By the time my father died several summers ago, he was 103 years
old. Hegrew up on a farm in Ohio and was the only one of seven children
to leave farming, finding his way through complicated paths to Harvard
and Columbia, getting his Ph.D. in rural education and teaching at Ohio
State University until he was 60. Then he and my mother bought an old
abandoned farm in northwest Connecticut, remodeled the house, and moved
there to live.
For many years he roamed the hillsides, thing trees and taking
pride in looking up at his dean and tidy mountain. As he grew older, his
legs and back would tire earlier in the day, and sometimes he would hire
a young man to help him keep up the place.
Over the years, almost unnoticeably, the upper part of the mountain
was no longer within his range; and gradually his level of aspiration
lowered, coming down the hillside, so to speak, into the trees and land
around the house. One year he did not plant the gardens, and his
attention turned to the little border flowers around the house and to
four large outdoor windowboxes.
The windowboxes served well for years, but then his failing sight
and muscular strength meant that he could not tend even these without
great effort. In the end, the tree work, farm work, and gardening all
were given up. But he focused on a new activity: listening to "talking
books." This man was as happy and fulfilled at 101 as he was at 60. In
dealing with the gaps between his desires and achievements, he had an
unyielding drive for growth and mastery, a rational mind, and a capacity
for change. But these traits were not unique to my father; they are.part
of every human being.
Our Drive for Growth and Mastery
I believe we are not content with what we already know and can do;
we want action and growth-opportunities to explore our competence and
mastery. Young or old, we want to be challenged. We want to shape, form,
and build our own lives. One of the most vivid events for parents is to
hear their little child, scarcely a year and a half old, shout out the
demand, "Me do it! Me do it myself!"
Judith Rodin and other psychologists who study aging find that
growth and mastery are central to older people's sense of well-being.
Studies of job satisfaction give convincing evidence that challenge and
autonomy make work more satisfying. Even if our work situation is
confining, repetitive, and boring, we create a way to grow.
The drive for growth and mastery is, though powerful, curiously
bounded. We choose challenges that are difficult enough to perplex and
test our powers, yet not so tough that we are likely to face severe or
frequent failure. Most of the time we try to arrange things so that we
are neither pushed to the limit nor coasting, neither overloaded nor
underloaded. We seek a level of effort that the psychologist Nicholas
Hobbs called the level of "just manageable difficulty."
Part of the art of choosing difficulties is to select those that
are indeed just manageable. If the difficulties chosen are too easy, fife
is boring; if they are too hard, life is defeating.
In the actual management of our achievement gaps, we change the
elements of our actions. If we fail, we cut back by decreasing the degree
of difficulty in a new task. This may mean searching for new behavior
that works better, extending our timetable for achieving a particular
goal, or reducing the amount or quality of the result we expect from the
resolution of the task- If none of these strategies works, we will, in
the end, give up this goal.
Winning sets a different process in motion. When we win, the
response is to increase the degree of difficulty. We set a shorter
timetable for the next endeavor, raising expectations of how much we can
achieve, even broadening out and adding new goals. We will try to get
there earlier or faster, and to get more or better results. In other
words, winning raises our hopes; losing lowers them.
There are broad implications here for what happens to people when
they are successful at work. Once you get good at a particular job, it no
longer takes most of your ability to do it well. So you set your sights
higher and push on to more demanding work. Ongoing studies of American
Telephone & Telegraph executives show that those who were successful
in reaching the middle-management level after eight years gradually
became more work-oriented. The less successful men, contrast, focused
their energies more on their families and their religious, recreational,
and social activities.
Finding the Right Level
Where is the right level of difficulty? We can define it for
ourselves, subjectively, and tell others when we are there or when life
is too easy or too hard. But objectively, who can say? There are three
clues to what may be going on. One way to describe a level of difficulty
is in terms o the probability that our action will succeed or fad.
Research on artificial tasks shows that we are most strongly motivated to
try to achieve success when we know the risk of failure to be about
fifty-fifty. The joy of winning is enhanced by the threat of failure.
Activities that involve no risk cannot provide the joy of
achievement.
Tags:
achievement,
ambition,
dean,
farming,
flowers,
gaps,
goal,
growth opportunities,
Harvard,
hillside,
legs,
level of aspiration,
muscular strength,
northwest connecticut,
ohio state university,
pride,
rational mind,
risk,
rural education,
self-assessment,
talking books,
windowboxes,
young man
