Keyu Jin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Very nice. Imagine the majority of people and how they feel. But it does drive ambition in part and you don’t take anything for granted and you work hard, you keep the spirit up. But going to the US, I finally realized that Americans are totally competitive, it’s just that they don’t display it. It’s not as apparent. I remember I went to a very competitive high school, but everyone’s so chill, “Oh, I’m not studying.” They’re studying. They are secretly studying. When I was doing my PhD at Harvard, people would say, “Oh, my parents say don’t work so hard. ” People say, “Don’t say you worked.” They’re working hard, just you don’t show it. In China, it’s kind of a noble thing to show that you’re working hard and that you’re number one or that you’re top of the class and you want to display it and you want to let everybody know. But in the US, everybody’s secretly doing it. Yeah, some of it is the signaling. The culture emphasizes the signaling of is it better for everything to come easily, thereby showing that you’re a genius, it comes naturally? Or is it better to show that you worked extremely hard for the thing? But the ultimate result is there’s still competition. But I don’t know, when you’re visually displaying and explicitly stating that it’s good to be number one and it’s bad to be number 800. I think that permeates throughout the culture to where, first of all, you understand that hard work is the only way to improve, to succeed in life. And second of all, you just create this framework of early on understanding what it means to live a good life. And a part of that is to find the thing you’re damn good at and get even better at it, master it, become hopefully the best person in the world at that thing. I don’t know, that’s an extremely important lesson for society to teach.…

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