Defining The Win

I would love to report that what I found in the prosperity gospel was something so foreign and terrible to me that I was warned away. But what I discovered was both familiar and painfully sweet: the promise that I could curate my life, minimize my losses, and stand on my successes. And no matter how many times I rolled my eyes at the creed’s outrageous certainties, I craved them just the same. I had my own prosperity gospel, a flowering weed grown in with all the rest.
– Kate Bowler

If there is a prosperity gospel for the youth of Silicon Valley, it would be something like this: you can have it all. You can be an elite athlete and get straight A’s. You can do music and a sport; engineer a world-changing project and have time for hobbies. You can achieve academic success and depth of character; you can have a full schedule and intimacy with your family. And you can use all of it to craft the kind of compelling narrative that will get you into the top college of your choice, so you can do what you’ve already figured out you want to do with your life. Anything outside of this is not just a statistical anomaly; it is an error. Curate your life, minimize your losses, stand on your successes.

Is it really like this? Moving here with a passel of little kids, that’s what I wanted to know. Yes, and no. Yes, you can shield your children somewhat from all that: you can lottery them into a school without grades; you can find teachers focused on fun; you can craft your own home culture. And no: eventually your kids will get involved in communal activities or higher levels of education and encounter what is essentially a very narrow definition of success. Success, defined as measurable, comparative achievement in every area of life, is the intangible yet incontrovertible thing around which life revolves.

We encountered this recently when one of our kids aged up into an older swim group. On one hand, it was simply the next step in the linear progression she’d been on for years: each year, adding on more practice time and harder drills. On the other hand, mingled in with the usual team bonding and fun, there was now an undeniable atmosphere of pressure. She was given handouts on how to be an elite athlete, expected to travel for weeks to training camps, gone for three to four hours every day at the pool. I think some would have thrived under the pressure, but she struggled to keep up, and that, combined with the implicit expectation that she should only push herself more, led to some degree of anxiety.

Perhaps most revealing was the reaction she got when she decided to step down to a less competitive group. Everyone was stunned: she had gotten into the top group, the one everyone wanted to get into. Why would she leave? Because, of course, that was success. Success was admission to the more prestigious group, so you could achieve a faster time. But that was not success for our child. Success for our child was having time to eat slower, to explore other interests at her own pace, to train under more attainable standards. It was having more time to embellish projects for school or make a card for her friend’s birthday. And the truth is, she could not do it all. And her decision not to do so was not a failure. In the world she lives in, it was an act of courage.

Here's the thing: our kids operate under a definition of success as achievement, and then we expect them somewhere in adulthood to be able to switch that definition to one of wellness. Achieve it all, arrive, and then be happy and well. We think the one success leads to the other. But in reality, they involve two very different skill sets. Success at achievement involves being good at meeting external benchmarks and goals. It involves being busy with productive activities. Success at wellness involves knowing yourself. It involves depth of relationships, tested faith, a sense of vocation and meaning. It requires a kind of reflection, space, vulnerability, and freedom which external achievement does not foster.

Sometime wellness and achievement overlap, because the latter extends from the former, or maybe the latter even fosters the former. It all depends on the child. The win for one child may be reaching a qualifying time in a swim event; the win for another may be showing up for that event even though they know they’ll be finishing last. The win for one child may be pushing through anxiety to try something hard; the win for that same child in another situation may be the willingness to quit. Is one win better than another?

Ultimately, we must examine the unspoken metrics of success we implicitly and explicitly lay out for our children. How are they informed by our society? By our peers? By our pasts? Instead of asking, “what does everyone assume is success?” or “what will make others think my child is successful?” we need to ask, “what is success for my child?” or sometimes, “what is success for this child, right now?”

These things are hard to see, hard to verbalize, the way it’s hard for a fish to describe the water it swims in. It took us longer than it should have, perhaps, to see that the next automatic step for our child was not automatically the best one. In the end, it was something she was able to see herself, and her ability to recognize that, even though it went against the norm, was perhaps the biggest win of all.