TED TALK DICTATION - Scrapers deserve interviews
（一篇来自人力资源经理的演）
（加粗单词、词组：听写时的难词&值得学习的表达）
Your company launches a search for an open position. The applicantion start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are indentified. Now the choosing begins.
Person A, Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations - all the right stuff; person B, state school, fair amount of job hopping, and all jobs like cashier and singing waitress.
But remember, both are qulified. So I ask you, who are you going to pick?
My collegues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct catagories of candidates. We call A "the silver spoon", the one who clearly have advantages and was destined for a success; and we call B "the scrapper", the one who have to fight against a tremendous odds to get to the same point.
You just heard a human resources director refer to people as silver spoons and scrappers, which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgemental. But before my human resources certification gets revoked, let me explain.
A resume tells a story. And over the years, I have learned something about people whose experiences read likes a patchwork quilt that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away.
A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredicatablity, or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the scrapper deserve an interview.
To be clear, I don't hold anything against the silver spoon. Getting into and graduating from an elite university take a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life have been engineered towards success, how are you handle the tough times?
One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doingmanual labor to better understand an operation. Eventually, he quit.
But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure, and actually succeed?
I want to urge you to interview the scrapper. I know a lot about this because I am a scrapper. Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. And he could not hold a job in spite of his brilliance.
Our lives wer one part "Cuckoo's Nest", one part "Awakenings" and one part "A Beautiful Mind". I am the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighbourood in Brooklyn, NY. We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we did not even had a telephone. So I was highly motivated to understand the relatinoship between business success and scrappers, because my life can easily turned out very differently.
As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-power leaders, I noticed some commonality. Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandenment, death of a parent when young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence.
The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress and there is been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight that even the worse circumstances can result in growth and transformation. A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discover which scientists called "post traumatic growth". In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most sever and extreme conditions, fully 1/3 grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded 1/3.
Take this resume, this guy parents give them up for adoption, he never finishes his college, he job-hops quite a bit, goes for a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs.
In the study of the world's most highly-successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. In the US, 35% of the entrepreneurs studed has dyslexia.
What's remarkable, among those entrepreneurs who experienced post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and pay greater attentions to detail. They do not think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they have become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful.
One of my collegues had his life completely upended as the result of the Chinese Culture Revolution in 1966. At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside; the schools were closed; and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16 when he got a job in a clothing factury. But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. 11 years later when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. He had 3 months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. So everyday, he came home from the factury, took a nap, studied until 4 a.m., went back to work, and repeated this circle everyday for 3 months. He did it, he succeeded it. His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. Today he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard.
Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. When things do not turn out well, scrappers asked what can I do differently to create a better result. Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevented them from giving up on themselves. Kind of like, if you survived poverty, a crazy father, and severalmugglings, you figure, "Business challenges? Really? Piece of cake, I got this." And that reminds me humor, scrappers know that humor get you through the tough times and laghters helps you change your perspective.
And finally, there are relationships. People who overcome adversity do not do it alone, somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. Having someone you can count on, no matter what, is essential to overcoming adversity.
I was lucky. In my first job after college, I did not have a car, so Icarpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. Along the way, I have met many people who have provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. This people do not mind that I once worked as a singing watress to help pay for college.
I'll leave with one finally valuable insight: companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support scrappers, andoutperform their peers. A study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperform the S&P 500 by 25%. So back to my original question: who you gonna bet on, silver spoon or scrapper? I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose - hire the scrapper.
4/6/2018 9:26:50 PM
