Success Is Not as Important as Happiness

One day this summer, a teacher from the Xueersi training center called me to ask why my son had attended only one class and never gone back. I told the teacher that I did not want my child to spend the whole summer attending various training courses and be unable to enjoy himself, so we were dropping the class. After hearing my answer, the teacher on the phone was struck speechless.

Children in Beijing are truly rather pitiable, forced from earliest childhood into all kinds of training courses. For the transition to middle school, for getting into a good high school after junior high, for getting into a good university at the gaokao, they are run ragged from one cram school to another. On top of that, there are all the specialty classes they must attend.

My child has great natural talent. Many people told me: send your son here or there for training, and he is sure to achieve great things. I am a stubborn sort; I have never wanted my son to achieve great things in the future. I only hope he can live without so much worry, with more joy. So I firmly refused such advice.

My brother and I were both loaded with high expectations from childhood, as you can tell from our names. Zhiyuan means "lofty aspirations." My older brother is Zhigao. Our two names are taken from the famous line: "Aspirations should be lofty and far-reaching." The two names sound inspiring—and also arrogant.

A name looks like a mere label, but it is not so. A name is like the shadow that follows a person his whole life, and it exerts a great influence. I feel my brother and I were like people injected with a stimulant from childhood, living very "inspirational" lives—and therefore exhausted, even worn out.

To live up to our names, we both set ourselves extremely lofty ideals. To realize those ideals, we both put in far more effort than ordinary people. Our personalities were deeply shaped by our names, because those names were our father's first expectations of us.

Only after we were past thirty, when in the common view we two brothers had been classified as ordinary non-achievers and become the laughingstock and dinner-table talk of others, did we deeply realize that these names had harmed us our whole lives. If life could begin again, I would want my father to give me a name like "Pussycat" or "Puppy," and not use this stimulant-like name to jinx me.

Our age is one in which inspirational stories have flooded out of all proportion. Personally, I think that after hearing too many inspirational stories, a person turns dull. Dull to a certain degree, he lives like one of the Dead Souls in Gogol, or like the "crowd" in the French psychologist Le Bon: completely without a mind of his own, not knowing how to think independently.

Why on earth must a person succeed? I truly cannot understand why the multitudes cram and claw their way to success. They not only claw their way to success themselves; they force their children to claw their way to success too.

Does success bring happiness? Does success bring joy? Does success give you something others lack? Is there no meaning in life other than success?

We modern people always boast that our modern civilization is more advanced than the ancients', and that we moderns are wiser. Judging by human cranial capacity, our intellectual evolution over the last ten thousand years has been negligible. And judging by the ten thousand years of human civilization, we have evolved hardly at all in our attitude toward life.