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It's time to redefine success

By You Nuo (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-21 07:55

One of the lessons yet to be learned from the financial crisis is the loss of values as people go crazy chasing success, which often is defined in material or numerical terms.

China's goal is to build a prosperous and harmonious society. But a society measured in terms of money alone cannot be one of equal success, and it's something no nation or community can afford to have.

The only realistic way of building a harmonious society is to encourage the more gifted and creative members and, at the same time, give due protection to the majority of the less materially successful people, including tolerating their failures.

Our economy may no longer be in as bad a shape as it was at the turn of 2009. And many economists are celebrating the news that GDP growth is, once again, picking up. But many things that brought the world economy to a near collapse are still there - including the pitfalls of a programmed quest for some narrowly defined success.

For too long, success has been exemplified by a few men and women who have managed to build or amass huge amounts of material wealth either through business ventures or technological innovations. There is no doubt that a country's economic growth needs to be powered by such endeavors.

From Beijing to Hong Kong and London to New York, bookstores are full of so-called success-guide books. In his newly published Outliers: The Story of Success, which I saw being displayed in all Hong Kong bookstores when I visited the city last weekend, Malcolm Gladwell actually reveals that there can be many chance factors that help an individual realize the best of his or her potential.

Following that logic, the more important thing to do is not to expect everyone to be equally versatile in computer programming, or all factories to be highly competitive in making electronic gadgets (in fact, that is likely to hurt a country's competitiveness by compromising its product diversity, as China's recent export records show).

By the same token, all parents should not expect their children to get admitted to supposedly top-notch (in fact most expensive) business schools.

If people manage themselves and parents guide their children like officials used to run China's planned economy - as people can remember from the early 1970s - there wouldn't be uncertainties in society and at different stages of an individual's career.

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But the consequences would be anything but good. We would end up losing the contribution of many people with hidden gifts, especially gifts other than those required by the few and highly competitive financial service jobs.

On a societal level, we would create a gap, as amply reflected by the income discrepancy between corporate managers and the rest of the white-collar workers, not to mention the meager incomes of men and women working in factories and on farms.

Some critics have already pointed out the cruel reality that the world is likely to see from now to the time when the economy regains its vigor, a prolonged period of growth without new employment - or some growth records amid high unemployment. This is a punishment meted out by our past - our old definition of success might have actually killed the chances of quite a few less profitable but no less interesting enterprises and jobs for college graduates now desperately looking for openings.

A true challenge for an economy is not how well it can resist a crisis - because no ship can claim to be tough enough to withstand a powerful storm - but its resilience, especially its ability to generate new chances for seeming failures and not so successful members of society.

E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn