On the shoulders of giants

I’m kind of awesome. I’m a genius. I’m a Duke student. I once dueled Kyle Singler in a theater studies class—and won. I got out of pre-med before it became uncool. I ate at the Jamaican food stand before it was replaced by The Greek Devil. I found a way to use the “obvious troll is obvious” meme in one of my columns. Samuel L. Jackson took acting lessons from me. I shot the sheriff, and, for that matter, I also remembered to shoot the deputy. I started with nothing, and now I have everything. I am a self-made man.

Joking aside, I have to remember that it’s not just my work alone that’s earning this success. Yes, I work hard (and play hard). Yes, I have good genes (and better jeans). Yes, the sweat of my brow is fragrant. (It smells like victory.) But I’ve also been the beneficiary of many blessings.

I am, in many ways, an exceptional case, as described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers.” While I would like to believe that I am an innately talented genius, the combination of circumstances that propelled me to where I am is truly extraordinary. Let me share just two examples of the special circumstances from which I benefited.

The first such circumstance was my father’s international business trips in Asia. As a young child, I would eagerly await his return because he would always bring new games for our family PC. Now, my father never knew much about these little discs (especially when they were labeled in Mandarin), but he knew they were all educational, child-friendly products: “Magic School Bus,” “Red Alert,” “Math Blaster,” “Fallout,”“Mechwarrior 2,” “Reader Rabbit”, “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six” and many, many more. He trusted me enough at the tender age of six to let me figure out how to install and run them on our family computer. Over the years, I spent hundreds of hours getting them to all work, tweaking settings, reading manuals and learning the ins and outs of how computers work. This served me well when I grew older: I have both the confidence and the experience to embrace and understand new or unknown technology.

The second example was my mother’s insistence that I attend the local high school that was farthest from our house and, consequently, farthest outside my comfort zone. Instead of going to the local public school where I had at least some connections and neighbors as classmates, I went to an all-boys school. (And trust me, as an incoming freshman there’s nothing more intimidating.) The school, run by Catholics (specifically, their psychic, government-toppling secret agents, the Jesuits), was located on the opposite side of town, literally on the other side of the railroad tracks, which I crossed over each day on my morning commute. However, over the four years that I attended the school, I rubbed shoulders with a significant number of people who were extremely different than I was, and I learned to reach common ground with people who didn’t think or act like me, something that helped me to build stronger and more diverse relationships when I got to college.

My greatest gifts are not material (though I am in the top 1 percent of the world in that regard) but rather, personal. I could write a book full of examples similar to the two above about how people have put me in a position to succeed: the Focus professor who took me under his wing, the improv group at UNC that took a chance on a lost Robertson scholar, the summer job boss who stayed up until 2:00 a.m. to help me finish a project... the list goes on and on.

In America and at Duke, the idea of the self-made man or woman is a dangerous myth that leads us to over-celebrate individuals who accomplish great things and also to demonize those who don’t as “lazy” or “untalented” without regard for individual circumstances or the contributions of others. As I prepare to exit Duke with a boatload of great memories and achievements, I hope that I can remember not just that I reached for the stars but that I stood on the shoulders of others to do so. And maybe someday, I can lend a shoulder for someone else to reach even higher.

Harrison Lee is a Trinity senior. This is his final column.