by Donnovan Somera Yisrael, MA ’89
Manager of Relationship and Sexual Health Programs
Vaden Health Center, Stanford University

Edited by Marshall Bennett
Center for East Asian Studies, Stanford University

From the Editor: Donnovan Yisrael was my life mentor during my time at Stanford University, and I always found his advice and insight to be quite perceptive and funny. As a part of my interest in positive psychology and wellness, I asked that he write this article so that his ideas on success and happiness would be accessible to a broader audience. Although it was originally written with the Asian American community in mind, its lessons and suggestions are applicable across all demographics. I hope you find it helpful and enjoyable. 

I am hesitant to give the whole Tiger Mom discussion more attention than needed, and yet it is obvious that the topic has hit a nerve among many Americans, including Asian and Asian American parents and their children. Even people who are confidently opposed to the philosophy Amy Chua espouses in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother become all riled up when they talk about it. I believe the nerve it touches has to do with our deepest fear of failure, a fear that is all too common at Stanford University. And for the parents raising our children to be high achieving members of society, we wonder, what if my kid could be the next Tiger Woods or Yo-Yo Ma and she doesn’t reach that potential because I did not push her hard enough? We worry, what if the Tiger Mom is right after all? And here at Stanford this debate is relevant to each of us as individuals as we consider how to motivate ourselves to work and to achieve.

First off, let us simply consider what it means to be a “success.” As a self-proclaimed “Health Empowerment Educator” at Stanford University, I am concerned with the entire human being that we simply call the “Stanford Student.” In my workshops, I often talk about Tiger Woods, not just because he was a Stanford Student and could have benefited from attending my interactive discussion called, “Studs, Sluts, Virgins and Wimps,” when he was a student, but because it is now obvious that while Tiger Woods is absolutely a “success” or “master” in his sport, he is definitely not what most would consider a success in certain areas of his personal life. So, before we try to be the next Tiger it would behoove us to first contemplate, what exactly do we mean when we say or think about the meaning of “success”? To start, I propose that we begin by thinking like a 17-year old student who I recently met at one of my workshops and who shared her thoughts on the topic. She noted that instead of asking, what do I want be when I grow up, she has learned to ask herself, who do I want to grow up to be? This is a question that every Stanford Student should be asking himself or herself.

As an introduction to my workshops on healthy relationships in Stanford residences, I often ask students to raise their hands if they know someone who is very successful in the academic-professional-financial aspects of their life and yet has had really serious difficulty in their personal and relationship life. (Insert divorce rates here.) The hands fly up. Next, I ask them how many hours each day they spend on the skills and abilities related to their academic as well as professional lives and futures (answer: 10+ hours), in comparison to the number of hours they spend each day on aspects of themselves related to their emotional-internal lives and present-future relationships – answer: blank looks. What I’ve learned is that you can’t have a ratio if one of the numbers is zero. My point is that we all know that it would be ridiculous to desire to get a degree at Stanford while spending little, if any, time going to class or completing class work, and yet, this is how we treat the incredibly complex quest for healthy and fulfilling personal lives and relationships. It seems that there is an unspoken assumption amongst the highly educated that amidst graduate school, residency, post-doctoral fellowships, and taking the bar that the relationship-marriage-family stuff will “just work itself out.” If we believe that success lies solely in the areas of academic-professional-financial achievement, then (I suppose) this way of thinking works. However, if we believe what the research in the field of Happiness/Positive Psychology tells us over and over again – that lottery winners and professors who get tenure return to their baseline rates of happiness in a about two years – and we believe that being a personal success includes a life lived with meaning and fulfilling personal relationships, then we (at Stanford) are not preparing our students for a successful life.

To resume our original discussion of motivational strategies for success, I am sure that the Tiger Mom’s strategies can and do sometimes work, just as Bobby Knight knows how to get his teams to win. Yes, the most negative of motivational strategies (hazing, terror and torture) can work especially in the short term, but we often fail to ask a crucial question: at what cost? Despite what we learned in Economics class about opportunity cost we somehow forget that there is a cost to everything. There is a cost to being famous (just ask Lindsay Lohan or anyone on Dr. Drew’s Celebrity Rehab), there is a cost to being a world-class athlete, and there is even a cost to being a Stanford student. I’m not saying that we should not make these choices or that the costs are not worth the benefits. I am simply saying that whenever we decide that reaching some goal equals success, we should also consider the obvious and intangible costs related to this goal. For example, Stanford Professor Denise Pope, author of Doing School and founder of the organization, Challenge Success, has said on many occasions that while she would be glad to have her children go to Stanford, knowing what she knows now, she is not willing to have them pay the personal price it would take to get them there. (For more on this topic see the film, “Race To Nowhere.”)

The crucial question is, do we motivate our children and ourselves with the whip or with compassion for self and others? (For more on self-compassion, see the work and courses of Professor Kelly McGonigal.) In her Stanford Daily op-ed article, “Self-Compassion,” Belinda Chiang – spurred by the suicide of a friend and fellow Stanford student – eloquently discusses the idea of self-compassion in our community and in our minds.

We know that he was a great golf coach, but I often wonder how Earl Woods, parent of Tiger Woods, was as a father. Maybe Tiger was just so good at golf at the age of 2-3 that he didn’t need to practice very much or maybe he did it all of his own free will, but somehow I doubt it. I think it is a safe generalization to say that children just want to go outside and play (and I don’t mean 18 holes). In the field of Positive Psychology, happiness is defined as the joy and fulfillment we experience on the journey towards a goal. And so, whether it is “success” or “happiness” we must consider our definitions before we charge forward down a particular path towards our goals. If we fail to do this, then, indeed, we may succeed while paying a very heavy cost.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, a person can have both success and happiness, but the equation is the reverse of what we so often hear. As Shawn Achor, positive psychology teacher, writer, and inspirational speaker, puts it, “happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the result.”