The Triple Package Read Free Page A

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    Group generalizations turn into invidious stereotypes when they’re false, hateful, or assumed to be true of every group member. No group and no culture is monolithic. Even a high-earning, “successful” group like Indian Americans includes more thantwo hundred thousand people in poverty. Moreover, within every culture there are competing subcultures, and there are always individuals who reject the cultural values they’re raised with. But that doesn’t make culture less real or powerful. “Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values,” writes author-provocateur Wesley Yang. “Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade-grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future.” Whether a person chooses to embrace or run screaming from his cultural background, it’s still there, formative and significant.
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    R ETURNING NOW TO how the Triple Package works: superiority and insecurity combine to produce drive (or so this book will try to show), but it takes more than drive to succeed. In fact the metaphor of “drive” is misleading to the extent that it conjures up a car-and-open-highway image, where the only thing a successful person needs is a full tank of gas and a foot on the pedal. To invoke a different set of metaphors, life can also be a battle—against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, against a system that keeps slapping you down, against the almost irresistible urge to give up.
    Nearly everyone confronts obstacles, adversity, and disappointment at some point in life. Drive is offense, but success requires more than offense. One of the greatest chess players in history reportedly said of another grand master, “[H]e will never become World Champion since he doesn’t have the patience to endure worse positions for hours.” The Triple Package not only instills drive. It also delivers on defense—with toughness, resilience, the ability to endure, the capacity to absorb a blow and pick yourself up off the ground afterward.
    In part the superiority complex itself has this effect, providing a kind ofpsychological armor of special importance to minorities who repeatedly face hostility and prejudice. Fending off majority ethnocentrism with their own ethnocentrism is a common strategy among successful minorities. Benjamin Disraeli used it against British anti-Semitism. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he famously replied to a slur in the House of Commons, “and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
    Much more powerful, however, is an interaction between superiority and impulse control—a belief in achieving superiority
through
impulse control—that can generate a self-fulfilling cycle of greaterand greater endurance. A superiority complex built up around impulse control can be very potent. A person with such a complex eagerly demonstrates and exercises his self-control to achieve some difficult goal; the more sacrifice or hardship he can endure, the more superior he feels and the better able to accomplish still more demanding acts of self-restraint in the future, making him feel even more superior. The result is a capacity to endure hardship—a kind of heightenedresilience, stamina, or grit.
    This dynamic is another Triple Package specialty. America’s successful immigrant communities nearly always build impulse control into their superiority complex.They tend to believe (probably because it’s true) that they can endure more adversity and work more hours than average Americans are willing to. They see this capacity as a virtue, incorporate it as a point of pride into their self-definition, and then try—frequently with great effectiveness—to inculcate this virtue in their children.
    But this phenomenon is not unique to immigrants. Mormons, too, weave into their superiority complex their discipline,