The choice to be a tiger mother

I admire Lance Armstrong; he is an amazing athlete with an iron will. But I wouldn’t want to be like him. I wouldn’t make the sacrifices he was willing to make along the way.

That’s the truth: People like Lance Armstrong choose to go all-in. Most of us choose otherwise.

Amy Chua went all-in. Her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has attracted widespread disapproval. And venomous response. And death threats.

She is a Yale law professor and author of (now) three books. Her parenting style can best be described as uncompromisingly tough. It included rejecting her daughters’ homemade birthday cards because they weren’t good enough; demanding straight A’s; refusing to allow her daughters on play dates and sleepovers; making them play a piano piece to perfection before being allowed to go to the bathroom.

I am not the parent that Amy Chua is. I have chosen to be more permissive and indulgent with my children. So far, I’m glad to report, they seem to be turning out just fine – even if I have an uneasy feeling that Chua’s kids are likely to have a higher career trajectory than mine.

Why did I chose not to be more like a Tiger Mother? Let’s be honest: I didn’t want to work that hard. There are other ways to justify it, but why bother?

That’s probably why people are having such a strong reaction to her and her book. It plays into Americans’ anxiety that we are being eclipsed; it seems to affirm our most secret fear that this isn’t happening due to circumstances beyond our control, but because we’re soft and lazy.

I suspect those who wish Chua harm are most upset by the fact that they too could have aspired for their children to be exceptional. But they chose not to.

For them, Chua’s parenting isn’t upsetting as much as it is threatening.

Real social impact from social networks

If you doubt the potential of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, read this recent column by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times. The depth of meaning here is amazing. Twitter is an outlet for the voices of freedom in Iran; the ongoing human rights situation in China creates the impetus for incredible cyber innovation; and the United States could help, but doesn’t necessarily have to do anything except watch quietly.

Social media is not just the latest iteration of the Web; it’s already embedded in world-changing events.

Facebook: eyeballs, China and deja vu

Is it possible to have two deja vus at the same time? Or is that simply schizophrenia?

According to Venturebeat, Facebook is raising money to buy back stock from its employees. It hopes to borrow $150 million to buy back 15 million shares at $10 each. These shares have been given to employees of the private company xiaonei-blueover the past few years, and those employees have the right to sell up to 20% of their holdings, according to the article.

And now that the market for IPOs is so rotten, this is apparently the only way the company can help them cash in anytime soon.

That’s where the first case of deja vu comes in. Just 10 years ago, during the first Internet boom, people couldn’t cash in quickly enough on their foundation-free stock. Yes, Facebook has an astounding number of users, but I’m not so sure about its business plan. The company will undoubtedly go public some day, but I simply don’t believe it’s monetizable to the same extent as Amazon, eBay and Google.

Facebook really has only one asset: a bigazillion eyeballs. Which is impressive in itself, and there ought to be a way to make money from it. But with ad markets drying up and Facebook’s genuine incompetence when it comes to figuring out how to let businesses participate in a way justifies their spending money,  I don’t know what the company is going to do to pay back this next $150 million that it borrows — let alone the previous $460 million it’s raised, according to PaidContent.org.

Facebook is undoubtedly an 800-pound gorilla in the white-hot social networking arena. But there were  scores of 800-pound gorillas a decade ago, whose names I can no longer recall, that went bust because they couldn’t figure out how to turn eyeballs into cash.

I’m not predicting Facebook is going to go under anytime soon. In fact, I’m sure it will be around to cash in on an improved IPO market sometime next year. But if I were an employee and could get $10 a share for stock that I hadn’t paid for, I would sell as much as I was allowed at the first possible moment.

Here’s another deja vu-inducing part of the story: Facebook can’t get the money from its usual investors, so according to the reports already cited above, some portion of the money is coming from Asia. I remember when Japanese investors bought (and overpaid for) Rockefeller Center in the late ’80s. At the time, it was assumed to be a disheartening sign that U.S. economic dominance was ending.

It’s clear to me that, no matter how strong and innovative the U.S. may be, the world is becoming a more competitive place; any perception that we are falling probably has more to do with the fact that others are rising. Still, do we need to make it easy for them?

It’s always bothered me when people complain that we’re losing our mojo as a world power, but they don’t seem to make a conneciton between that observation and our willingness to let Asia — China in particular — lend us the money to finance our foreign wars and deficit spending.

If China comes to own a third or more of Facebook, do you think these people will notice? Do you think they’ll care?