Contact us
Home Page
Subscribe to The Achievement Digest
THE
AMERICANS
WHO ARE THEY, AND HOW DID THEY GET THIS WAY?
By Gene Griessman ©2003
Links
to more great pages at the bottom of this page
You'll
find thought-provoking information like this in every
issue of The Achievement Digest®. Click here
for your complimentary subscription (quarterly).
Why
Americans Are Different
Practically everyone in the world seems to have
an opinion about Americans, and they are not all complimentary by any
means. Arnold Toynbee wrote, “America is a large, friendly dog in a very
small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.” Sigmund
Freud was far from admiring, and said, “America is a mistake, a giant
mistake!”
But there are countless fans too. American citizenship is eagerly
sought even in nations where it is not politically correct to like
Americans,
Are Americans different from other people?
A man in France told me
he could spot Americans a block away. He said Americans walk, talk, and
dress in a distinctive manner. He also claimed Americans hold different
attitudes from most people.
America: Not Yet Fully
Formed
When I was a Fulbright
professor in Pakistan, I became friends with Gerardo Zabliglioni, the
Italian ambassador to that nation. More than once Gerardo told me,
“Americans are a new people. You are not yet fully formed.” And he was
right. America is a work in progress.
Great waves of immigrants are part of the evolution. It would require a
long page to list all the places from whence the immigrants have come. Even
the so-called Native Americans came from somewhere else. Scholars are
debating whether they all came across the Bering Straits or whether some
sailed across the Pacific from China or India. But the Native American’s
ancestors were immigrants too.
One of the remarkable
things about America is that the immigrants begin to change almost as soon
as they set foot on the ground. 1n 1782, Michel Guillaume Jean de
Crevecoeur wrote: “Here (in America) individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men.” Thomas Jefferson agreed. In 1802, Jefferson used
the word “Americanized” to describe the process.
Like actors in a play,
the immigrants are given a script, they find a role, and start learning
their lines. America—the stage on which they play—and the other actors
transform the immigrants.
Who is an American?
Officially, an American is anyone who can legally obtain an American
passport—in other words, an American citizen. But many people who can’t
qualify for a passport, like recent immigrants and illegal ones, think of
themselves as Americans.
America: Land Of
Diversity
There are so
many different kinds of Americans that some people claim there’s no valid
way to make generalizations about them. Admittedly, there is lots of
diversity: Yankees and rednecks, Wall Street brokers and beach bums,
landlords and beggars. Americans live in small towns and great cities, in
cabins, yachts, high rises, and on the streets. America is full of
contradictions: generosity and chauvinism, hedonism and Puritanism,
tolerance and racism, courtesy and in-your-face rudeness. One writer has
stated, “America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely
to be true, and the opposite is probably equally true.”
Having said this,
Americans are alike in important ways. There are strong tendencies in
American culture, recurring themes in the national character.
A French nobleman by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville
produced an amazing discussion of those themes during his visit to American
some 170 years ago. To a remarkable degree, what Tocqueville found then is
still true today.
A Key To Understanding
Americans: The Belief In Individual Achievement
The key to understanding
Americans, and understanding what happens to immigrants as soon as they get
here, is their belief that they can achieve something important in life. To
be sure, there is apathy and fatalism in America, but these are by no means
dominant attitudes.
In the 1950s, a Cornell University sociologist by the name of Robin M.
Williams, Jr. wrote about what he called the “major value orientations in
America.” The very first item on his list was “achievement and success.”
After literally thousands of interviews on this subject, I am convinced
Williams’s assessment is correct.
The
celebrated actor Robert DiNiro keeps a quote from Henry David Thoreau quote
out where he can see it. Here’s the quote: “If one advances confidently in
the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the
life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common
hours.”
Americans think there’s something wrong with you if you
don’t have dreams. Parents worry about their children if they seem
“unmotivated.” A couple spoke to me after I had delivered a speech on high
achievement. If they bought one of my books for their son, they wanted to
know, would it “motivate” him. They told me he had no ambition.
Naturally I was faced with a dilemma. How could I not
recommend purchasing my book? It could do no harm and might possibly help
the boy. I replied that I had little experience motivating unmotivated
people, that I was better at fanning flames than starting fires, but, I
added, it might possibly help. They purchased the book in spite of my
caveat. They never let me know if their son was motivated enough to read
the book, or if it helped him.
Some American dreams are
outrageously optimistic ones. I have met homeless men and women seeking
shelter at rescue missions who told me of their plans to start a business or
go to college or write a book. I interviewed one such person who did that.
His name? Eric Hoffer. Hoffer spent years as a migrant worker, and
eventually wrote a fine book entitled The True Believer. It sold
millions of copies.
American parents routinely ask their children: “What do you want to be when
you grow up?” This is one place in the world where the answer to the
question matters. Kids are expected to dream, and then work at the dream.
Let me tell you about one such dream. The man’s
beginnings were humble. He was a teenager before he even knew who his
biological father was, but he studied hard and became an excellent
athlete. His senior year in college he was the starting center of the
football team and was chosen Most Valuable Player.
His university yearbook chose him for its Hall of Fame in 1935, and gave
this explanation: "Because the football team chose him as their most
valuable player; because he was a good student and got better grades than
anyone else on the squad; because as house manager he put his D.K.E.
(fraternity) house back on a paying basis; because he never smokes, drinks,
swears or tells dirty stories - qualities quite novel among the rest of his
fraternity brothers; because he's exceedingly bashful but broke forth in the
middle of his senior year with a date; because he has decided to coach
football at Yale and incidentally to study law; and because he's not a bit
fraudulent and we can't really find anything nasty to say about him."
The young man did go to Yale Law School, paying his way by coaching football
and boxing, and graduating in the top third of his class. After serving in
the Navy, he ran for Congress against a strong incumbent, winning handily.
He won 12 straight contests, never with less than 60 % of the vote, and
eventually was chosen Minority Leader.
In case you don’t recognize the story, it is
the story of Gerald Ford, America’s 38th President. What you may
not know is that Gerald Ford manifested his dreams with sweat and
blood—literally. Here, in his own words, is how he got through college::
“In those days you didn’t have a scholarship but our coach got me a job over
at the University Hospital, where I waited on tables. About every three
months I’d give blood, for which I was paid twenty-five dollars.”
Gerald Ford’s story is very American.
Here’s another dream story, not nearly as dramatic as Ford’s, but one
that is fairly common in America. A company in the convention industry hired
a young person as a sales rep. One of the interview questions was, “How
much do you intend to be making two or three years from now?” She replied
“$75,000 to $100,000.” (She had earned less than $20,000 the previous
year.) She got the job. Later the sales manager told her, “If you had said
$30,000, I would not have hired you. I don’t want any low-aiming people
working for me.”
A highly successful American
pastor told me that he always kept his churches involved in building
programs. “If I come to my people with a little plan, say, to build a
modest addition or purchase a piano or two, they will nit-pick the proposal
to death. But if I recommend that we tear down the old building and
construct something huge in its place, they will say, 'Our pastor is great
man.'"
America is a place where
dreams get turned into action plans and timetables. Homer C. Rice, years
before he became a nationally recognized athletic director, began to write
down his dreams on index cards that he carried around with him. He used
those cards to visualize his goals and create strategic plans to go with
each card, each dream. One by one his dreams came true. After Rice has
retired, he was asked by Georgia Tech to teach a course on the subject of
achievement. Only in America would a major academic institution teach people
how to convert dreams into reality.
But that is what America is about—converting dreams into reality. Arthur
Miller’s “Death Of A Salesman” tells the sad tale of Willy Loman’s
unsuccessful attempt to make his dreams come true. After Willy’s suicide,
his friend observed: “A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the
territory.”
Sumner Redstone, the
billionaire chairman and CEO of Viacom once made this statement: “I realize
that many people work for money, but I would wager that those who become
extremely successful are more strongly motivated by the desire to achieve,
by a commitment to excellence, and an obsessive drive to win.”
Every year Gene
Griessman does scores of seminars and keynotes for business groups and associations.
If you'd like to know more about his seminar on doing business with Americans, social trends, the future,
and strategic planning, click here.
He also does
executive coaching and seminars for business people who want to understand Americans better.
He resides in Los Angeles, but does coaching and seminars internationally. For information, call 310-822-1864 or send an email to
gene@achievementdigest.com
If you would
like permission to reprint the above article or to be notified when How To Do Business With Americans is published, please
send us an email at gene@achievementdigest.com.
Index to all pages
Time Management: How To Create A Time-Effective Organization
American
Chauvinism
Abraham Lincoln: quotes
More About
Abraham Lincoln: Resources For Further Study
Is George W. Bush the next Abraham
Lincoln? Lincoln-Bush compared
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt quotes and commentary on
leadership style
The Lincoln-Roosevelt
Connection
War quotes
Ronald Reagan quotes; exclusive
interview: his big break
"The Diversity Creed";
Why I Wrote "The Diversity Creed"
Remarkable Similarities Between President Abraham Lincoln And Benjamin Franklin
Civil War Quotes: U.S. Grant's Leadership Style
How To Do Business
With Americans: Forgive Their Blunders
Every
issue of ACHIEVEMENT DIGEST® contains articles like the one above. For
your free subscription, click here
For information about Gene Griessman's famous Abraham Lincoln portrayals,
click here
