Making the Connection: Strategies to Build Effective Personal Relationships (Collection) (67 page)

While professional achievements continued, Oprah’s personal life was not very satisfying. Throughout her twenties, she had stormy relationships with men who didn’t stay with her. She also struggled with her weight, which had ballooned to 233 pounds when she arrived in Chicago. But instead of trying to hide her own problems, Oprah learned that she could turn some of them to her advantage.

The most famous example came in a 1985 show about childhood sexual abuse in which a tearful Oprah unexpectedly
revealed that she, too, had been raped as a child. Rather than being pitied as a helpless victim, she was pleased to find herself admired as a symbol of resilience and a fearless spokesperson for the rights of women. Her obesity was also transformed from something shameful to a challenge that she could share with her viewers, many of whom had a similar problem.

The public’s sympathy for Oprah’s struggles stimulated her to reshape her personal myth. Instead of just aiming to be a glamorous star like Diana Ross, she became a champion of self-acceptance and recovery. Over the years, Oprah even started to think of her role as a service to a higher cause. As she herself put it, “I am the instrument of God .... My show is my ministry.”
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This spiritual aspect took many forms as her stardom increased.

Identity As a Story

Oprah’s story makes good reading because she became so successful. But it also illustrates the general factors that influence the way the rest of us form mental pictures of who we are. Each case involves a constellation of traits and talents that reflect, in part, the genes we happen to have been born with. Each case involves influential life circumstances, such as gender, family, social class, nationality, culture, ethnicity, religion, and ongoing world events. Each case involves chance events, opportunities, and encounters that we react to and become deeply affected by. In each case the interplay of these factors is sorted and integrated to generate the characteristic ways we deal with our world. In each case these coalesce into an internal sense of principles and goals. And
even though they are mainly formulated without much conscious thought, each of us sums up our version of the result in the form of a story.
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In Oprah’s case, the story she developed is one of talent overcoming deprivation, abuse, racial prejudice, and teenage mistakes; of ambition leading to opportunities; of hard work leading to professional advancement; and of the gradual realization that her own self-acceptance can teach and inspire others. To fill in the details, she tells us that she knew from an early age that she could be a star; that even though she faltered because of mistreatment and personal failings, she didn’t let this stop her; and that, in the end, she is serving God’s purpose as well as her own.

Is this really Oprah’s story? How much is she making up? What is she leaving out? The same questions can be asked of each of us. And the reason we find it hard to answer them is that we all have been greatly influenced by events and encounters whose impact we may be unaware of, including many that were accidental.
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Even when we made deliberate decisions about work or relationships, they may have affected us in ways that we don’t really understand. As our identity formed, important memories were unconsciously modified to conform to the internal self-image we were creating, and the past was shaped to make a more coherent story. Here is how Erikson described the development of an identity by creating a personal story:

To be adult means, among other things, to see one’s own life in continuous perspective, both in retrospect and in prospect. By accepting some definition
of who he is, usually on the basis of a function in an economy, a place in the sequence of generations, and a status in the structure of society, the adult is able to selectively reconstruct his past in such a way that, step by step, it seems to have planned him, or better, he seems to have planned it. In this sense, psychologically we do choose our parents, our family history, and the history of our kings, heroes, and gods. By making them our own, we maneuver ourselves into the inner position of proprietors, of creators.”
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In Oprah’s case, her relatives have questioned some of her selective reconstructions. For example, a cousin has challenged her memory of an extremely deprived childhood: “She’s not straight with the truth. Never has been .... You should’ve seen the clothes and dolls and toys and little books that Aunt Hat brought home for her ... the ribbons and ruffled pinafores.”
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Members of her family have also disputed Oprah’s description of childhood sexual abuse.
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But no one would deny that she experienced hardships as a little girl who was shuttled between parents in different cities. Nor would they deny the difficulties she faced while pregnant at 14 and dealing with the premature birth and then death of her baby boy. So even though there’s some uncertainty about the details, her story can still be properly told as one of recovery from adversity and as a triumph of talent, hard work, and determination. And even though what we know about Oprah’s story is surely incomplete, mulling it over helps us understand her better.

Benjamin Franklin also made liberal use of selective reconstructions. As Walter Isaacson pointed out in discussing Franklin’s inventions, “the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist ... he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.”
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Nevertheless, the story Franklin told in his
Autobiography
still gives us a good idea of what he was really like.

Erikson wasn’t put off by such inventiveness. Instead, he believed that inventive interpretations are essential to building a coherent identity. This is particularly important in adolescence, when we may be attracted to ideas and attitudes that differ greatly from those we were raised with and find ourselves struggling to reconcile them. To bring change and continuity together, we seek out friends and environments that support what we want to become, while consciously and unconsciously inventing a story that explains this new synthesis to ourselves.
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The story becomes more detailed over a lifetime as we meet new challenges, and Erikson emphasized three that present themselves after we complete a first draft of identity.
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He called the challenge of young adulthood “intimacy versus isolation,” which can be met by developing close friendships and an enduring romantic relationship. He called the challenge of middle adulthood “generativity versus self-absorption,” which can be met by parenting, mentorship, and altruistic contributions to the community. He called the challenge of late adulthood “integrity versus despair,” which
can be met by finding a way to look back at one’s whole life story with understanding and satisfaction.

To Erikson, it seemed natural to think of these challenges in chronological sequence. But he also recognized that we keep working on all of them throughout our lives. Intimacy is not confined to young adulthood, generative contributions to the welfare of others may begin before middle age, and satisfaction with the integrated self we have become does not need to be postponed until we are in a nursing home. So even though it can be useful to break down a person’s story into developmental chapters, we must also recognize that their contents overlap. Thoughtfully editing all parts of a story—and the identity that it represents—is necessary not only for making plans for the future, but also for adapting to the present and accepting the past.

Complicated though this process is, we are all continuously guided by our evolving sense of our own identity and by our inferences about the identity of the people we are engaged with. And we make these inferences by looking at the past and the future through stories.

Steve Jobs Tells Three Stories

We don’t just create stories internally to keep us aware of who we are. We also tell them to others to project our identity. As we get to know someone, we listen to that person’s stories and tell our own. Sharing stories helps us to get to know each other in ways that are not apparent from simply observing behavior.

A good example of the informativeness of personal stories comes from a commencement address by Steve Jobs. Delivered at Stanford in 2005, it described three pivotal life episodes and the lessons he learned from them.
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The first story Jobs told was about his own college experience. A promising student, he started at Reed College, a small liberal arts school, when he was 17. But “after six months,” Jobs said, “I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would work out okay.”

Jobs was not, however, the ordinary dropout. Having freed himself from curricular requirements, he decided to get educated on his own terms. So he stayed at Reed for another few semesters, sleeping on the floor in friends’ rooms, turning in discarded Coke bottles to get money for food, and dropping in on classes that looked interesting. Among them was a course in calligraphy that he loved so much that he later insisted on including multiple typefaces in the fonts of the Macintosh computer. From this he drew two lessons: “Much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on,” and “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

The second story jumps over the starting of Apple with Steve Wozniak when Jobs was 20, to a low point ten years later, when he was fired by John Sculley, the man he had
recruited to be its CEO. Humiliated at first, Jobs went on to new greatness at Pixar and subsequently realized that “getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life.” After a 12-year hiatus, Jobs returned to a faltering Apple to preside over its spectacular rebirth.

The third story is about another low point. Diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer, Jobs had it surgically removed in 2004. But again he saw a lesson. Instead of slowing him down, this near-death experience reaffirmed that “your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life .... And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.”

These three stories tell us a lot about Steve Jobs and the way he sees himself. From the age of 17, he had the confidence, resourcefulness, self-discipline, and ambition to follow his curiosity and do things his way. When faced with a crisis at 30, he relied on these qualities to bounce back. When confronted with cancer, he relied on them again.

At the close of his speech, Jobs summed up the essence of his identity, as reflected in the three stories. He said it could be described in four words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” a motto from
The Whole Earth Catalog.
The intense motivation and curiosity that this motto implies are, to Jobs, what he is all about. And he recommended this way of seeing oneself to the new Stanford graduates.

There are, however, other ways of seeing Steve Jobs. Although his own narrative is informative, learning others’ stories about him can add a lot. In “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” Peter Elkind, an editor of
Fortune,
sums up some of those stories.
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Among the troublesome features Elkind identified in the stories he collected, many can be attributed to Jobs’s low Agreeableness, which is not rare among top business leaders. From what Elkind learned, Jobs “oozes smug superiority” (arrogance), “periodically reduces subordinates to tears” (heartlessness), “fires employees in angry tantrums” (combativeness), and “is notoriously secretive” (suspiciousness and deception). Elkind also found signs of all three patterns of low Agreeableness: narcissistic, as revealed by smugness and an insistence on making his own rules; paranoid, as revealed by a level of secretiveness that even his Silicon Valley colleagues consider extreme; and antisocial, as suggested by reports that “he parks his Mercedes in handicapped spaces” and that he condoned backdating of stock options.

Another troublesome feature that Elkind identified is perfectionism, the dark side of Jobs’s exceptional competence. This dark side led John Sculley to call him “a zealot, his vision so pure that he couldn’t accommodate that vision to the imperfections of the world” and to fire him in 1985. This dark side also may trigger his low Agreeableness and lead him to call subordinates “shitheads” and “bozos” if they don’t meet his exceptional standards.

But to Jobs, the troublesome characteristics I’ve mentioned might just be inconvenient by-products of staying
hungry and foolish. If you asked him why he isn’t nicer to people, he might say that he’d like to be but that it would get in the way of the true excellence he is striving for. If you asked him why he doesn’t lighten up a little and stop being such a control freak, he might explain that it’s all too easy to slide into mediocrity and that he’s simply not willing to lower his standards. Then he might go on to tell you that the ultimate justification for this way of being is apparent not just in the beauty and elegance of his products, but also in their social value and commercial success.

When viewed in this way, it is reasonable to conclude that much of Jobs’s personal myth is truly represented in his three stories. Of course, he might tell us other important stories as well, including those about his adoption and search for his biological parents; his youthful immersion in Buddhism and experimentation with LSD; the way he dealt with the birth of his first child out of wedlock when he was 23; and his relationship with his wife and their children—and each one deserves attention if you want to put yourself in Jobs’s shoes. But work appears to dominate Jobs’s life, and “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” is his way of explaining his approach to it.