“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has as by the obstacles which he has overcome.” Teach Different with Booker T. Washington

Transcript

Dan Fouts (00:10)

Hey everybody, welcome to the Teach Different podcast. Welcome back. It’s good to have you here. Our listenership for this podcast is growing and we’re so excited that you decided to join us with another conversation over another quote from somebody famous. And today it’s gonna be Booker T. Washington. Early, early civil rights activists in the 1800s and we’re gonna be working through the conversation method. And just one thing I like to just maybe pontificate a little bit on or just explore is the power of these conversations and why they’re so difficult yet so necessary. And I think what I landed on Steve, is that you have to blend spontaneity with structure to make these work, if you’re gonna be using these quotes to start these conversations. There has to be an unpredictability to it, but there also has to be a structure that contains it. And I think that’s what we try to do here with these quotes. They become kind of the North Star, the thing that we can all do as a group, if you’re doing this in a group or with your child in a home setting, that you can all go back to if you ever feel lost and you lose your anchor. And that’s important, that structure. But then there’s also the storytelling component of it and the questioning component of it. And those things often come into a conversation without warning. They are spontaneous, they’re organic, they can’t be predicted. And so you have discovery of new ideas that are held together with this loose structure. That’s what this is about. And that’s why using quotes like this is so much fun and so valuable in these different settings. Okay, well, just with that maybe it kind of helps everybody understand. You know, what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Booker T. Washington is gonna be our guest today and I’m gonna read this quote twice. It’s really good. It’s on success, that I think is very relatable. I’ll do that now. This is from his famous work, Up From Slavery it’s a good one. Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has as by the obstacles which he has overcome. Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has as by the obstacles which he has overcome. Steve, do you think Booker T. Washington is saying here about success?

Steve Fouts (03:16)

Well, I’ve got to read into the definitions of position. Position, he’s got to be referring to your position in society, like your class or your career or how you’re looked up to by other people in society, like your status. He is saying that that’s not what success is, what your title is, but it’s how many obstacles you’ve overcome. So how much determination and perseverance and grit you have should be the measure of your success. This feels a lot like the way we have been talking the last couple decades in say the education setting and emphasizing the importance of things like perseverance and grit, you know, in learning and in students, I guess you’d call it social emotional learning, what have you. But it’s just an acknowledgement that not everybody has the same starting point. And some people quickly get to positions of status in society. Others have to overcome a lot just to even get noticed. So if you’re going to measure success, are you going to go to the person that just has this position or are you going to go to someone who you knew had to struggle? You know, had to struggle. So it’s a definition of success. It’s a criteria.

Dan Fouts (05:00)

And it makes me think of what is it about obstacles and overcoming of them that lends itself to success, why it should be measured that way, that maybe what you learn from the obstacles that you face, what you overcome. What you end up learning is really what your success ends up being because no one’s perfect and great at something the first time they try it. They have to work at it. They have to overcome their failures. They have to push through and persevere in order to achieve things. We could say this about teaching our job in general. You don’t really become a good teacher, I don’t think, until you’ve gone through a lot of obstacles and barriers. In fact, I don’t even think I knew anything of what I was doing until I was maybe five years in to the profession. I mean, I’m 30, I’m going into my 33rd year next year, my final year in classroom teaching. I don’t think I knew what I was doing the first five years. That’s probably not completely accurate, but I would definitely not say I achieved success per se because I hadn’t overcame enough. I’m going with his claim here. I like this.

Steve Fouts (06:30)

Yeah, that’s what it’s referring to and it’s says a lot about him and his time because he’s been around people who have status and he’s probably not impressed with their character. Not everybody who has status has character, but I’m ready to go to the counterclaim and just throw this out right now. Sometimes. Yeah, we’ll go back sometimes.

Dan Fouts (06:39)

Right, right. Think of what, yeah. Okay, we’ll bounce back to the claim, but yeah, go.

Steve Fouts (06:59)

When you overcome things and you have to struggle a lot and have a lot of obstacles to your path, sometimes that actually does result in position and status. There’s a lot of stories of people who had to overcome a lot and they became Able to reach the pinnacle of their career You know, I don’t know if anyone’s come into your mind. But I mean, I don’t know why Oprah just came and I thought about her because she had Some real struggles that she had to get over

when she was young and look at her, she was a meteor. You know, and just became so big and had status.

Dan Fouts (07:50)

That’s a great, mean, Abraham Lincoln, you could do political figures. You could go after the political figures. What he had to overcome to build on the point that you’re making that his position of president of the United States. You could measure success based on the fact that he is president. Cause look what he had to overcome in order to get to that position. So success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has as by the obstacles. Okay, so maybe Booker T. Washington, he’s not saying not so much by the position. He’s not discounting position. He’s just saying the emphasis should be on the struggle when you’re defining and measuring success.

Steve Fouts (08:38)

Okay. Yeah, I mean, this is a pick me up. This is a self-esteem building This quote is for anyone who has to struggle a lot and doesn’t think it’s worth it sometimes.

Dan Fouts (09:00)

And you think of what Booker T. Washington had to do to struggle or Frederick Douglass or many of the African-American heroes of the 19th century in American history, the struggle, I mean, of course the success was measured in that way. So, I mean, that very much makes sense given his background, you know, and I gotta just add some.

Steve Fouts (09:28)

And a lot, by the way, weren’t recognized for their accomplishments, which is the whole thing about, yeah.

Dan Fouts (09:35)

Yeah, right, right. This would be a great quote to introduce a reading you might give by Booker T. Washington. Just to stop and to your teachers out there or homeschoolers, if you wanna find a really cool way to use this method to integrate with the curriculum, throw this quote out and speak about it in the similar way that Steve and me are right now. And it will create maybe some intrigue as to who is Booker T. Washington? Why would he say this? And then that leads a glide path into learning about historically who he was and what he did. So that’s a nice way to pair these with the curriculum. Anyway, I just had to mention that as a quick little tip. Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

Steve Fouts (10:38)

What’s another counterclaim? I don’t know. He equivocated, so it’s hard to disagree with this.

Although, yeah, position means something as well. That is a brand of success. I mean, you don’t, unless you’re a very rare few, you’re not going to have a position if you don’t work for it and you’re not willing.

Dan Fouts (10:53)

It is. Well, and in a company, you have to have a certain position in order to get a certain salary and benefits. So your success actually is your position because you can’t just say, I’m deserving of all these benefits at work, salary or whatever, just because I’ve overcome a lot of hardship. No. My success is measured by now they call me this, it’s on my business card. I don’t know, I’m trying to work in a counterclaim, but it is, he says it in a more balanced way, I think. So it’s harder to articulate a counterclaim. Yeah. Okay, well question. What’s the best way to measure success?

Steve Fouts (11:49)

That’s a rich question. People have a different idea on that one. Like even the president of the United States, some people would say, boy, he’s successful. But you could also argue that, you know, if you’ve gotten to any position of authority in your life and let’s say you’re not treating people well or you got there through. You know, not so good means nefarious beginnings. That’s not success. know, success is being a good person. How about that? I’ll answer an essential question. What is success? I think it’s being a good person because it is a very difficult thing to do at times because we have temptations. We have anger. We have frustration. We have so many obstacles in us doing the right thing, but to throw out even my closer definition to what success or what ⁓ being good is really and what is success would be to care about it.

You know, if you care about being a good person, you’re going to be successful at it. doesn’t matter how much you screw up in my opinion. It’s all keeping it as something that you care about. And that’s what people give up on, I think.

Dan Fouts (13:19)

Well, right, and then that makes me think of the question, what is success? If success is your character, if a successful life is that you have a good character, then it’s not dependent on position and it’s not dependent on obstacles that you overcome. It’s dependent on something internal that can’t be defined by external things. And in that sense, I think that’s a great definition of success.

Steve Fouts (13:53)

There you go. Internal, external, that’s a good way to separate it. People disagree on that.

Dan Fouts (14:02)

Because if you have an internal sense of your own success and worthiness as a person, it doesn’t matter what happens. You don’t need positions, you don’t need salaries, you don’t need anything. You…

Steve Fouts (14:10)

Yeah. And then you take that to the extreme. And some of those people have you noticed they kind of are resigned and they’re afraid of rejection. So they’ll say it doesn’t mean anything to them, but it really means they don’t want to be rejected, you know, and try to obtain something you got to…

Dan Fouts (14:33)

Sure, there’s authentic and inauthentic expressions of that. Booker T. Washington, success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has as by the obstacles which he has overcome. What a great one to use. This ⁓ taps into humanity in a very real way. Well, thanks everybody for listening to the Teach Different podcast and we’re looking forward to our next quote soon as we can. Thank you so much.

Steve Fouts (14:54)

That’s a good quote.