The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [28]
We retreated that evening to a joyless Ibis hotel where the dining room had closed due to a flood and, after a cheese sandwich from a petrol station, turned in early.
Matters began to look up the next day, however, when we went to Middlesbrough to visit a windscreen repair company which was in the process of laying off twenty-five middle managers. The bosses had asked Symons to conduct a seminar entitled ‘Self-Confidence’, during which he would lead the redundant workers through a number of exercises designed to help them to imagine an adequate future for themselves. In the morning session, he projected some slides onto a screen: I can do anything if I put my mind to it. I can be strong and move mountains. I can set myself goals and achieve them. Nothing I have done so far is an indication of the powers that are within me. These were supplemented by a booklet Symons handed out, containing extracts from the biographies of famous self-made men and women. On the fly-leaf was a quote from Leon Battista Alberti: A man can do all things if he will.
None of this was easy to watch, and several times I found myself looking awkwardly out of the window at the cafeteria below. I was particularly troubled to hear one participant repeating, under Symons’s direction: I am the author of my own story. In the bathroom to which I repaired for mental relief, I tried to analyse my discomfort, and yet, in so doing, began to be suspicious of my own stance. I realised that Symons’s talk unsettled me because it reflected a disturbing but ultimately unavoidable truth about achievement in the modern world. In older, more hierarchical societies, an individual’s fate had largely been decided by the accidents of birth; the difference between success and failure had not hung on a proficiency with the declaration I can move mountains.
However, in the meritocratic, socially mobile modern world, one’s status might now well be determined by one’s confidence, imagination and ability to convince others of one’s due – a possibility of advancement which shone a less flattering light on philosophies of stoicism and resignation. It seemed that one might squander one’s life chances because of a high-handed disdain for books with titles such as The Will to Succeed, believing that one was above their shrill slogans of encouragement. One might be doomed not by a lack of talent, but by a species of pessimistic pride.
After lunch, Symons took his managers back into the lecture room and offered them a chance to share their hopes for the future, the idea being that a public revelation of this kind would stand as a promise to themselves which would be the harder to break when their confidence wavered. An employee in her early forties, who had been with the company for twenty years, spoke of her ambition to open a tea shop in the village where she had grown up. So strong was her enthusiasm, and so detailed were her plans (the walls were to be hung with pictures of the young Shirley Temple), that it was almost impossible not to feel stirred. I can move mountains, she concluded by saying, and returned to her seat, to the applause of all the participants.
I felt my eyes fill. I was reminded that whatever over-cerebral understanding we may sometimes apply to our functioning, we nevertheless retain some humblingly simple needs, among them a prodigious and steady hunger for support and love. It was to the archaic part of our personalities that Symons’s motivational exercises appealed, the side which requires neither eloquence nor complex logic and which will forgive ungainly sentences so long as they are imbued with the necessary, redemptive doses of hope.
Towards the end of the day, Symons engaged his audience in a discussion about what he called the voices of despair, internalised attitudes emphasising the chances of failure. Many of the participants traced such voices back to an unhelpful parent or a disapproving teacher, someone who, decades before, had subjected them to criticism or neglect. One after another, grown men and women