John Hawkins: Does American Culture Celebrate Mediocrity Over Excellence?

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In the midst of a roiling intra-party battle over H1-B visas no one will probably care about six months from now, Vivek Ramaswamy took a shot at what he called America’s culture of mediocrity:

It feels like there are two points he’s making here, one subtle and one obvious.

The subtle one, which is at the heart of why so many tech companies REALLY want H1-B visas so badly, is that some cultures are poorer and hungrier than others. I hate to tell you this if you’re American, but as a general rule, Indians WANT IT more than you do. Why? Because the average salary in India is about $382 per month. So, if you’re Indian, educated, smart, and because of the wonders of the modern world, can do work or even remote work in America, you have an incredible opportunity.

If you have pretty good English, can take instructions, work hard, and have a good attitude, you may be able to get very “rich” doing what most Americans consider fairly mundane work. Think about it – if you can just make the minimum wage in America, that equates to $15,080 per year. Americans consider that “barely surviving.” Meanwhile, if you’re in India, that’s three times what the average person makes.

How much bullsh*t would you be willing to put up with at work to get paid lots of money to do a simple job? Personally, I’ve hired people from India to work remotely for me before, and do you know what my experience was? There were some communication issues, but generally, they did the job, they did it well, and they had a work ethic you just don’t see in America. What do I mean by that? Well, I am 100% not exaggerating when I say that I’ve had Indians tell me out of the blue they intend to work for me through their honeymoons or reach out to tell me they just had a heart attack and are in the ICU but will be back at work in a couple of days. It’s not like I’m a slavedriver or ask them to do these things either, this is just their attitude.

In my experience, Americans who are that hungry tend to be few and far between as compared to it being common somewhere like India. This is one of the few advantages poor people have over the rich. Being deprived makes them hungry for success in a way that it’s hard to be when life is easy.

Getting beyond that, it’s impossible to deny that Ramaswamy is right about America’s culture emphasizing the wrong things. It starts right at the top. You can tell a lot about a culture by who it gives attention, rewards, and makes into heroes. Who is that in America? You can see it in who our kids want to be. Do they want to be scientists? Entrepreneurs? Soldiers? Computer programmers? Pastors? Not so much…

If our entertainment industry and society treat smart kids like “nerds,” act as if people who work hard are “boring,” and treat moral people like “prudes,” “hypocrites,” or “dorks,” we’re teaching people not to be these things. If we treat successful people like they somehow cheated to get there and poor people as if they’re noble by virtue of being poor, we’ll end up with a country full of resentful poor people who will claim they don’t want to be rich because they think it’s, “bad.”

Perhaps worst of all, if we treat kids like they’re pieces of glass that will break if they’re pushed too hard, they won’t have what it takes to do anything truly exceptional. The sort of people who create new companies, build rocket ships, and code paradigm-changing pieces of software are not working 40 hours per week from home. They’re getting after it in a way that many people never do in their whole lives. Furthermore, the skills it takes to do those things are typically not the same skills you get from being an influencer, a model, a star football player, or a badass who can wreck five guys in a fight, which are the types of things we lionize in American society.

I have had the privilege of being around more than a few people who raised successful kids and from the outside, you know what it looked like?

They loved their kids, had good relationships with them, and tried to help them, but they also pushed them. They demanded a lot from them. They expected good grades, and their kids were involved in lots of extracurriculars. They challenged their kids, didn’t accept excuses from them, and didn’t treat them like glass.

Similarly, I’ve also interviewed and gotten to meet a lot of wildly successful people in my life, and you know what I notice? They work HARD. Much harder than the average person. They do things other people don’t want to do. They’re not whiny or easily offended. They network. They’re consistent. They’re willing to take risks and try new things. They may be gifted, but that’s coupled with a work ethic and a do whatever it takes to succeed attitude which gets them to the top.

Is that what we’re teaching our kids? Is that what we’re holding up as an example for our society? If it’s not, maybe it’s time to start asking, “Why not?”

If we don’t build a culture that encourages and rewards success, learning, and morality, it’s not going to just happen on its own. No matter how many advantages a nation has, its place in the sun is not guaranteed. If other nations do a better job of encouraging and rewarding their populations for pursuing productivity, decency, patriotism, and education, they will eventually pass us.