A lot of good points in this one. Not sure I will be able to unsee this bias towards giftedness/privilege over effort, now that it's been made clear.
Of course, many have long complained about how film and TV give a very compressed view of success, leaving out all the hard parts and struggle in the middle. But I don't recall seeing anyone point out this consistent preference for the privileged, gifted hero and how Hollywood contrasts these to the scrappy, upstart and sometimes hard-working and creative (to the point of kooky) villains.
It's almost as if Americans have a deep-seated longing for a the nobility of class-based society, as opposed to a true meritocracy. Is Hollywood right about this??
The Hollywood perspective is interesting but I think it is failing to reflect recent cultural changes (in education at least). As a foreign educated engineering PhD I was surprised how much American educational institutions emphasized hard work over academic achievement. Even our better schools underperform their UK and European counterparts for the simple reason they celebrate grind over academic achievement. The workload American students are subjected to is disproportionate to the academic level of the work.
Maybe, part of the problem is that a lot of the work is actually pointless. In many of our schools, particularly the "good" schools, the ability to manage a high workload is the point, not learning chemistry or math. When one starts discussing the issue with people, the answer is that employers need hard workers more than they need chemistry or math skills. When it comes to education, conservatives seem to subscribe to a "hard work is its own reward" ethic.
This recent article also has noticed the hard work over outcomes trend:
Yes, this is one of my biggest complaints about American education, how we're basically trained to do everything the hard way. So entrepreneurs tend to be rather contrarian here, and often don't do well in school.
I remember the endless homework sets in engineering; school was an endless grind. It was important to work problems, but maybe not so many.
I have often wondered how it's done in the English system, my impression has been that it's very different. It was a long time ago, but I had a couple of English-born engineering professors, and I did well in their classes.
In the UK, high school students earn their grades from external exams at the end of 10 and 12th grade. With a few exceptions nothing else counts. With grades coming from external exams and schools being judged by their students' exam results, there is no place for anything that does not benefit the student academically. The constant grading (and graded homework) is a very American thing.
At universities, they have dialed back the practice of 100% of a student's grade coming from end of year exams to some degree, but it is still common, especially in engineering. 1st year grades do not count unless you actually fail. Generally more easygoing than the American system with the caveat that by the time exams come around, may God have mercy, you better be ready.
It's an interesting cultural paradox, I would not have expected American education to be so focused on grind and busywork while the rest of the world is on the "get it done" side. Vivek is full of nonsense, outside of a few subcultures most foreign students are not overworking themselves, when grades come from final exams, people take advantage of that.
In the A-level system ~10% of students receive the top score (A*). How is that a sufficient discriminator for the most competitive universities like Oxbridge? They would have to rely on other (more biased IMO) measures like interviews.
In the Australian system, each student receives a score between 0 and 100 based on their ranking in final-year state exams. I knew two students who achieved the top score in my year, and both went on to become Math/Physics professors in the US.
It's an excellent system for identifying talent, though unfortunately this talent ends up in elite US colleges.
The first "Rocky" movie did glorify the grind. Long scenes of Rocky getting up before dawn, doing endurance runs, punching workouts against sides of beef, swallowing raw eggs for fuel, etc. The iconic shot in the movie takes place when he finishes training.
Ha ha, yes, I've never even seen it all the way through, but while reading I thought of the first Rocky film as a counter-example. Considering that it was a breakout, surprise hit, that spawned a whole series of films, perhaps Hollywood is misreading Americans' taste in movies?
In the books Jack Reacher is famously a genetic freak, who doesn’t work out apart some walking and occasional manual labor.
That being said, look at fiction from the past and even movies like Wanted; the main character gets superpowers but this ends up meaning almost nothing because he now enters a world where his enemies are super powered, so a combination of training and strategy pulls him through in the end. Minor example but there you go.
Thanks for the wisdom here, Aaron, through Mr. Holmes. I try to teach this principle to a high school writing class and appreciate how he recommends more attention to the glory of the grind.
A lot of good points in this one. Not sure I will be able to unsee this bias towards giftedness/privilege over effort, now that it's been made clear.
Of course, many have long complained about how film and TV give a very compressed view of success, leaving out all the hard parts and struggle in the middle. But I don't recall seeing anyone point out this consistent preference for the privileged, gifted hero and how Hollywood contrasts these to the scrappy, upstart and sometimes hard-working and creative (to the point of kooky) villains.
It's almost as if Americans have a deep-seated longing for a the nobility of class-based society, as opposed to a true meritocracy. Is Hollywood right about this??
The Hollywood perspective is interesting but I think it is failing to reflect recent cultural changes (in education at least). As a foreign educated engineering PhD I was surprised how much American educational institutions emphasized hard work over academic achievement. Even our better schools underperform their UK and European counterparts for the simple reason they celebrate grind over academic achievement. The workload American students are subjected to is disproportionate to the academic level of the work.
Maybe, part of the problem is that a lot of the work is actually pointless. In many of our schools, particularly the "good" schools, the ability to manage a high workload is the point, not learning chemistry or math. When one starts discussing the issue with people, the answer is that employers need hard workers more than they need chemistry or math skills. When it comes to education, conservatives seem to subscribe to a "hard work is its own reward" ethic.
This recent article also has noticed the hard work over outcomes trend:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/opinion/school-grades-a-quantity-quality.html
Yes, this is one of my biggest complaints about American education, how we're basically trained to do everything the hard way. So entrepreneurs tend to be rather contrarian here, and often don't do well in school.
I remember the endless homework sets in engineering; school was an endless grind. It was important to work problems, but maybe not so many.
I have often wondered how it's done in the English system, my impression has been that it's very different. It was a long time ago, but I had a couple of English-born engineering professors, and I did well in their classes.
In the UK, high school students earn their grades from external exams at the end of 10 and 12th grade. With a few exceptions nothing else counts. With grades coming from external exams and schools being judged by their students' exam results, there is no place for anything that does not benefit the student academically. The constant grading (and graded homework) is a very American thing.
At universities, they have dialed back the practice of 100% of a student's grade coming from end of year exams to some degree, but it is still common, especially in engineering. 1st year grades do not count unless you actually fail. Generally more easygoing than the American system with the caveat that by the time exams come around, may God have mercy, you better be ready.
It's an interesting cultural paradox, I would not have expected American education to be so focused on grind and busywork while the rest of the world is on the "get it done" side. Vivek is full of nonsense, outside of a few subcultures most foreign students are not overworking themselves, when grades come from final exams, people take advantage of that.
In the A-level system ~10% of students receive the top score (A*). How is that a sufficient discriminator for the most competitive universities like Oxbridge? They would have to rely on other (more biased IMO) measures like interviews.
In the Australian system, each student receives a score between 0 and 100 based on their ranking in final-year state exams. I knew two students who achieved the top score in my year, and both went on to become Math/Physics professors in the US.
It's an excellent system for identifying talent, though unfortunately this talent ends up in elite US colleges.
The first "Rocky" movie did glorify the grind. Long scenes of Rocky getting up before dawn, doing endurance runs, punching workouts against sides of beef, swallowing raw eggs for fuel, etc. The iconic shot in the movie takes place when he finishes training.
Ha ha, yes, I've never even seen it all the way through, but while reading I thought of the first Rocky film as a counter-example. Considering that it was a breakout, surprise hit, that spawned a whole series of films, perhaps Hollywood is misreading Americans' taste in movies?
In the books Jack Reacher is famously a genetic freak, who doesn’t work out apart some walking and occasional manual labor.
That being said, look at fiction from the past and even movies like Wanted; the main character gets superpowers but this ends up meaning almost nothing because he now enters a world where his enemies are super powered, so a combination of training and strategy pulls him through in the end. Minor example but there you go.
Thanks for the wisdom here, Aaron, through Mr. Holmes. I try to teach this principle to a high school writing class and appreciate how he recommends more attention to the glory of the grind.