Making the Connection: Strategies to Build Effective Personal Relationships (Collection) (66 page)

Starting with temperance, defined as “strengths that protect against excess,” Franklin readily acknowledged that he had a lot of excess to protect against. In fact, his whole self-improvement project was explicitly designed to rein himself in. So it’s not an accident that his list of virtues featured efforts to control himself. And these efforts may have worked. From what we know of Franklin’s life, he deserves a fairly respectable score on temperance.

Turning to courage, Franklin gets high marks. A notable example is the way he faced down vicious personal attacks from the British Crown before and during the American Revolution. And he frequently put himself in harm’s way to defend causes and principles he believed in. This didn’t spare him from being criticized by the more steadfast John Adams, who believed that Franklin was too willing to compromise in difficult negotiations. But to Franklin, this was a sign of shrewdness rather than cowardice.

When it comes to Justice, Franklin’s score skyrockets. He was, in fact, deeply committed to fairness and good citizenship. His recognition of the value of mutual assistance was already clear by age 21, when he organized the Junto, a club of a dozen up-and-coming young men who met regularly on Friday evenings to educate and inspire each other. Franklin’s
interests also extended to the much larger community, which he enriched by helping to found many important institutions, from a lending library and a fire brigade to the University of Pennsylvania and the United States of America.

Moving on to humanity, Franklin deserved only a middling score for the warmth of his personal relationships. As Isaacson pointed out, “His friendships with men ... were more affable than intimate. He had a genial affection for his wife, but not enough love to prevent him from spending fifteen of the last seventeen years of their marriage an ocean away. His relationship with her was a practical one.
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” Joseph Ellis considers Franklin a master of superficial interpersonal relationships, “a man of multiple masks ... whose most sustained expressions of affection came late in life with his grandchildren.”
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But Franklin was hardly a cold fish; closeness to others was just not his highest priority.

In wisdom, however, Franklin was at the very top: creative, curious, open-minded, eager to learn new things and to provide counsel to others. These exceptional strengths were apparent in his many practical inventions, in his famous research on electricity, and in his brilliant achievements as a diplomat and statesman. Most important, Franklin was eager to apply his broad knowledge to help others live richer lives.

But unlike Franklin’s high score on wisdom, which is generally accepted, his high transcendence is not obvious to everyone. Being known for his down-to-earth practicality, many people overlook Franklin’s dedication to great causes, such as religious tolerance, and to the development
of the physical sciences that help us find our place in the universe. They also may fail to see that his commitment to self-improvement was not only designed to get him ahead, but was also an expression of his lofty idea that everyone can live a rewarding life if they set their mind to it. So Franklin did, in fact, find meaning in great ideals, and he certainly felt a sense of awe about the natural world. But he chose to express his transcendent feelings in practical actions rather than in flowery rhetoric.

When taken together I think that Franklin had good reason to be pleased with his character as well as his achievements. His is not a simple story of a self-made man. It is also the story of a man who was serious about his character, a man who learned to moderate his weaknesses and build on his strengths. Proud though he was of what he had made of himself, he was also aware of his limitations and looked with tolerant amusement at those of others.

Why Character Matters

When Gordon Allport decided to “keep the actual structure and functioning of personality free from judgments of moral acceptability,” he opened the way to objective assessments of individual differences in our basic traits. But sizing up people is never completely objective. When we first meet people, we don’t just notice their Big Five traits. We also form an intuitive impression of their character.

As we get to know them better, we flesh out details of their objective and moral characteristics. But the moral ones tend to stand out because they speak most directly to our
emotions, drawing us to those individuals with a mix of virtues that we find attractive and turning us away from those who do not. Although our description of a personality relies heavily on information that is contained within the Big Five and the Top Ten, we are most moved by the moral and emotional assessment of the whole package, using both universal and culture-specific criteria.

Allport recognized the importance of such moral assessments. He was just fearful that they would muddy up the rational judgments that science depends on. But in making sense of a person, we have good reason to remain deeply interested in their character because it gives us a very meaningful framework for dealing with them. And this moral perspective is particularly relevant when considering the person’s life story, which I turn to in the following chapter.

Six. Identity: Creating a Personal Story

Until now, I’ve considered the aspects of personality that can be broken down into traits, patterns, and virtues. But to understand someone, we need to know more. Although we can piece together a revealing profile from these components, we can’t complete the picture without information about the guiding principles of the person’s life. To get this information, we need to shift our attention to his or her personal story.

Creating stories is one of the basic functions of the human mind.
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It is our way of organizing sequences of experiences by inferring cause-and-effect relationships that can help us predict future events. In sizing up people, we use this process to create stories about how they got to be the way they are. Within these stories are our inferences about their motives, where they’re headed, and what we can expect from them. It is our way of converting all the mental snapshots we have taken into mental movies of their lives, with flashbacks of critical episodes and projections about what will happen next. We use the same narrative process to compose stories about ourselves.

Composing stories begins in childhood, and events during that period have their effect on our developing
personality. But the stories we are mainly interested in are not simply records of objective biographical details. They are, instead, imaginative interpretations of who we are—interpretations that we begin working on seriously in our early teens. As this process unfolds in young adulthood, it gives rise to our sense of identity with which we steer the course of our lives.

This chapter is about the sense of identity, the subset of personality that psychologist Dan McAdams defines as “the personal myth you construct to define who you are.”
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Although traits, patterns, and virtues contribute to the creation of this personal myth, they don’t tell us what it is. To grasp it, we need to learn what makes a person’s life feel unified, purposeful, and meaningful, a view expressed in the form of a self-defining story.

Erik Erikson, whom you met in
Chapter 4
, first recognized the importance of such self-definition as an essential step in growing up.
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In his view, the adolescent challenge of reconciling goals and interests with social opportunities and expectations is what leads us to construct an initial draft of identity. To meet this challenge, we each develop our own characteristic ways of dealing with the world,
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along with an overall sense of who we are. We do this gradually and intuitively, without much conscious thought.

Some people make this process seem easy. By their mid-teens, they have an idea about the kind of person they want to be and the path they intend to follow. This is more readily achieved in traditional societies with limited and well-defined choices. But it also happens in complex modern societies. For
example, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan made clear her interest in becoming a judge while still in high school, and she even posed in a judicial robe for her yearbook.

Others have a harder time deciding who they are. They may find it so difficult to bring their abilities, goals, and ideals in line with social demands that they drop out of school or quit their jobs. In certain cases, this inner struggle continues well into adulthood, a condition that Erikson personally experienced and that he called an identity crisis.
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It took him many years to settle on his identity, which he continued to work on for the rest of his life.

Paying attention to a person’s sense of identity is important because it can put you in his or her shoes. Unlike the analytic understanding that comes from making a list of traits and virtues, learning about a person’s view of the past and hopes for the future promotes empathic understanding. Considering the noteworthy events and circumstances in the narrative of someone’s life may encourage you to identify with the struggles she encountered, the failures she experienced, and the strengths she displayed. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes may also lead you to think about who you might have become if you had been in the same situation, and this will often help you clarify your judgment of her character. To see what I mean, let’s consider a famous story.

Oprah Winfrey Shapes Her Identity

Oprah Winfrey’s Wikipedia page begins with a paragraph of superlatives that describes her as follows:

[A]n American television host, actress, producer, and philanthropist, best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history. She has been ranked the richest African-American of the twentieth century and beyond, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was once the world’s only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.

What makes these achievements all the more remarkable is that they were hardly predictable from her turbulent early life.

Born in 1954 to a teenage mother from a small town in rural Mississippi, Oprah was initially raised by her maternal grandmother and other members of her extended family. But this stability ended when Oprah was six. At first she went to Milwaukee to be with her mother, and then she was sent to Nashville to live with Vernon Winfrey, who, at the time, believed he was her biological father. In 1963, after struggling with Vernon’s strict discipline, Oprah returned to Milwaukee.

This new environment brought sexual activity and abuse.
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It started when Oprah’s cousin reportedly raped her when she was nine. By her own admission, Oprah was also sexually promiscuous from an early age. Her younger sister claims that, at 13, Oprah was even selling sex to boys at her house while her mother was at work.
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Feeling that she couldn’t control her, Oprah’s mother sent her back to Vernon.

It could have been too late. Shortly after Oprah arrived at Vernon’s, in time to enroll in the first integrated class at East Nashville High School, it became apparent that she was pregnant. In February 1969, having just turned 15, Oprah delivered a baby boy.

So far, this all sounds like the familiar story of a poor child born out of wedlock who replicates her mother’s struggles. But in Oprah’s case the baby, who was born prematurely, died about a month later. As Vernon told her, “God has chosen to take this baby, and so I think God is giving you a second chance.”
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It was, like the pregnancy itself, one of those fateful events that can shape the course of a life. To Oprah, it meant putting everything behind her and behaving as if it had never happened.

Oprah could move on so easily because she had already rejected the possibility of settling for the role of unwed teenage mother. At 15, she had big plans for herself and wouldn’t let anything stand in her way. Furthermore, the future she envisioned—to be a famous entertainer—would be based on the talents and personality traits that already made her an engaging performer as a little girl.

Those talents and traits were obvious from the time Oprah was three, when she wowed her congregation by reciting Bible stories in church. And, as she tells it, her decision to go on stage had already crystallized when she was ten, while watching Diana Ross’s enthusiastic reception on
The Ed Sullivan Show.
To Oprah, who considers that the moment when her identity began to gel, the success of the glamorous African-American singer convinced her that she, too, could
become a star. Even though she went through an adolescent period of wildness, she continued to believe that she was destined to be famous, and she kept her eye on that prize.

After the birth of her baby, the wildness subsided and she grabbed her second chance. This was also a time when affirmative action was beginning, and Oprah’s integrated high school brought new opportunities, including classes in speech and drama that prepared her to win oratory contests. While still in high school, she also got a part-time broadcasting job at Nashville’s African-American radio station. Instead of descending into the dead-end role of unwed teenage mother, the 17-year-old Oprah was envied by her classmates and already was becoming larger than life.

More success followed. Her radio performances soon led to a job at a local television station, and, at age 20, Oprah became Nashville’s first black female TV personality. A few years later she was hired to anchor the evening news in Baltimore. Then, after some setbacks, the seasoned 29-year-old moved on to Chicago to build what soon became the nationally syndicated
Oprah Winfrey Show.