I remember from my admissions days the demise of class ranks on high school transcripts. They stopped probably twenty years ago. For me, sitting in an admissions seat, ranks were a way of assessing the 3.6 from a high school. Is that in the top 10 percent, or does everyone else at that school have a 4.0? When I asked high school officials why they’d gotten rid of ranks, I was told, “Ranks made students feel bad.”
Well, if they’re in the bottom 5 percent of their graduating class, maybe they should feel bad!
I thought it was a woeful day when they took ranks away. Everyone needs a push to reach what he’s capable of.
This was my point in Malaysia: You need to differentiate between good, mediocre, and poor. In my Western experience, we want to achieve our best. We want the gold star. The golden apple! To think that all I have to do is show up and I’ll be patted on the head? That’s no way to live an exciting artistic life.
I SEE THIS AS a trend not just in academia but also in parenting. I think it may be the celebration of imagination and self-confidence over good citizenship. Creativity should be fostered, but so should conceptual development and execution. Parents should want their children’s self-confidence to be earned.
I love to see children building discipline, whether it’s by learning an instrument or doing a sport. It’s good to expose them to lots of different things. A broad range of exposure is really important, because you don’t know what’s going to resonate. But when you find something that does it for them—whether it’s the ballet or baseball or sewing or karate—you can feel good that you helped them find something they can get involved in and about which they feel motivated to excel.
We adults need to do this, too. It takes a certain level of humility to push ourselves to try new things. Once we have a realm of expertise, we may think, Why expand our horizons? We’ve found our niche.But it’s very important to keep your hand in as broad a range of areas as possible. I’ve seen so many people around me losing their jobs in recent years, and some have had a very tough time readjusting.
My advice to them: Try to take your ego out of it. You don’t make it about you and how hard your life is. You have to focus on what needs to get done and find a way to do it, independent of what your ego may be saying about what you deserve or what’s beneath you.
I ran into a neighbor at the supermarket who had lost his job on Wall Street. He was there at the store applying for a job. He showed me the application and said he’d just had an interview and they’d told him he was overqualified. “But I’ll do anything,” he pleaded. He was having a hard time, but he had the right attitude, and I predicted he would come out of the recession just fine.
Breadth of exposure is really important in education, even if you’re studying something specific like fashion. At Parsons we made our students experience every phase of every design. They would bitterly complain: “I don’t want to do menswear,” or “I can’t do children’s clothes.” But they would have epiphanies. “Wow, I’m really good at suits.” Or “I have a natural gift for children’s pajamas.”
They would be amazed, and I would say, “That’s why we do this.” They never would have discovered it otherwise. They would have cut themselves off from a rich field of experience if they’d had their choice.
The buffet style of education, where you take what you want when you want it, is so unfortunate, in my opinion. I know young people. They gravitate toward what comes naturally to them and what they think they want. But what they’re comfortable with isn’t necessarily their destiny.
I also think it’s good to keep as wide a circle as possible of professional acquaintances. My predecessor at Parsons never interviewed anyone for positions unless there was one available that very second. I took a lot of promising people out for lunch just so we’d know each other and be able to cut to the chase when a job did open up. I thought we should vet people and stay in touch with them so we had a stable and could get someone into open jobs immediately rather than having everything be a 911 call.
You can be inspired by anything, and you never know what information is going to serve you well later. That’s why I think core curriculums are good. You need to have a grounding in everything. Fashion does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Lady Gaga’s famous gyroscope dress on Saturday Night Livemade me think that her designer at some point took a physics class.
So it’s good to push yourself and others to study as many different fields as you can, even if you think you know exactly what you want to do.
If you aren’t convinced that it’s good for you and for your career, then maybe you will be convinced by David Sedaris’s argument for broad-based education in his story “21 Down”: “When asked ‘What do we need to learn this for?’ any high school teacher can answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.”
As a crossword puzzle junkie myself, I love that argument for education. But I also believe culture can genuinely improve your life. You can be too rich and too thin, but you can never be too well read or too curious about the world.
Give Back (but Know Your Limits)
MY MOTHER PARTICIPATES IN one of those sponsor-a-child programs and has a boy in Guatemala to whom she sends money each month. She’s been doing it for a long time.
“He sent me a Christmas card,” she said that first holiday season.
“That’s so sweet,” my sister said. “What’s his name?”
“Felix.”
“Felix?” we said. “That doesn’t sound very Guatemalan. What’s his last name?”
“Wait,” my mother said. “Let me get the card … It’s Navidad.”
She thought the name of her sponsored child was “Merry Christmas.”
We still joke about Mr. Felix Navidad.
I am a firm believer in giving back, and I encourage you to do as much charity work as you possibly can—especially if your work allows me finally to take a break. In fact, in writing this book, I’ve been surprised by how often I’ve said things that could fall under the theme It’s Hard to Be Nice.
That’s not saying you shouldn’t be nice for society’s sake, nor that it doesn’t ultimately pay off for you personally, but let’s be honest: Niceness can at times feel a little bit thankless.
My wonderful associate, Marsha, and I have lunch together in my office every day when we’re both free. At one recent lunch she was teasing me about how many charity lunches I go to. We took a bet on how many it actually was, and then we got out the calendar. A little math later, we realized I had attended more than sixty such lunches in the past year. That’s more than one a week, far more than I see my family or my closest friends.
It’s a hard thing to complain about. And no one knows this more than I do, having spent most of my life far from the in crowd. But please indulge me. There is this expectation that once you’re in a certain social world, you have endless obligations to it.
I was at a reception for Bill Clinton at someone’s apartment on Park Avenue, and as thrilled as I was to be there on one level, on another, I was just so drained from a long day of work that my idea of a good time involved getting under the covers with a book. While I was there, I was thinking how ironic it was that at one time I would have killed to be at this party. Now I would kill to be home watching game shows.