These concepts are all connected to impulse control, as we’re using the term: the capacity to resist temptation, especially the temptation to give up in the face of hardship. The results of these studies—beginning with the well-known “marshmallow test”—are conclusive and bracing.Kids with more impulse control go on to get better grades; spend less time in prison; have fewer teenage pregnancies; get better jobs; and have higher incomes. In several studies, willpower and grit proved to bebetter predictors of grades and future success than did IQ or SAT scores.
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    B EFORE CLOSING THIS CHAPTER, we need to say a word about something we didn’t include in the Triple Package: education. It’s often said that Jewish and Asian Americans do well in the United States because they come from “education cultures.” Given that the Triple Package is essentially a cultural explanation of group success, why isn’t education one of its core elements?
    Because, to begin with, there are some flat-out exceptions to the rule that successful groups emphasize learning. The immensely successful but highly insularSyrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn does not stress education or intellectualism; indeed, higher education at prestigious universities is often disfavored. Instead this community prioritizes business, tradition, “taking over the family company,” and keeping younger generations within the fold. Because of its insularity, most people probably have never even heard of America’s Syrian Jewish community, but it’s been thriving for generations, economically as well as culturally, and elite education has decidedly not been part of its formula.
    Of course it’s true that most successful groups in America do emphasize education. They also tend to save and work hard. The question is why. The worst move to make at this point—the kind of move that gives cultural theories a bad name—is to take these behaviors, turn them into adjectives, impute them to culture, and offer them up as “explanations.” Why do the Chinese save at such higher-than-average rates? Because they come from a “thrifty” culture. It’s the same with education. Why do parents from so many successful groups harp on education? Because they hail from an “education culture.”
    In fact, many of America’s rising groups, although they stress academics today, do not have longstanding “education cultures.” Forexample, although early Mormon pioneers founded many schools and colleges in the American West, an important current of Mormon culture for much of the twentieth century remainedrelatively closed to intellectual and scientific inquiry, emphasizing “the authority of scripture over human reason.” In 1967, future Church president Spencer Kimball urged the faculty of Brigham Young University to remember that Mormons are “men of God first and men of letters second, and men of science third . . . men of rectitude rather than academic competence.”
    Even when we consider cultures supposedly steeped in centuries-old scholarly traditions, the conclusion that they focus on education today
because
of those traditions can be much too facile. Jews, for example, are sometimes said to have the