Is Happiness the Same as Success or Do We Have to Choose?

I'm in the all-too-typical position of reading two books at once now (three, if count War and Peace, which is frozen on page 364 where I left off at the end of the summer). The first book is Ned Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap; the second is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. Neither is what I'd call a great read, but I'm slogging through. 

But it didn't occur to me until last night (hair slathered in Cetaphil and covered with a plastic shower cap to "suffocate" those g-d lice is how my friend Sarah put it) how much the books are in opposition to one another. Or are they? 

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell, a former Harvard psychiatrist and ADD expert who Ralph and I recently heard speak, suggests dialing life back a notch or three. In his view, being out-of-control busy has supplanted designer handbags as the new status symbol and the yearning to get organized is just as ubiquitous as the nearly universal desire to shed a few pounds. All it will take, the chronic clutterers among us believe, is the equivalent of the next new diet to clean off our desks and clear out our kids' toy boxes, and come January or June or September, by God, it's going to happen! 

Hallowell's lecture was about the childhood roots of happiness (after his book by the same name), but his theme was much the same as CrazyBusy: don't lose sight of what's important. He stressed to a state-of-the-art private school auditorium full of stressed-out parents that dragging your child from horseback riding to ballet to baseball to math tutoring is not nearly as important as allowing him to find a passion and then letting all the connections that ripple out from that passion grow. I felt calm when I left. Sam loves baseball, and, as I've blogged about before, that obsession has been his window on the world since he was 19 months old. And Julia, I was sure that night, would eventually find something besides dressing up that makes her world spin properly on its axis. 

But Gladwell upset my zen moment. While our national narrative on success is all about pluck and how sturdy one's boot straps are, Gladwell says that success is more a function of luck

--when you're born (January babies are more likely to excel at hockey) and to whom. He describes a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who found not only that parenting styles were "divided almost perfectly along class lines" but that the overachiever parent tends to produce the most successful kids: 

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

Reading that was enough to make me want to pull off my Cetaphil-laced shower cap. That's not crazybusy, I thought. That's insane. 

Lareau calls what I think of as Xtreme parenting "concerted cultivation" and believes that the ability to "customize" your environment is one of the big keys to success. 

And so I was left wondering all over again if trips for Sam to play baseball in the Virginia and Pennsylvania suburbs will one day be necessary for his success, not as a ball player necessarily, but as a person. Should he already be taking saxophone lessons? And what about karate? And am I behind by not already signing Julia up for ballet lessons, even though, at this point for her, it's all about the leotard and the pink slippers? Should we be fanning her interest in music not by playing CDs in the car but by attending music appreciation classes? Is our mellow approach stunting our children's growth before they even get started?

I personally don't know a single parent who says, "I just want my child to be successful."  Like Ralph and me, they say, "I just want to be my child to be happy." But do we really believe that our children will be happy as cashiers or waiters or construction workers? Don't we secretly have some floor that we think they should attain in order to be happy, say waiter/struggling artist? Can you be happy without also being successful? Where do those two intertwined notions of success and happiness go their separate ways? Or do they? 

I need a little wisdom here. And a cure for head lice.