Geek Heresy (26 page)

Second, aspirations are intrinsic, even if they are influenced by external factors. Agyare wasn’t shackled by the golden handcuffs of the tech industry. She left when she could no longer ignore the beat of her inner drummer. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan defined the related concept of intrinsic motivation as “the prototypical form of self-determination: with a full sense of choice, with the experience of doing what one wants, and without the feeling of coercion or compulsion, one spontaneously engages in an activity that interests one.”
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It’s not an aspiration if a person has to be coerced or asked. Aspirations come from within.

Third, aspirations are slow and sticky. They sustain for the long haul. Intrinsic growth doesn’t happen in a day, so any force that doesn’t last won’t be enough to inspire it. Agyare’s path from student to entrepreneur and activist took eleven years, during which she expended consistent effort. Something had to pull her through the demanding course load at Ashesi, and something had to keep her going at work – not just to earn income, but to learn and grow. Of course, throughout that time, other internal forces – needs, fears, desires, irrational impulses; reasoned goals to be richer, kinder, healthier, and happier – competed for her attention. But these were fleeting compared with the pull of her primary aspirations. Psychologist Kennon Sheldon has spent much of his career researching the value of setting and striving toward intrinsically motivated, or self-concordant, goals. He and his colleagues have found that “individuals do better at self-concordant goals because they put more sustained effort into such goals.”
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Take the long view and average out the choppy waves of our minute-by-minute moods, and what remains are the slow tidal swells of aspiration.

Fourth, it was by chasing her aspirations that Agyare underwent critical intrinsic growth. She admits that even if she had wanted to start Soronko earlier in her life, she wouldn’t have been ready. It’s not an easy thing to start your own company. And to succeed at both a for-profit and a nonprofit at once is another thing altogether. What equipped her with the skills and strength she needed?

What she learned through her early aspirations enabled her later ones to develop. Agyare’s first aspiration helped her gain knowledge and professional discernment. Building a new organization requires business acumen, management capability, and leadership skills, all of which Agyare learned in her first career. It also seems likely that years of academic life and professional work further built up her self-control. Ashesi routinely graduates high achievers. Corporate high-tech Ghana is much like the high-tech world elsewhere: It values a hard-charging work ethic. That mental and emotional stamina supported Agyare as she built Soronko. Following her aspirations led to a sharper mind and greater will.
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It’s important, though, that in meeting one’s aspirations, some striving is involved. An aspiration achieved without effort doesn’t build wisdom. “Undeserved” fame or fortune doesn’t necessarily cause growth, because they’re not accompanied by internal change. The spoiled children of inherited wealth are not particularly wise. The same problem occurs at a national scale when the resource curse of oil and minerals corrupts leaders and stunts other industries.
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Even more stable countries are prone to “Dutch disease,” where the availability of an easy resource displaces other productive capacity, just as an overused crutch can lead to muscular atrophy.
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Apparent exceptions only affirm the rule. There are trust-fund children who increase the prestige of their families, but they’re focused on more than collecting baubles and living a lavish social life. Among nations, there is, for example, Norway, which took a windfall from North Sea oil, invested it carefully, and pumped some of the returns into one of the world’s most generous foreign aid programs.
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That striving after aspirations leads to greater mind and will is not surprising. Intentional effort leads to learning. What’s most noteworthy about Agyare’s intrinsic growth is her change in heart. She underwent a fundamental change in intention – from being focused primarily on serving her own economic, intellectual, and emotional needs through a corporate job to becoming increasingly focused on serving the needs of others. “It took me four years and a lot of sleepless nights to realize that when you have a dream and a desire, it is like an alarm clock going
off inside you,” she said. “Hitting the snooze button doesn’t work; the alarm will just go off again. Eventually, you have to wake up.”
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A New Beginning

Long before Agyare started at Ashesi University – years in fact before there was an Ashesi at all – Patrick Awuah vowed that he would never return to live in Ghana. He was visiting his home country in 1990 when he became disgusted by its political corruption, economic stagnation, and social backwardness. Five years earlier, he was among the lucky few who, due to a combination of wise parenting and strong academic accomplishments, earned a full scholarship to Swarthmore University in the United States. His dream then was to become an engineer and to buy a new house for his mother. He majored in electrical engineering and economics. Upon graduation he joined Microsoft as a program manager. Over ten years, he proceeded up the corporate ladder rung by rung.
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That decade marked the golden years of Microsoft. It was a period when Awuah and his colleagues worked day and night to realize the company’s mission to put a PC on every desk. The market responded with an industry boom whose reverberations grow louder even today. Through stock and options, the company shared its skyrocketing profits with its employees. The first Microsoft millionaires were minted.

By 1995, Awuah was comfortably among them. Having achieved and exceeded his dreams of just a decade earlier, though, he began to ask if there wasn’t more to life than technical feats and his family’s financial well-being. He felt incredibly blessed and wanted to share his good fortune. Reflecting on his life, he felt a critical point for him was his Swarthmore education. Its strong liberal arts program marked the point where his path and that of his high-school peers diverged. Based on this conviction, and with encouragement from his wife, Awuah decided to start a liberal arts college in Ghana. In 1998, he quit Microsoft.

He enrolled in UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he focused every class project on the question of how to start the university. In 2002, spurred by a quotation attributed to Goethe – “Whatever
you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
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– Awuah launched Ashesi University in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. Defying his earlier vow, he moved back to the country with his family soon afterward.

“Ashesi” means “beginning” in Fanti, the language of Awuah’s ancestors, and the name has proven auspicious. Starting with the initial class of 25 students, whom I taught in rented space, the school has grown to 600 students studying in a beautiful new campus. Talented students flock to Ashesi not only from within Ghana but from across West Africa. International development experts cite the school as an example of what can be accomplished by a country’s own people.
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Other private universities have sprung up in Africa to follow its lead.

Ashesi is an unqualified story of successful social change. But while Awuah’s professional life is steeped in computing technology, the lessons of his life don’t have much to do with the tools he used. What matters is his transformation from a young man eager to study abroad, to a program manager in a large corporation, to a visionary who invested his wealth, sweat, and soul in a cause that is changing Africa. In other words, it’s not about the packaged intervention.

Transformational Internal Epiphanies

Something happens as aspirations are achieved through valiant effort. When dreams come true, some people notice that they’ve outgrown them. Awuah says that in his last year at Microsoft, “I lost the sense of urgency that I had before. The work just felt less important.” People talk of missing something in their lives and of wanting something more, something they might have postponed or never have imagined before. They feel an intrinsic change. It’s not that they gain new knowledge. Don’t we all know, after all, that there’s more to life than whatever we happen to be chasing right now? Rather, they move on to a different, deeply felt aspiration. At some point, Awuah was no longer attracted to the extra 10 percent of income, recognition, or accomplishment that he had spent years pursuing. He wanted work with a broader purpose.

These kinds of stories are common fodder for heartwarming news articles, but they are rarely discussed by policymakers. No one in the US government, the World Bank, or the Gates Foundation is asking, “How do we encourage people through transformational internal epiphanies?”

Partly, the problem is that today’s metric-focused technocrats all but laugh at what seem like soft intangibles. Partly, the problem is that policy is disconnected from fields that consider these changes of heart. Partly, it’s that the fields that once used to think about deep questions like this have stopped asking them. So much of behavioral science today overlooks long-term human change in favor of easily measured short-term phenomena. It focuses on catchy factoids, such as that finding a dime left in a phone booth can make you temporarily more likely to help others.
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As a result, modern social policy is obsessed with the equivalent of strategically placed coins – tricks and nudges to incentivize “behavior change.”
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But while behavior change might be a more meaningful goal than the willy-nilly scattering of technologies, it’s fleeting. And it casts individuals as adversaries to be manipulated, as if people just can’t be trusted to do the right thing on their own. The alternative is to ask, What makes a person intrinsically motivated for the larger social good? What makes a Patrick Awuah or a Regina Agyare? Today’s number-crunching disciplines have no answer to such questions.

But developmental psychology does. Psychologists going back to Sigmund Freud have sought to explain human maturation as a staged process of
personality
,
character
, or
life-cycle development
.
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Freud was joined by many others. Thinkers such as Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg tried to map out aspects of long-term human development.
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Some of their claims have been discredited by modern psychology, but in acknowledging the possibility of lifelong, intrinsically powered growth, they offer an alternative to today’s fast-twitch policymaking.

And they are far better suited to explaining transformations such as Awuah’s. His trajectory was defined by his successive aspirations. As a student he “wanted to be a great engineer. My father was a mechanical engineer, and I’d read magazine articles about things like the Space
Shuttle. I thought it was cool.” At Microsoft he did exactly the kind of work he once admired. “Growing up in Ghana, whenever I read about technological advances, they were always happening abroad,” he said. “In my job, though, I was at the center of it. We worked on computer networking when it was going mainstream. I knew some kid would read about what I was working on and think, ‘That’s awesome!’” Awuah says he came to love “the technical challenges of the work and the intensity of the workplace.”

Then, after nearly ten years of that work, “being in a meeting to decide what a button should do or what feature to cut stopped seeming that important.” What happened? We’ve already encountered Agyare, who after years of corporate work, struck out on her own. Similarly, Rikin Gandhi left a software engineering job at Oracle and astronaut dreams to found Digital Green. Abraham George returned to India to establish Shanti Bhavan after attaining entrepreneurial success in America. Trish Millines Dziko was a Microsoft employee before she went on to start the Technology Access Foundation. Bill Gates made a public transition from amassing one of the world’s largest fortunes to spending it on global philanthropy. And when I ran the research group in Bangalore, I received inquiries every week from professionals who wanted to work with us. They would say, “I’ve done well for myself, but I’d now like to see how I can give back to society.” There’s a good chance that you know people like this, or maybe you are one.

Without taking away from anyone’s uniqueness – each of these people is a gem on the pebble beach of humanity – there’s no doubt that a pattern is at work.
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A pattern of human maturation. A pattern of intrinsic growth. A pattern of expanding heart, mind, and will.

Maslovian Development

Developmental psychology has many theories that could explain this pattern. The one that best fits what I’ve witnessed is the well-known hierarchy of needs developed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Lists of the world’s eminent psychologists inevitably include Maslow, and his ideas have taken firm root in fields well beyond psychology.
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But if
Maslow’s hierarchy is a bit of a celebrity meme, it has suffered for its popularity – it’s widely misunderstood. Many people have heard about the hierarchy from pop psychology, and while some of what they’ve heard is correct, it’s mixed with inaccurate rumor-mongering. For example, most depictions of it involve a rainbow-colored pyramid that Maslow never used. The wrong interpretations don’t explain Awuah or Agyare.

In its original form, Maslow’s hierarchy was a series of five motivational categories: Survival needs such as hunger, thirst, and the need for sleep motivate a person to seek food, water, or shelter. Security needs drive a person toward physical and psychological security – freedom from fear and anxiety, desire for structure and order, and so on. Needs for love and belonging are met through social acceptance, community, and companionship. Esteem needs demand recognition, status, achievement, and competence. And the need for self-actualization causes people to do things that express their unique talents and preferences, what “he or she, individually, is fitted for,” whether it’s playing in a rock band, managing a corporate division, or being a good parent.
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