“To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish.”
His claim basically says to first be selfish until you get on top, and then once you are on top be humble and grounded.
Of course, not everyone has the same grain of wisdom as the NBA superstar. I feel that nowadays, it’s changed to:
“To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be even more selfish so you can stay there.”But there have been certain situations where I have witnessed ethical behavior as a Good Samaritan shines through. One in particular was a story that a former mentor told me. This woman was a doctor at a nationally ranked medical center hospital located in downtown Chicago. She was speaking of her career track from undergraduate school, to medical school, to residency, and then finally opening her own practice. In her story, she described the difficulties of medical school. She went on about one of the biggest incidents that could have destroyed her entire medical career.
In one of her courses, they had to conduct an experiment and produce a liquid solution perfectly to pass. She was an intelligent African-American woman and one of the top students in her class. Many saw her as competition.
She completed her project in the classroom, walked a way for a second, and then returned. When she came back, one of her classmates pulled her aside. She was confused, thinking she did the experiment wrong. But he, instead, whispered to her saying one of the other male students put something in her solution, so she would fail the project. She was in complete shock.
Immediately, she approached her professor, not wanting to confront her perpetrator. In the end, he was kicked out of his medical program, she got another opportunity to re-do the experiment, and she passed.
The opportunism here does not focus on the cheating culprit who took advantage of the opportunity of her stepping away from her experiment. The chance for opportunistic behavior is when her classmate chose to tell her that another student tampered with the results of her experiment. The competition involved in medical school motivates individuals to be extremely selfish. But her classmate chose the ethical path. He could have changed the circumstances for his own gains by letting the incident slip, but he didn’t, and told her the truth instead.
I think the story is interesting in that it chooses to focus on the classmate who told the truth rather than the student who tampered with the experiment. I like that you can see both sides of opportunism in this story. Do you think there was some opportunistic behavior associated with telling the truth? The student could have assumed that the other student would get kicked out of the program, therefore guaranteeing a better opportunity for himself.
ReplyDeleteThis story is an example of whistle blowing - seeing wrong doing and reporting it to the injured party. Often whistle blowing comes at strong personal cost to the whistle blower, because it is done against one's employer and the possibility of retribution is there.
ReplyDeleteFor this prompt, one should ask whether not blowing the whistle after witnessing the crime is a form of opportunism. It may be unethical, but I think in common usage it wouldn't be called that. There have been many violent crimes that happened in public where nobody reported it. People "learn" to keep their heads down and walk away. It does not reflect a noble human spirit. But it may be a sensible act of self-preservation.
The way the story was told it sounds like the perpetrator was motivated by racism and sexism as much as about getting ahead, since this was an act directed at a specific classmate. In contrast, when I was a first year grad student, some of my classmates who competed in an out-of-bounds kind of way would reshelve some of our readings, which were in bound periodicals in the improper place in the Library. This was a low form of behavior, but it wasn't directed against any particular student. It was done purely to get an advantage.
I agree that this story is very interesting in that it looks at the behavior of several different individuals. I think it was interesting that the student who saw the other student tamper with the experiment chose to tell your mentor as opposed to going directly to the professor. I also wonder if there is some distinction between acting opportunistically and acting dishonestly. I think that in many cases it is possible to take advantage of an opportunity without being unethical.
ReplyDelete