Nature vs Nurture – Does a Silver Spoon Guarantee Success?

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Lynne McTaggert, author of the Intention Experiment, quoted an amazing study in her blog yesterday, which basically tested the ‘nature vs. nurture’ concept – and asked ‘does a silver spoon guarantee success?’  I paraphrase her post below:

“In the late 1930s, Arlie Bock, director of the health services at Harvard University at the time, backed by department-store magnate named W. T. Grant, conceived of the idea of taking the best and brightest from Harvard and studying them over time to ‘attempt to analyze the forces that have produced normal young men’.

Unlike virtually all medicine of the time, which focused on pathology, Bock wished to study the qualities of wellness, happiness and success: those x-factors that make for a happy life. Bock had big plans; from his data, he promised a blueprint for ‘easing disharmony in the world’

…Bock and his colleagues from an impressive array of disciplines — medicine, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, physiology, social work — set about selecting 268 young men at Harvard as the most promising, potentially successful and well-adjusted to take part in a longitudinal study. This kind of exercise gets hold of a relatively small sampling of people and tracks their progress over a long period of time.

…For 70 years, the group — told they were part of a special elite — were poked and prodded in every conceivable way and every body part measured and compared, from length of ‘lip seam’ to scrotum size. Biological changes with any physical activity were painstakingly observed. Social workers, interviewing their relatives at length, uncovered such private details as when they stopped wetting the beds. Psychiatrists submitted the young men to a battery of Rorschach and other popular psychological tests of the time.

Shakespearean Tragedy
In fact, the cases, in many instances, read like Shakespearean tragedy. Although a number of the group achieved extraordinary outward success — the participants included the late President John F. Kennedy, a presidential cabinet member, a newspaper editor, a bestselling author and four who ran for U. S. Senate — by age 50 a third of the men had suffered clinical mental illness.  A goodly percentage became alcoholics.

…Many of those considered most gifted turned out to have disastrous or even pointless lives. One young man, the son of a wealthy doctor and artistic mother, was singled out as exceptionally blessed: ‘Perhaps more than any other boy who has been in the Grant Study,’ wrote one researcher about him, ‘the following participant exemplifies the qualities of a superior personality: stability, intelligence, good judgment, health, high purpose, and ideals.’

…Bock was shocked by how his best and brightest were doing. “They were normal when I picked them,’ he remarked when Vaillant caught up with him in the 1960s. ‘It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.’

On the other hand, others who’d started out with difficult early lives rallied as time went on. One young social misfit, given to depression, found his calling as a psychiatrist in mid-life after someone was simply kind to him during one of his bouts in the hospital.

…In his article, Shenk calls mature adaptations a ‘real life alchemy’, ‘a way of turning the dross of emotional crises, pain and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment and creativity’. Vaillant likens it to the grit of sand in an oyster eventually transforming into a pearl.

…What is most important is the understanding that every tough moment is your life’s biggest pearl. That, in my view, is the key to the good life.”

How do you react when challenges appear in your life?  Does a tough life as a kid make it easier for us to overcome those challenges as an adult?

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