A Modest Proposal
In high school senior English, we had the assignment to write a satire. Our model was Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, where Swift writes with a straight face that poor people should sell their children as food, which, let’s be honest, is a bit too “oh so clever.” I can’t say if it really made an impact on 18th century Ireland, but I’d be surprised if it had. It struck me as quintessential ineffectual intellectual work that was mostly about making the writer sound smart.
I decided that I’d write a satire satire, a satirical take on “modest proposal”-style satire, which basically consisted of me writing stuff like “satire is stupid” and “satire is really really stupid.” My teacher gave me a zero on an assignment that everyone else got a 100 on for writing about how we should use babies as basketballs and that kind of thing. I remember my teacher writing in the margin, “This doesn’t resemble satire at all.”
It’s not a surprise that I was never particularly successful in school. I always did either terrible or okay, but never great. Once I was hanging out with my cousin Eric, who has a Ph.D from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. I asked him, “What’s your secret?”
You see, Eric wasn’t just a recipient of one of the United States’s most prestigious postgraduate scholarships, he was always the best and most loved person around. He was president of his college’s Society of Black Engineers–as a Chinese guy. When he went on Loveboat, the infamous 4-week study tour in Taiwan for overseas Taiwanese, he was chosen as the best student–for basically no reason because his Chinese kinda sucks. Beyond that, he’s an extremely funny and kind person.
Eric leaned in, and he told me his secret to success.
“Pretend like you care.”
When I was a kid, I never cared about anything that you could apply the label “work” to. In fact, I liked to openly show disdain for my teachers, and that’s why I immediately understood the importance of what Eric was talking about. Much of the talk about passion at work, Generation Y, etc., is overblown. You just gotta care. You don’t even have to care that much, really, but you have to care a little bit. The funny twist is that if you pretend like you care for awhile, you might actually start to care.