It's On You

There's never been a better time to do things

One of my all-time favorite movie lines is from the 1947 version of The Bishop’s Wife, starring Cary Grant, David Niven, and Loretta Young. One of the supporting actors was Monty Woolley, who played the character of the aging Professor Wutheridge. At one point in the movie, Wutheridge, believing himself past his intellectual prime, and feeling unproductive, remarks that “for quite a while now, every time I passed a cemetery, I felt as if I were apartment hunting.”

That line has always resonated with me because in very real ways I have felt that way my entire adult life. On Christmas eve of 1980, as a young husband and father of a 6-week-old child, a cardiologist told me that if I didn’t have open-heart surgery I would not survive until my 30th birthday. I have written on this platform before about having lived a life rather more interesting than I would recommend for others. But when your adulthood starts out the way mine did in 1980, you have well and truly had your nose rubbed in your own mortality. Indeed, the congenital defect that necessitated that first heart surgery has reared its head time and again, culminating in very nearly killing me just nine years ago.

So I often give a wry chuckle when I hear people on the left complaining about things like white privilege and systemic racism. Conceiving of people as advantaged or disadvantaged, for such a facile reason as their skin color, is not only malevolent, it is astonishingly dumb. I have raised multi-racial children, and I am very happy to report, with relief I must say, that my brownest child’s anatomy imposes nothing like the obstacles his white father has faced in making his own way through life. I take a backseat to no one in having to live life with an anatomy that puts a damper on your privilege.

I write this neither for attention nor for pity, but to make a point to any young men who are seriously trying to figure things out. In spite of my own life-threatening obstacles, I have managed to do well, to provide for my family, and to have more than a little fun along the way. But that has only been possible by choosing to disregard my impediments and just do things anyway. I have learned that, when faced with what seem like immovable structural obstacles, your greatest opportunity for success is found in leaning into your own agency, acting in pursuit of virtuous goals and without waiting for systemic or official approval. True competence is more valuable than any credential and more powerful than any macro statistic. You don’t need some professor’s permission to do things that are useful. Your character and your demonstrable skills will affect your destiny far more than your skin color or your credentials.

This matters right now, because I seem to hear a steady drumbeat, coming even from many supposed conservatives, that seems continually fixated on the insurmountability of current structural obstacles and that deemphasizes the way human agency creates opportunity in every individual life.

I am not trying to pretend that young people aren’t facing any difficult obstacles. All of the complaints may very well be true — at a macro level. But at a micro level - at the level of the individual - things are always very different. Every young man who conceives of himself as merely one among a larger cohort of peers, a cohort which is being held back by external obstacles, has just become one of those being held back. If your locus of control is external, then you are choosing to be a victim of circumstance.

But here’s the thing: you yourself can choose to act for the benefit of your own flourishing and for the flourishing of those you love. You do not have to be just one of the herd.

Probably by the time I was sixteen years old, I had a conscious sense that, more than anything else, I wanted to acquire a demonstrable skill in something with which I could produce economic value. A willingness to work at acquiring a skill, while your peers are passively waiting on changes to the macro environment, will immediately set you apart from most of your generation.

When the cardiologist told me on that Christmas eve that I needed heart surgery, he took a sledgehammer to all my plans. It would be three years before I was really back on my mental feet after that. During those three years, after taking months to recover from the surgery, I worked as a bank teller, a carpenter’s helper; at night I cooked hamburgers at Wendy’s and by day I worked in the pit underneath cars at a fast oil change business, coming home every night soaked in motor oil and transmission fluid.

I worked 60 hours a week changing oil, but caught a break by accidentally injuring myself, ending up in the corporate office for a few weeks while recovering from my injury. Sitting on a desk in that corporate office, unused because no one knew what to do with it, was a Radio Shack desktop computer.

Over the next two years, I taught myself to program that computer. I knew precisely zero about programming computers when I started. But I read the manuals, bought some other books, and spent all of my free time reading about programming. I was “fortuitously” offered a permanent job in the corporate office, where I was able to test my understanding of the books I was reading by writing code on that Radio Shack computer.

My friends would tease me, whenever they came over, because I would often be buried in a book about software development. But I somehow intuited that this was actually a lifeline and a skill very much worth having. So I set aside many months of personal leisure time to arm myself with these skills.

I am not trying to tell anyone to “learn to code” like I did. Not at all. That worked for me, but not everyone has the personality or the temperament to spend their days puzzling over computer logic. But I am saying that, with everything stacked against me, (I had no resources to take advantage of professional teachers or training, and I also had to work like a Trojan all the while, because I had a wife and family to feed) I was nevertheless able to acquire skills that have been a benefit to me, my family, and many others for over 40 years.

Alas, none of this occurred because I am some kind of amazing person. The truth is both simpler and far more convicting than that. I succeeded due to a simple willingness to operate on a basic set of assumptions, first and foremost being the belief that opening doors of opportunity depended upon actions I myself could take. I understood that I could not wait on “the system” or “the economy” to create an opportunity for me. I intuitively rejected the notion that structural/macro obstacles would foreclose my opportunity to succeed. In other words, I proceeded by thinking of myself as an individual, not as a cog within a cohort which was doomed to share a common, dismal fate at the hands of some kind of impersonal forces.

By every statistical measure I was hopeless, but it never occurred to me to think of myself that way. In truth, our lives and opportunities cannot be truly represented by numbers expressed within arbitrarily chosen statistical boundaries.

There is a place for talking about societal-scale obstacles being faced by young men, the challenges to young families, and all the rest. But that mostly involves reasoning about public policy. As an individual, however, you can pursue your own goals and still achieve them, notwithstanding any macro obstacles, or scary-sounding, societal-scale statistics that are facing your generation.

You yourself can do things. You can acquire the skills. You can get on a proper footing to marry the girl and make some chubby babies. It’s on you to take action. Don’t blame your circumstance. Don’t blame the times you live in. There has never been an easier time, in all of human history, for arming yourself with valuable skills. Truly.

Do it.