Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…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. Yeah. That’s, I would say, the right kind of competition or the efficient kind of competition. I feel that in the Chinese education system, it was not necessarily efficient because it frames you and molds you to be thinking in a certain way what’s been taught to you. You don’t have the bandwidth or the time or freedom to be more creative and to think outside the box. There, it’s just the box. You maximize the box and that’s it. You don’t actually know what’s outside of the box and you never actually go there. That’s the bad part of Chinese competition. And when I got to the US, the high school teachers were asking us to question authority, to question text. I’m like, “Wow, really? You can do that?” So I started asking why.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.