The Road to Freedom (5 page)

FOR THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE
, the most common source of earned success is work.

People need to work. Philosopher Erich Fromm wrote that “only in being productively active can man make sense of his life.”
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This is partly correct; unproductivity is obviously terrible, which is one of the reasons unemployed people have such high depression rates. But being “productively active” is not enough. Slaves are productively active. To earn their success, people have to be more than just productive; they must also choose their own paths and have a chance at finding the work that matches their passions with their talents. That match is what Albert Camus called
the “soul” in work. “Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.”
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I came to understand this—and to appreciate the system that offered a chance to find the soul in my work—through firsthand experience.

I used to have what some considered the best job possible, yet was unhappy. I spent my whole childhood playing music—violin, then piano, and then finally the French horn. From the age of nine, playing the horn was practically all I did. I worked hard, year after year, with hours and hours of practice, rehearsals, lessons, and competitions. I never thought about
whether
I would pursue a career as a musician; it was simply inevitable. I skipped college to go professional, taking a job with a brass quintet. I toured Alaska in February and Arizona in July, and practiced like crazy. After a few years, I won a job playing in a symphony orchestra—the dream of most classical musicians.

My friends in the orchestra thrived on what they were doing and threw themselves into it with abandonment. They would spend their vacations at classical music conventions and heatedly discuss the most esoteric details of the lacquer on their instruments. Try as I might, I lacked such ardor. I loved great music, but found the production of it punitive and exacting, and I knew my job would never change much. My friends had found the soul in their work, but I hadn't found the soul in mine.

So in my late twenties, I hatched a plot to quit. I took a job teaching music during the day, and (without telling anyone but my wife) studied economics at night until I had a bachelor's degree. At age thirty-one, I gave up the horn and started graduate school, planning to become a social scientist and write books. This was a crazy idea for a French horn player. When I called my father to announce my career change, he asked incredulously, “Why do you want to leave music, when it's going so well?” “Because I'm not happy,” I
told him. He was silent for a moment and then demanded, “What makes
you
so special?”

The fact is, I'm
not
so special. I'm just an American, and I understood instinctively that the genius of our free enterprise system is that it makes it possible for people to reinvent themselves and earn their success.
²⁹
That is why the U.S. has always been a magnet for people from other parts of the world who want to transform their lives. It has created a society of opportunity-seeking strivers who can match their skills and passions—the America our Founders envisioned, and Alexis de Tocqueville marveled at when he said, “What most astonishes me in the United States, is not so much the marvelous grandeur of some undertakings, as the innumerable multitude of small ones.”
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America's system allowed me to find the work where my soul resides. Today, I feel I earn my success, and my job gives me joy. I now look forward to work, and probably spend twice as much time doing it each week as I ever did during my years in music. I work so much now that someone who doesn't understand the system that matches people with the work they love—a European social democrat, for example—might think I'm a crazed workaholic. As a matter of fact, that's basically the view that Europeans have of most Americans.

Have you ever heard the old expression that Americans live to work and Europeans work to live? It's basically true. Americans work 50 percent more than the Italians, French, and even the Germans.
³¹

Why? Some argue that it's because Americans are terrified of losing our jobs; others claim it's due to our quasi-religious work ethic. According to
Time
magazine, “in the puritanical version of Christianity that has always appealed to Americans, religion comes packaged with the stern message that hard work is good for the soul. Modern Europe has avoided so melancholy a lesson.”
³²

While that analysis might sound compelling to some people, earned success is a better explanation for Americans' work ethic. Simply put, work in America creates more personal value than it does in other places. Numerous studies have shown that Americans enjoy greater social mobility than Europeans, and becoming successful in one's work can raise social status.
³³
In addition, Americans have traditionally been taxed less on their labor income than Europeans, which means harder work is rewarded financially.
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Not surprisingly, working makes Americans much happier than it makes Europeans. One economist at the University of Texas-Dallas has used numerous databases to show that Americans outrank Europeans in happiness at high work levels, while the reverse is true at low work levels.
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Europeans are happiest working thirty-five to thirty-nine hours per week. Americans are happiest working fifty to fifty-nine hours. My own data analysis shows that “very happy” Americans work more hours each week than those who are “pretty happy,” who in turn work more hours than people who are “not too happy.”
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The vast majority of Americans like their jobs. Among adults who worked ten hours a week or more in 2002, 89 percent said they were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs.
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And people with high-paying jobs aren't the only ones who are satisfied. There is no difference between those with below- and above-average incomes: 89 percent are satisfied.
³⁸

In America, job satisfaction relates to life satisfaction. Among those who say they are very happy in their lives, 95 percent are also satisfied with their jobs. Only 5 percent say they are not satisfied with their work.
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The evidence also shows that the relationship is causal: job satisfaction actually
increases
life happiness.
⁴⁰

Europeans find this notion mind-boggling. When I describe American work habits to my European in-laws, they just shake
their heads and make derisive comments about how brainwashed we all are. Even weirder, they think, is our attitude about vacations. When getting to know a European, a typical question is, “Where are you going on vacation this year?” You rarely hear this trivial conversation in America. There is no indication that Americans wish they had more vacation time than they have already. Only 11 percent of American workers say they wish they could spend a lot less time on their jobs.
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Am I arguing that Americans are happier than Europeans and that Europeans could be as happy as Americans are, if only they embraced our system? Actually, I'm not. Europeans do reasonably well on happiness indexes. One British study from 2006 compared 128 countries worldwide and concluded that Denmark was the happiest country in the world, even somewhat more so than the United States.
⁴²
Other surveys show that the United States has the edge. But either way, it's clear that Europeans think they're pretty happy.

It is reasonable to assume that Americans and Europeans are different, on average, and are made happy by different things. For most Americans, work in a free enterprise system that matches our skills and talents is essential to happiness, so the European system would be wrong for
us
. Immigrants with “American wiring” come to our shores to work hard and create value. European-style social democracy would make it harder for most Americans—whether they are Americans by birth or by choice—to earn our success and would make us unhappier as a people. We need to resist all efforts to push America in a European direction.

WHEN I DESCRIBE
earned success, perhaps I seem to be talking only about the good things in life. After all, flourishing and happiness don't come from pain and suffering, right?

Wrong. According to the great Hindu yogi Paramahansa Yogananda, “the weakling who has refused the conflict, acquiring nothing, has had nothing to renounce. He alone who has striven and won can enrich the world by bestowing the fruits of his victorious experience.”
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Earned success requires sacrifice. And a system that dedicates itself to expunging the challenge and risk from people's lives is immoral.

Whenever you ask entrepreneurs about their success, they spend a great deal of time describing the hardships: early failures and bankruptcies, missed little league games, and endless nights without sleep. They talk about almost losing their homes and the strain all this put on their marriages.

Take Bernie Marcus, founder of The Home Depot, the $60 billion home improvement retail chain. Marcus initially struggled desperately to make the venture work. At the first store's grand opening in 1979, he sent his friends and family into the street to give away $1 bills to lure people into the empty store. The result? “We literally couldn't give the dollar bills away,” he recalled.
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He jokes that his wife wouldn't let him shave during this time, because she didn't want him to be alone with a razor blade.

The legendary investment company founder Charles Schwab is another example. When asked about the incredible success of his $15 billion company, he tells the story about taking out a second mortgage on his home just to make payroll in the early years.
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The focus on early failure is funny, when you think about it. If you ask a friend about a vacation to Mexico she clearly enjoyed, she'll talk mostly about how sunny it was and how beautiful the beach was—not so much about how it had increased her chances for melanoma or how the airline lost her luggage. Yet happy, successful entrepreneurs always talk about how much they sacrificed before attaining success.

I asked Bernie Marcus why entrepreneurs always recall the sacrifices when they talk about the path to prosperity. For him, he told me, sacrifices were central to his later earned success. Failure, anxiety, and lean years weren't just necessarily evils; they were lessons to learn and tests to pass. They were the “earned” part of “earned success,” and there was no substitute for them. Without sacrifice, either there's no success or, at the very least, it's not earned. Either way, it's no good.

When we hear about successful entrepreneurs, it is always as if they had the Midas touch. You know the story: A pimply college kid cooks up an Internet company during a boring lecture at Harvard, and before lunch, he's a billionaire. But in real life, that's not how it works. Steven Rogers, in
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Finance and Business
, reports that the average entrepreneur fails 3.8 times before succeeding.
⁴⁶
According to
careerbuilder.com
, the average small-business owner earns $44,576 per year in personal income, hardly a fortune, and a lot less than the average civil servant.
⁴⁷

Entrepreneurs aren't generally rich, and they fail a lot. When they sacrifice, they are learning and improving, exactly what they need to do to earn their success through their merits. Every sacrifice and failure makes them smarter and better, showing them that they're not getting anything for free. When success ultimately comes, they wouldn't trade away the earlier sacrifice for anything, even if they felt wretched at the time.

Experimental psychologists have shown in novel ways the link between the ability to sacrifice and success. In one famous study from 1972, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel concocted an experiment involving young children and a bag of marshmallows. A researcher would put a marshmallow on the table and tell the child he was leaving the room for a little while. He told the child
that if he or she could refrain from eating the marshmallow until the researcher came back fifteen minutes later, the child would get another one as a reward.
⁴⁸

It sounds easy, but it wasn't. About two-thirds of the kids failed the experiment. Some gave up immediately and gobbled up the marshmallow as soon as the researcher walked out. Videotape shows other kids in agony, trying to discipline themselves to get the sweet reward—some even banging their little heads on the table.

But the most interesting results from that study came years later. Researchers followed up on the kids in the study to see how their lives were turning out. What was the difference between the kids who waited, and the kids who didn't? The kids who took the marshmallow immediately had average SAT scores 210 points lower than the kids who refrained. They dropped out of college at higher rates, made far less money, were more likely to go to jail, and suffered from more drug and alcohol problems.
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So let's return to public policy as it relates to sacrifice. The welfare state exists, in no small part, to shove the marshmallows into our mouths. It gets rid of sacrifice. It smoothes out our economic lives and protects us from unpleasant downsides. The welfare state—including not just those who receive welfare checks but everyone else who relies on the state to bail them out as well—protects people from the vicissitudes of life.