A couple years back, I used to visit the site Medium frequently. It's an idea-sharing platform, almost like a news source with a blog-style take. I must be frank, I'd fallen out of the habit of checking Medium, but a few weeks ago, our class read an article from the site in EBI. I immediately reconnected with the feelings that attracted me the Medium in the first place after reading "Résumé Virtues, Eulogy Virtues, and the Impact of Small Moments". This article resonated greatly with me and I've been reflecting on it for some time now since EBI.
In this article, Mike Sturm argues most people possess two sets of traits. For example, being a hard-worker, responsible, articulate, and intelligent are what Sturm calls "résumé virtues". They're the kinds of traits that employers want to see, but that you wouldn't necessarily highlight when introducing someone in a non-work setting. "Résumé" traits are also what many schools tend to breed in students these days through rewarding those who focus on perfecting their school work over other areas of their beings.
On the other hand, Sturm designates the second set of traits as "eulogy virtues". Possessing traits like charisma, emotional intelligence, resiliency, kindness, patience, and an optimistic character are, as the term suggests, traits you'd say in a eulogy. Sturm writes that in today's high-power, forward-thinking society, people are wrongly raised to focus almost exclusively on résumé traits. In turn, these soft skills or characteristics are inadvertently de-emphasized. And I couldn't agree with him more.
For most of my academic career, I've believed in educating the whole person. I've always found character to be the thing that draws me most to people. When I say "character", I'm referring to what Sturm calls "eulogy virtues." I don't understand what it is about our education system, but too often it fails to reward those traits. Instead, the system rewards people for résumé virtues. People with strong résumé virtues often perform better in school and receive better job offers. They may be called the "alphas".
But I see the implications of this every day. When people don't feel they're rewarded for things like kindness or emotional intelligence, they don't spend time developing or reflecting upon those areas of themselves. This can people to be reluctant to help peers. Peers feel ultra-competitive, pushing themselves to the limits to oust everyone else from the performance picture. In the work environment, it pushes everyone to be extra critical of each other to the point where at some companies, I've read that it's normal for "team" meetings to lead to people crying. Where is it that we lost the ability to be constructive and kind? To be compassionate and hardworking. To be optimistic and data-driven. Where is it that we lost eulogy values?
Perhaps it's even too general to denominate these as "eulogy" values because they're not just things that we should say when someone passes. "Eulogy virtues" touches upon the fundamentals of human character. Of personality. Of genuine goodness in people. And while a herd of people with strong résumé virtues may serve the economy relentlessly, we shouldn't lose sight of the value of a good human being.
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