Sturdy Lad

This is an extract from Emerson’s Self-Reliance:

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances. Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, – and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history.

I’ve worked with people who have not gone to college. People who have informally or empirically studied a craft and gone off and made a living of it. I’ve also seen college graduates fail at a real job. Folks who have graduated with honors and gotten beat up by the realities of work-life.

College is a micro-universe, a bubble. It has a set of rules that we can follow and reach a successful outcome. Like playing a video-game. You can start, play, fail, restart, try again, succeed. The reward is an acknowledgment from a group of experts. When finished, you have won the game of college. It does not imply you have won the game of work-life.

At the end of our teenage years, we’re given the task of choosing what we’ll want to do professionally for the rest of our lives. It’s not an absolutist choice, but society does not reward those who periodically switch professions. We are continuously rewarded in the career ladder if we become specialists at a craft. This makes the choice, at that age, immensely stressful. Even if we don’t realize it.

What Emerson reflects on in his passage is entitlement. As a college graduate, I felt a sense of “deserving” a certain job. I had studied all the components of computer engineering and passed the expert’s trials, so I must be qualified. Right? As soon as you start seeing how real business operate, and how money is really made –by providing value to someone else–, it is easy to realize how unprepared I was.

Emerson talks of “the sturdy lad.” One that hasn’t had the opportunity to formally train in a craft. One that out of passion or labor, has empirically learned a craft. If we come out of college so unprepared, isn’t work-life the great equalizer? Don’t we all, when confronted with problems from the true craft, face it on equal grounds? Aren’t we all forced to become sturdy lads in order to succeed? Don’t we all get a hundred chances?