What Ladders Are You Climbing?

Picking the right ladders to climb is one of the most important things we do in life.

In his book Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, written with Daniel Gross, economist and public intellectual Tyler Cowen said:

Knowing how to perceive and climb the right hierarchies is one of the most stringent but also most universal tests available. It requires emotional self-regulation, perceptiveness, ambition, vision, proper sequencing, and enough order in one’s activities to actually get somewhere. Whenever you see signs that a candidate has this skill, look much more closely. If anecdotes suggest cluelessness about hierarchies, give that person a significant downgrade, at least for all jobs requiring ongoing initiative and learning over time.

He doesn’t define exactly what he means by hierarchies here. There are multiple forms of hierarchy - skill, status, economic, etc. He probably means all of them.

My viral tweet on this drew a huge response, with a barbell distribution. Probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the people loved it, the rest hated it.

I misremembered Cowen’s quote as about “status hierarchies.” A lot of people reacted against the term “status.” Although everyone, and I do mean everyone, is playing some sort of status game, it’s considered gauche to directly mention it. That’s one reason our society is so cynical today. (I should note, Cowen says that focusing too much on pure status games is actually a negative indicator. Things like mastery of craft really matter).

While status is involved in every hierarchy, if you don’t like that word, don’t use it.

Everybody is climbing some ladders. Everybody is playing some game in some league. Everybody is fishing in some pond. Everybody is part of some networks of people. Everybody is part of an ecosystem. Pick the term that makes the most sense to you.

They key is: are you picking the right ladders for what you want to achieve? Are you even conscious of this ladders you’ve chosen to climb?

Choosing the ladders to climb, choosing the game and league to play in, has an enormous impact in where you are going to end up in life. It doesn’t determine what you can achieve, but plays a huge role in it.

Here’s one example. Do you want to be a venture capitalist? A 2018 analysis by Richard Kerby found that 40% of all venture investors graduated from either Harvard or Stanford.

You don’t have to go to Harvard or Stanford to be a VC. Going to Harvard or Stanford won’t turn you into a VC. But this stat is still telling us something profound about what it takes to even gain entry to the venture investing field, much less achieving a high level position within it.

The answer to the “right” hierarchies to choose is not necessary “the most elite.” Most people don’t even want to enter an elite profession like venture capital. And most of us have values and priorities that aren’t a fit for a life of pure elite hierarchy climbing. An example of a guy who looks like he undertook elite hierarchy climbing in a traditional form is Pete Buttigieg. I don’t want to be Pete Buttigieg. Also, trying to play at a level too far above your talent is a recipe for frustration or failure. Although a superb pianist, as a young person Condoleeza Rice smartly decided against pursuing a career as a professional when she saw that there were other people who were much more naturally gifted at it than she was. And, of course, there are always tradeoffs.

You have to choose the right ladders for you. You might want to simply be your own boss and build a life close to family in the area you grew up in. In that case, you might set a goal of founding a “sweaty startup” like a home services trade business (e.g., HVAC contractor). You might then want to start learning your trade working for someone else, move up to working for the premier company in your field in town, then start your own firm, then start building your own business’s reputation. You might also start out as a volunteer for civic organizations and over time become a go to guy the community relies on.

Or think about the immigrant experience. A child of Indian immigrants noted in response to my tweet that his father had perceived that, at the time, climbing the ladder in India wouldn’t provide a lot of opportunity. And also that the conditions there would make it hard for him to climb high anyway. So he moved to the US, a much bigger pond with much more opportunity for moving up. A middle class life here was far above what he could have achieved for his family in India. Say what you will about immigration, but immigrants perceive that the USA has the best ladders in the world to climb, and consciously choose to come here to climb them.

There’s a saying, “Without awareness, there is no choice.” Most people don’t actually choose the ladders they end up climbing. They just ended up on them by default. They did not recognize the profound implications of the path they started walking down.

My Own Path

In my tweet, I described what I view as, retrospectively, one of my biggest mistakes. Namely, I chose the wrong hierarchies to climb. The implications of those choices only became clear 20 years later.

I grew up four miles outside of a town of fewer than 100 people in Southern Indiana. My consolidated high school had 50 people in my graduating class. I got perfect grades in high school, great test scores, and was actually named one of the top 40 high school students in the state of Indiana.

I ended up making the default choices for a Midwest “farm boy” like me who got good grades.

• I went to college at Indiana University. That is, I chose the Big Ten status group of the state flagship university hierarchy.

• I moved to Chicago after graduation. That is, I chose to climb the ladder of Midwest cities, from small town to Bloomington to Chicago.

• I got a job with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), a technology focused management consulting firm. That is, I chose mid-tier corporate consulting. I rose through the ranks there to become what is now called a managing director.

These choices catapulted me to places that I never dreamed possible. I fell in love with cities and public transit. I was able to make good money and get to splurge on any restaurant I wanted to go to, subscribe to the opera, etc. I got the satisfactions of career success.

My choices arguably satisfied all my goals in life at that time. All I wanted was more money, to be “rich” in some sense. And had I actually stayed with Accenture and simply avoided getting fired, I’d probably have made enough money to be able to retire today.

But in time my goals shifted in life. That’s something few of us can relate to until age 35 or so. When we’re younger we know that we have changed in the past - oh, how we know we’ve changed and we’ve grown - but we can’t emotionally connect to the reality that we will continue changing in the future.

In my 30s and into my 40s, I shifted towards wanting to have influence in the world. This is when I discovered that my choices had been limiting in ways I didn’t perceive.

Indiana is a good school, but it’s not an elite college. Everybody loves to hate on the elite university credentialing system, but it has an enormous impact on the opportunities you’ll be presented with and the network’s you’ll be part of. Influence at the higher levels of our society is dominated by people from elite educational backgrounds.

Chicago is a wonderful city. Arguably it has the best price/performance in urbanism available today. For college graduates outside of the top 5% of talent who want to build a life, it's arguably the best place to move after college. But with some limited exceptions, it's not the big leagues. It's less connected to elite networks. It's not an ambition force multiplier. For people who aspire to reach the peaks or have major public influence, it's the wrong choice, or at least a more difficult choice. It's the top of the Midwest hierarchy, but not the national or global one.

Accenture is a great firm and I had a great experience there. But as a career platform, unlike elite McKinsey tier management consulting or investment banking, it doesn't really lead to big things outside of that world. Very few people I knew at any level of Accenture went on to achieve big success in obviously elite realms. Almost all of them are still doing some variety of corporate IT.

In retrospect, I was left completely alone growing up to make my own life choices in a vacuum in a rural environment. Nobody ever told me I couldn’t do anything. But they never told me I should do anything either. That's better than a lot of people in my hometown area, whose ambitions were actively suppressed. My choices were extremely high ambition by the standards of that community, but in that era I almost certainly could have gone to Harvard or another elite school. Nobody ever told me to think bigger, and my default choices had a major negative impact on my ability to have public impact and influence.

By contrast, I met a very famous pastor whose name you'd know. He grew up in a similar backwater to me, probably 2-3 hours from me. But in high school he had a teacher or counselor who looked at his test scores and told him he needed to go to an elite college - and even gave him a list of acceptable choices. That put him on a trajectory that led to the very apex of his profession. He’s much more influential than I am.

Obviously, this says nothing about merit, character, substance, etc. But the ladders you choose have, everything else equal, a major impact on your potential level of accomplishment.

Now, I actually was successful in having an impact. I managed to become a senior fellow in a major think tank in New York City. My three worlds of evangelicalism framework is becoming pervasive in how evangelicals understand our world. I’ve never had greater reach or been more influential than I am today. I’m happily married and very satisfied with life. I’ve been successful, and am not nursing regrets or what could have beens.

But I say my choices were a mistake because they made it more difficult to achieve, and continue to limit my progress toward, the level of reach and influence I aspire to have. It’s easy to say that, since in God’s providence we like where we ended up, all of our choices must have been good after all. That’s a cop out. If you can’t look back on your life and think of significant bad decisions that you’ve made, you are deluding yourself. And you are probably ensuring that you’ll continue making the same kinds of bad choices in the future.

Fortunately, today’s world offers opportunities to disrupt outside the existing ladders that were much less available when I was young. I’ve taken full advantage of that. And genuine innovation often happens outside of the mainstream hierarchies, because innovators don’t fit in with them. As Eric Hoffer wrote:

People who make good usually stay where they are and go on doing more and better what they know how to do well. The plunge into the new is often an escape from an untenable situation and a maneuver to mask one’s ineptness. To adopt the role of the pioneer and avant-garde is to place oneself in a situation where ineptness and awkwardness are acceptable and even unavoidable, for experience and know-how count for little in tackling the new, and we expect the wholly new to be ill-shapen and ugly.

Being outside of certain hierarchies gives me the freedom to say and do things many other people can’t do, and which I myself would not be able to do if I were embedded in those networks. Arguably, that’s the situation that’s best aligned with my personality and talents.

But let’s not kid ourselves that status and ladders don’t matter. They matter a lot. For example, when I wrote my original three worlds framework for my own newsletter, it went viral. But when I wrote a version for First Things magazine, a very high status publication within its ecosystem, it went nuclear viral and had enormous impact it would not otherwise have had. Had I thought I shouldn’t consider the venue I was publishing in, I would have forgone an incredible opportunity to make a difference in the world.

Again, my goal of having influence necessitates a certain kind of approach which has to be very conscious of things like that. Your goals may be very different. To be clear: I’m not telling everyone to try to pursue the elite institutional path. I do think most people ought to think bigger, which I will write more about in the near future. But that doesn’t necessarily mean trying to get into an Ivy League school.

The point is, you have to be consciously thinking about the choices you are making. Where you go to school, what city you live in, what profession you choose, what firms you work for. All of these put you on certain ladders that have profound downstream consequences you ought to at least think about before making a commitment.

Why Status Seeking Can Be Ok

The minority of people who didn’t like my post tended to take the view that climbing elite hierarchies is inherently wrong or, as one person put it, “grotesque.” Some others argued that it’s anti-Christian.

When I read the Bible, I see that God ordained hierarchies and at times explicitly affirms that it’s good to try to climb them. “It is a trustworthy statement: if any man aspires to the office of overseer [bishop or elder], it is a fine work he desires to do.” (1 Tim 3:1). “Earnestly desire the greater gifts” (1 Cor 12:31)

Rightly ordered, the status hierarchy is a tool to promote character and pro-social behavior. If you aspire to be an elder, then that causes you to seek to become the kind of person Paul talks about in terms of qualifications for that role. When status accrues to honorable behavior, men have an incentive to behave honorably. Status sends signals about what we should be doing, the same way the approval of parents sends a message to children about how they should behave. Much of the teaching of the New Testament is not against the pursuit of glory, riches, honor per se, but about the true path to their achievement (e.g., storing up treasures in heaven), which often does differ from the worldly version.

Of course, we live in a society that’s far from rightly ordered. Hence we must be on our guard to ensure the pursuit of status doesn’t lead us into bad goals, selfish ambition, moral compromise, abandoning truth, pride, etc. Nothing could be more natural than to fall into these traps.

But wanting to achieve positions of leadership, authority, influence, etc. is a good thing if we are the kind of person that society should want to see in those roles. To believe otherwise is to abandon the playing field and the commanding heights of society to bad people who don’t share our values. I saw someone quote Augustine that, “There could be nothing more fortunate for human affairs than that, by the mercy of God, they who are endowed with true piety of life, if they have the skill for ruling people, should also have the power.” People who think being in the game is illegitimate aren’t in a position to be complaining about what the people who end up in charge are doing.

Sometimes you run into roadblocks, such as a requirement for moral compromise, that you cannot get around to keep rising. Sometimes you make the right choices, aim high, swing the bat hard, and just end up missing the ball. Sometimes people utilize their status by consuming it prophetically. Some people came from blue blood backgrounds and burned their bridges in that world to hold the line. That too can be a choice worthy of honor.

Making it to the top is not the mark of a good man or of being in the right. But there’s nothing wrong with good men seeking to achieve and operate well at the high levels of society and life.

And let’s be clear: sometimes the denigration of status seeking is its own form of pride, it’s own status game. The people criticizing my tweet by and large present themselves as having made morally superior choices. It’s just another way of saying, “I’m better than you.” It’s a status game in its own right. There are plenty of backwoods fundamentalists who are as insufferably arrogant as any McKinsey consultant. You don’t have to be an elite success to be full of pride.

Even worse is the hypocrisy of our society and even the church, where we talk one way and act another. When rich kids at Ivy League schools pretend to poor and then say, “Aww shucks, I guess I just worked hard and got lucky.” When people pursue status while denying that’s what they are doing. Or when churches preach about how leaders in the church should be the people who are the most humble and servants of all when their own elder board is the seven richest dudes in the congregation. No wonder our society is so cynical today. We can all see it.

Better to admit that hierarchy is ubiquitous, we are all trying to achieve goals in life using some theory of how to get there, and that it’s a good thing if men of good character and competence seek and achieve positions of commensurate power, responsibility, influence, and status.

If I’m leading people astray, then I don’t want to go viral. But I want to be the kind of person who is worthy of influence, and then obtain it. If you have a blog or other public online presence, if you are quote tweeting my post in order to critique it, then be honest: you want to have influence too. There’s no shame in that.

If you found this essay thought provoking, please like or repost my original tweet.

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Cover image: Harvard class of 2015 graduates by Caroline Culler, CC BY-SA 4.0