Good essay overall, but this footnote in particular stood out to me: > [2] Tiger parents, as parents so often do, are fighting the last war. Grades mattered more in the old days when the route to success was to acquire credentials while ascending some predefined ladder. But it's just as well that their tactics are focused on grades. How awful it would be if they invaded the territory of projects, and thereby gave the…
Fifteen years after escaping, I still haven't published anything real, and I can see the pattern. I saw the pattern ten years ago, even, but deep conditioning is really hard to break. Only being able to finish things for other people is kind of a disaster, especially when you wind up in the “need experience to gain experience” trap.
¹ Who, again without too much detail, was Asian. ² Which never happened. She never put any actual energy into it, I had no framework for approaching it as a child, and I'm not sure the surrounding environment contained people who were willing to do that sort of thing anyway.