Are High-Achieving Families Born or Made?

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Emma Varvaloucas: Can sibling rivalry actually fuel success?

Susan Dominus: Yeah, sibling rivalry can absolutely fuel success in the sense that it can create real motivation of maybe even the most primal kind.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, founder of Progress Network, joined by my co-host Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And as regular listeners know and as new listeners will soon discover, What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast. We do a shorter form one, which is called the Progress Report.

This is our longer form one where we interview scintillating compelling people who have unique and often eclectic, but always intriguing views of the world and we range all over the place from politics to the environment to culture, and we try to do so from an angle of, you got it, what Could Go Right? Meaning the world is replete with messages of all that could go wrong. There is no quote unquote good news. That is not the nature of news. The nature of news is if it bleeds, it leads and that is only magnified in a social media ecosystem where hot emotions and quick clicks get the most attention and doom scrolling is the nature of the game.

But we believe at The Progress Network, and I certainly believe in my writing and I do a column called the Edgy Optimist, which you can get on Substack, that we are potentially insufficiently paying attention to all the things that could go right in the world and over examining all the things that we know are going wrong. That is not a recipe for blithe optimism. It is simply a, we don’t know the future and maybe we’re not considering all the things that are constructive and positive.

Today we’re gonna talk to somebody who’s written a book that doesn’t pertain directly to the issues I just talked about, who is also a longtime journalist and is gonna look at family dynamics. I guess you could argue that much of what goes right or wrong in the world has its origin in the crucible of family. You probably can overdo that. Certainly many people have from Freud onward, but you can underemphasize it as well. And in many respects, it would behoove us all, not just biographers who do this as a matter of course, to look at the familial underpinnings of the world that we are in and of the people who are shaping it in one form or another.

So Emma, who are we gonna talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: So today we’re talking to Susan Dominus, as you mentioned, she is a longtime journalist and in fact, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. Today we’re gonna be talking to her about her book called The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success.

It explores why certain families produce multiple high achieving siblings. So she talks about profiles of certain families, scientific research, and also her own experience as a mother of twins. So are we ready to dive into family dynamics with Susan Dominus?

Zachary Karabell: Brace yourself. We are.

Emma Varvaloucas: Let’s go.

Zachary Karabell: Susan Dominus, what a pleasure to have you on the podcast and to talk about your recent book, although maybe we will bleed into other topics, I wonder if I should use the word bleed into other topics, given that you also won an award for writing about menopause. So that was an unintended pun to say the least.

So what was your motivation for writing this book? I have to say, I’m gonna, I’m gonna give you a quick little personal story about this, and for those who are listening for the first time, the book is about siblings and families with unusually, quote unquote, successful in the world. Siblings, whether or not they’re emotionally imbalanced, I guess we can get into as well. I was struck, raising two sons. There was a juncture in which they were having real challenges with each other, and I was interested in trying to find a therapist to kind of examine the sibling dynamic. And everybody that I talked to and I did not do probably nearly enough of an extensive search in New York City, only wanted to do sibling dynamics in the context of family dynamics, right? So they were only interested in talking about sibling having issues with each other in the context of it was all essentially about the parents, right? And that all the fighting was a derivative of whatever dynamic, and maybe that’s true in multiple cases. I was simply struck by the fact that there didn’t seem to be anyone, or at least it was not easy to find anyone whose real focus was simply on sibling dynamics as its own intense, unique, powerful relationship that clearly is amongst the most fundamental relationships for a lot of people ’cause you’re kind of growing up with this other person who’s there all the time, who you didn’t choose and who you can’t get away from. I’m curious, like given that in many ways is part of the nature of the book you did, how you got into this, why you got into this, why you decided to look at not siblings as a derivative of parents, but actually as its own unique, powerful, singular relationship.

Susan Dominus: So the truth is that I went into this project thinking that I was going to write a parenting book. I was thinking that I was going to identify a bunch of families in which there were numerous high achieving siblings. And that I would go to their parents and say, so what was the secret? What did you do? How did you manage to make all of your children so successful because clearly these are not one-offs, you know, either some consistency across the board so we can attribute it not just to the individual talent some child was put on this earth with, but something that was happening at home that was disseminated to all the children who succeeded.

It was only when I really started digging into my reporting that I realized that the siblings were just as influential in shaping each other and leading each other down the path of success as the parents, if not more so.

Emma Varvaloucas: Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that moment. Like was it just like the siblings kept on bringing each other up as motivators, or what exactly did that look like?

Susan Dominus: In the case of the Groff family, which includes Lauren Groff, this highly lauded novelist, her sister Sarah True, who’s a Olympic triathlete, and their brother Adam Groff, who’s a serial entrepreneur, they were very clear that their siblings were hugely driving factors. I mean, that was really what was, and they talked about their parents and how much they admired them and how grateful they were.

But when they talked about where like the real juice of their motivation came from, both Sarah and Lauren talked a lot about their siblings and it wasn’t about trying to please their parents vis-a-vis their siblings. It was about competition to live up to or to better than that kind of thing among each other. And also I heard other stories of people, you know, whose parents were role models for them or who were inspiring, who set a kind of bar, but often the siblings were the ones who made it possible for the other siblings to live up to those expectations because they gave them great advice. They told them where to go to college. They told them what they should major in. They made major introductions.

When it came down to the nitty gritty, the logistics of it, the siblings turned out to be more consequential than the parents who often were themselves kind of quietly extraordinary people who set expectations very high, who were role models, who were inspiring figures in their own right, albeit in some cases very humbly so.

But they weren’t the ones pulling the strings for their kids. It was the siblings who were in one way or another doing that for each other.

Zachary Karabell: You look at four, I think, groupings in the book, or at least primary groupings in the book. How did you, I always wonder about this, like really good journalists somehow find these like perfect microcosms to tell the larger story. And while yours is not the, at quite the same time level as the immersive reporting of like Katherine Boo or Andrea Elliott, I mean, you didn’t spend, you know, 12 years following these people around. Nor am I suggesting you should have, by the way, had you come upon these various groups.

Susan Dominus: I wish I had a better answer for that. I mean, I took suggestions from people, oh, you should reach out to this family. You should talk to that family. And I, a lot of people turned me down. I think they were uncomfortable with the idea of being held up as exemplars, or sometimes there was one sibling who was not as successful and they were worried about hurting somebody’s feelings, or they were like family secrets that people didn’t want me to dig too close to. So I mean, I think I was really just doing lots and lots of interviews and at the end of the day, the people I wrote about were people whom I both admired and wanted to spend time with, you know, and thought were in one way or another, inspiring to me, and also were willing to give me their time and open up to me.

I really felt like, and if I was gonna spend this much time with families for the purposes of this book, I really wanted to be people that I enjoyed. I mean, it was, you know, it was my book, my prerogative, and so there were many factors that came together, but I really am quite fond of all of the people I wrote about in this book.

Emma Varvaloucas: So Zachary kind of hinted at this in the beginning when he said like, they’re quite successful maybe or maybe not well balanced, and I kind of wanna ask directly about that. So, you know, you profile these families where the siblings are extraordinarily successful in their own ways, but are they well balanced?

Like is the sibling effect like a positive psychological effect, or does it turn into sometimes intense rivalry or competition, things like that?

Susan Dominus: It’s true that in many of the families that I write about in this book, there are mental health struggles and there are also rivalries that can be quite intense and there are, you know, huge judgements and error that come up. I mean, I really told a very warts and all story for these families, I think. And I guess I just would say more like those things exist in all kinds of families and I think they can be intensified in families where, look, you know, for families that are just in general very intense and very hard driving and very achievement oriented, you’re gonna see some exaggerated effects compared to what you might see in other families. But I think they’re really, if anything, what I think I took away from these family stories is that no matter how successful these families are, they’re still susceptible to the same kinds of problems that everybody is. There’s nothing particularly protective about huge levels of success, and in fact, driving for success at that levels can be very emotionally exhausting and stressful.

Zachary Karabell: So how are we defining success here? Are we defining it purely in terms of what most people think of optically, materially, socially as success, like career, money, fame, power.

Susan Dominus: The way I define success is very idiosyncratic, and it reflects my values. Definitely I was interested in this book and I think actually now is a really great time for a book like this, because what interested me was not just wealth accumulation or social status. I was interested in writing about young people who had been somehow raised to believe that they could change the world, that they could create new forms of art, that they could be civil rights leaders, that they could have impact, that they could do big, ambitious, bold things that they thought were for the good of the world. And I wanted to write about kids who had dreamed big and who had reason to think that they could dream big. I was, I think that’s the thing that most interested me. So the success for me was overcoming hardship, trailblazing, innovation, social justice. Those were the kind of benchmarks that were interesting to me.

Emma Varvaloucas: You mentioned the Groffs previously. Can you tell us a story of another family that you profiled so that we can get a sense of who these trailblazers are?

Susan Dominus: Yeah, sure. Well, another family that interested me a lot was the Murguia family. There were seven kids in that family. They grew up very humbly in Kansas City, Kansas. It’s a Mexican American family. They spoke Spanish in the home and neither of their parents was college educated. I’m not sure. Their mother went to high school, passed eighth grade. And of those seven children, one now is Janet Murguia, runs the largest Latino civil rights organization in the country, Unidos US. Her sister Mary, her twin sister Mary Murguia is the chief judge of the Ninth Circuit. Their brother Ramon Murguia is on the board of the Kellogg Foundation, he’s one of the more prominent Latino philanthropists in the world and also has been very innovative in bringing Latinos into the world of philanthropy. And there’s a fourth sibling, Carlos Murguia, who was a federal judge as well, who actually resigned following a scandal that I wrote about in the book. So it’s both a story about an extraordinary family that was very humble and very admirable. And also about what happens when a family whose brand is social justice has to face the fact that, you know, nobody’s perfect and that their own brother had really let them down.

Zachary Karabell: And like in that, I mean that’s a big family. So in that seven sibling family, how did they influence each other in the ways that you’re talking about? Meaning how were they group raising each other separate from parents?

Susan Dominus: So their parents, and this is something you see a lot in, in, you know, immigrant families. I think their parents really weren’t in a position to say to them, you know, I think you should take this AP course, or you know, you might wanna try out for boys state. What really was influential for them was the oldest brother in this family was someone named Alfred Murguia, and he was the first in the family to go to college and they all looked up to him, and Alfred got to college and really like paved the way and found the fraternities that his brothers would follow him into and got to know the financial aid people really well. You know, at these big state schools, it can be very overwhelming. You can waste your entire freshman year because you’re not getting into the classes you want. So he really helped his brothers, but what they didn’t know was that he himself was struggling, which is often the case for first generation low income minority students at a school like this.

And in fact, he had secretly dropped out and was not telling them that, and was still encouraging them and walking them to class and getting them into his fraternities. So they had this older brother who was cheering them on and paving the way, and literally helping them with very important logistics. He didn’t have the benefit of that older sibling, and so he didn’t quite make it and he, you know, he now is a thriving person who works in hospitality at a major hotel, but obviously he kind of paved the way for his siblings to thrive at University of Kansas. They all went on to law school from there and went on to very prominent lives.

Emma Varvaloucas: So that brings to mind the question, how much of this is dependent on the eldest sibling, right? Like are, did you look at families where the direction was also like the effect also went up, like the youngest sibling or the middle sibling or something like that greatly affected the older ones, or is it really like you’ve gotta get the eldest one, quote unquote correct, and everything has a downflow from there.

Susan Dominus: It’s really funny that you say that because I think it was Ethel Kennedy who said something like, if you get it right with the first one, then everything follows from there. And it does seem, honestly, now that I look at all these families, that typically the oldest child in a family is the most typically high achieving in the sense that they have, like there’s all this research that finds that the oldest sibling has a bit of a cognitive edge over the other siblings because the parents. Spend more time alone with that child than any other child in the family. So that oldest child gets a lot more enrichment and a lot more alone time at a really crucial developmental time. And then when the kids get older, the older child does a lot of like instructing of the younger children. And it’s thought that also really reinforces cognition. So when I think about the families that I wrote about, very rarely is the oldest child, not in some way extraordinary. Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: So one of the things we try to do on this podcast and with The Progress Network is this idea of we’re all kind of in the business of writing an unknown future, and that future could have any number of pathways from the most fearful and destructive to the most hopeful and constructive. And so I wanna tie that into this notion of success, right?

It’s not just, or I would hope that it’s not just, Hey, I can make a lot of money or get a partnership at a law firm, or whatever the professional dot dot dot is. And I think in the book, you know, you do examine this notion of it’s not just purely like getting good grades and getting a good job as success. It’s something more connected to society at large.

Susan Dominus: That is definitely what I was interested in learning about was how did parents raise young people who thought that they could dream big, make change that was positive for the world in some way. And what I took away was something as simple as the message that parents give to children. It seems obvious, but not all families do operate from a place of optimism. And that was the one really consistent theme that I saw throughout all these families. Like in their family mottos, you know, in the Murguia household, the family motto wasn’t a family motto, but their mother used to say, with some regularity, With God’s help, all things are possible. I also wrote in the book about the Holifield family, a family of civil rights activists who were, who grew up in the Jim Crow South of Tallahassee, and Marilyn Holifield, who was one of three kids to desegregate a massive high school in Tallahassee and went on to be a prominent civil rights figure in Miami and the first black female partner at a major law firm in Florida, Marilyn told me that the unspoken motto in her household was all things possible. I mean, kind of coincidental, but obviously not.

And so I think there’s this balance that parents ideally strike between creating in their sense, the kids that like, you look, anything is possible. You wanna reach for the moon, no one better than you, without creating the expectation that they have to reach for the moon, that if they, in other words, you’re trying to balance the sense of the world’s your oyster, if you want it, like go for it, we’ve got your back and we believe in you. But also not creating this pressure, you know, this heavy responsibility that you have to change the world. Because I think if it’s coming too much from the parent, first of all, it robs this young person of agency, but also can create a tremendous amount of pressure that’s clearly counterproductive.

Emma Varvaloucas: So is there anything that the parents can do to kind of foster that, like positive sibling flywheel, so to speak? Or is that just again, like get the older kid and then let them handle the rest?

Susan Dominus: I think it’s really hard to micromanage that stuff because to harness like, how am I gonna beautifully harness. My kids’ relationships so that they are both inspiring each other to succeed without it being negatively competitive. I mean, it’s like, it’s hard enough to know how to raise one child. They’re also idiosyncratic, right?

Like, you know, anyone who’s been a parent knows that you don’t parent your kids the same way, and now you’re gonna try to like imagine how to interact these moving parts so that they create the most harmonious yielding of success. It’s sad to say, but it’s a book about these interesting families. But I have to say, it’s not really a book of how-tos, I mean, I think it’s more about a mood or an energy, but you know, as I said in the beginning, parenting effects are much smaller than we think. And the ideas that parents are like these puppeteers who, and if they can just figure out how to pull the strings just the right way and have the dolls talking to each other in a certain way. There’s so many variables, there’s so many unknowns, and there’s so many factors affecting your kids’ lives outside of parenting that you may never even know about.

And you know, when you think about how much time a parent spends interacting with his 14-year-old son versus how much time that kid spends playing video games with his friends and people you’ve never even heard of, you, you start to get pretty humble about how much influence you can have on your high school age kids, for example.

Zachary Karabell: I’m glad you raised that last point because there’s always this fine line, particularly on these subjects, right, between the descriptive and the prescriptive, and one of the challenges of writing about this sensibility, or the warp and woof of siblings and familial success defined however it is defined. Is that a lot of people will and understandably do read these things a, with a how to mindset, even if you’re not actually providing it. And two, the flip side of all this is failure, meaning the feeling of, what am I doing wrong? What am I getting wrong? What if it doesn’t turn out that way without, as you just described, some degree of respect for luck and contingency and the uncontrollable and all the other variables that go in and, and then the interplay amongst them, combined with the fact of there’s always the, you find the families that fit the thesis. I mean, there’s no other way to do it. Right? But you don’t really find the families that don’t fit the thesis, meaning like you don’t get to follow 12 random families from birth and see how it goes.

I’m wondering what you thought about that and as you were doing all this.

Susan Dominus: I mean, I addressed that very idea pretty specifically at the end because for example, Anne Wojcicki, who is the founder of 23 and Me and whose sister, Susan Wojcicki was the CEO of YouTube, talks about how incredible her mother was because she would take the students, her daughter’s papers, and she would grade them, and then she would say, well, this is a B or a C, and you can turn it in or you can revise it again, and she would give it back to ’em.

It was up to them whether they wanted to revise it or not. But if they did, she would give it another edit and they could keep going until their mother said, this is an A. And to Anne, that was like obviously great parenting, but what I said is somewhere out there, there’s some other kid whose mother is doing the same thing and that kid is crushed by their mother’s over involvement in their academic experience.

And they feel like they’re terrible writers because their mother was like redlining everything that they did. And you know, that person maybe never goes on to be anyone. And so you don’t hear about that story. Or maybe that person does go on to succeed, but they hate, they did it in spite of the fact that their mother did that.

So I say in the book, you know, parenting advice should come with a warning. Like, don’t try this at home. You know, it’s like it’s very hard to replicate those kinds of results and it’s very idiosyncratic and sometimes I think a lot of parenting boils down to just knowing your own child really well and knowing what will and won’t motivate them.

But what’s gonna motivate one child is not necessarily gonna motivate the other child. And I think now is the part where we also have to talk about luck. You know, I, you know, some of these families, I will be perfectly frank. Sometimes you just have three kids who all come out, you know, with some of the qualities that we associate with success, they’re agreeable, they’re pretty good looking, they’re hardworking, they’re very bright.

You know, sometimes you just pull the slots and you’re gonna get three kids who are all like, you know, cherries. And other times it just doesn’t come out that way because the genes shuffle in in unpredictable ways. And you can have geniuses who are one of seven average kids, you know, and you can have three really bright kids. You can have two really bright kids and one who struggles. Kids have ADHD, kids have learning disabilities. They have, you know, where does addiction, you know, I talk about genes quite frankly in the book. You know, sometimes there’s a kid who’s born and he, that kid got the genetic leaning towards addiction.

That’s gonna make it harder for that kid to be high achieving.

Emma Varvaloucas: It would’ve been another different but equally fascinating book if it was like families with three kids, two of which are highly successful and one of which was a failure.

Susan Dominus: Well, I mean, in the Meia family, I’m not gonna say they were failures, but four of the Meia are like on the national stage, and three of them lead extremely average lives and. You could say that’s just a function of, you know, genetic roll of the dice. But it could also just be, you know, personality inclination or, you know, some of the kids in that family grew up in much, much more dire poverty the first couple of years of their lives. Their developmental experience was really different.

Or I think about Diana Ross, right? Her sister, people don’t know this, but Diana Ross’s sister was the first black dean of a medical school. School, her name is Barbara Rossley. Equally beautiful, very brilliant woman. And she and Diana Ross were extremely successful.

They grew up in very middle class housing. Their younger sibling, you know, died in a drug deal gone wrong. And that was just a function of like, the neighborhood had changed a lot where they lived, the world had changed a lot. He was enough younger that the environment around him was much more dangerous and it was much more, you know, so timing is everything and luck is a lot of it. And yeah, there are many factors.

I know it’s not satisfying, but it is sort of, I think I was just interested in these very fascinating families. I wanted to get inside of them, but you know how much we can extrapolate from them. I kind of make no promises.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and there’s also the, I mean, you saw that with Serena Williams and Venus Williams, and then a whole series of other siblings who have had much more variated careers. It reminds me there was a standup comic years ago who says, I’m so happy to be here. You know, my wife and I are celebrating our 10th anniversary and everybody claps. And he says, and we have two wonderful children. Everybody claps, and he says, and then we have the other one.

Susan Dominus: I’m glad you brought up the Williams sisters because Richard Williams makes it seem like he made these champions and he could have made champions out of any two girls that were handed to him. And obviously they’re all, he’s got all, he’s got all kinds of kids who are terrific, I’m sure, but were not tennis champions.

I mean, they could not have been tennis champions at the level they are without him. Like that is true, but that’s not the same thing as saying he could have made any two kids tennis champions.

Zachary Karabell: So I actually wanna push on that, which is this question of ambition, right? Ambition is not evenly distributed, or at least the nature of what one defines as ambition. And you know, some people are ambitious for having a wonderful family, which of course never quote unquote shows up in a public optic, right?

If someone’s like a great father, great mother, or just like really good in their community, that is unlikely to scan as success, or at least in the sense of you’re not gonna find it unless you know them, right? You’re not gonna find a family in Tulsa who just happens to be that. And that was in fact their ambition set, right?

Susan Dominus: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: So like what’s that question mark of a lot of the ingredients of what we call success is ambition for it. And that may be wonderful in all sorts of ways, or as you said, the ambition to make the world a better place, but often making the world a better place, can be quieter and local and therefore not heralded or not noticed.

Susan Dominus: I mean, those are such great points. And honestly, I would say that a lot of the parents of these kids that I ended up writing about fit just that description. So the Murguias will say, it’s true. My mother didn’t go to college, and it’s true that she didn’t change the world, but she was quietly a greatly admired figure in our community.

She was someone who would set aside all the work she had to do to read a letter to a neighbor who, who is a literate, you know, a letter from home who was very involved in the church whom everyone just admired and liked and looked up to. And I think all of the Murguia kids were trying to live up to. The, what they call the Murguia brand, which was a brand of great dignity, I would say.

I mean, I myself, when I set out to write this book, decided I wasn’t gonna get into people’s personal lives because I was not trying to write a book about who had led the most meaningful life or who had led the most overall successful life, or who, you know, who I wasn’t gonna pick and choose and say like, this was a good life. It was really about people who had done something extraordinary that was publicly recognized and had, you know, it scaled up in some way. So, for example, Diane Paulus is a director who really innovated how theater could be done and was a woman director at a time when there simply weren’t that many. Her brother, Stephen Paulus, was very influential in helping to create New York 1, this local news channel that was not just hugely influential in New York, but spawned a bunch of local news channels like it around the country.

So people who just had a really big impact. Even people who had big impact, but nobody knows about it. So Marilyn Hollifield, the woman who I said desegregated a high school, her brother, Bishop Hollifield, went to Harvard Law School and co-founded the Harvard Black Law Students Association, which was gaining momentum just as Martin Luther King was assassinated. They went on to basically insist that Harvard hire, Harvard Law School hire its first black law professor Derek Bell and from there other law schools started following suit, so no one’s heard of Bishop Hollifield, but he was actually quietly very influential in a more global way.

Emma Varvaloucas: I wonder, thinking about these stories, how you see them either butting up against or supporting narratives around the American dream, right? Because we have like this narrative that’s been around for so long, you can come to the United States or you know, the United States will give you an opportunity to move up, right?

Susan Dominus: And then recently there’s been a sort of a, I don’t wanna say a collapse, but certainly like a shaking of that story, whether that’s true anymore impossible. So I wonder how that looks like to you after writing this book about these extraordinary families, some of which are obviously immigrants.Yeah and overcame hardship. I am so glad you asked that question, Emma, because I think the Murguias in particular really wrestle with the same question. One of the reasons they’re so public about their lives is they wanna show other humble children of immigrants the American Dream does exist. Look at us. We came from real poverty and here we are in these positions of prominence.

Janet Murguia Before running Unidos US was inner circle with Bill Clinton and had traveled the world meeting with heads of state, as I said, Mary Murguia Chief Judge for the ninth Circuit at the same time, a lot of what janet Murguia wrestles with as the head of uni ose us is racism and structural inequality and structural racism, this fine line, and I felt like I was super conscious of it when I was writing the book. You wanna say, look, here are somehow some extraordinary families have managed to succeed. That’s not to say that if you don’t succeed, it’s on you.

And Marilyn Hollifield also was really important to her that we say that not only did a lot of luck and a lot of things had to go right. So many things had to line up in order for her and her brothers to have the impact that they had on the educations they had, and for her parents to succeed in such a way that they could make that possible for them. And also to point out that this sort of the other flip side of this is she didn’t want people to read the book and think like, oh, this is the one successful black family that came of age in the Jim Crow South in Tallahassee. But that there were people like her parents building, you know, fruitful lives and lives of great growth all over the south in spite of the deep racism of the era. I definitely thought about that as I was writing it because, you know, just because the Chens were able to succeed, even though they were a very poor family in Appalachia whose parents ran a humble Chinese restaurant, they had a lot of things going for them that were really unusual, including a really receptive, warm community, including a mother who was sort of, you know, in her own way, almost unhinged, but was crazed with a desire to acquire ed, musical educations for her children, which is enough to say, put them in close proximity to some of the most educated people in the neighborhood. And so I think the Murguias themselves struggle with that balance between wanting to inspire people to believe that they can overcome hardship, while recognizing that a lot has to change to make it possible for more people to do that without relying on flukes of luck and quirks of fate.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, that’s well said. So yeah, personal question for you. I believe you have a brother, because I’ve heard you speak about him and also you’re a mother to twins. That’s correct. So this must have been an interesting book to write, both reflecting on your own family dynamics as a kid and with your brother and as a parent.

So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

Susan Dominus: There was a brief moment when I came across research that found that very bright kids who went on to be very high achieving, had been exposed to as much enrichment as possible. That was something that was really valuable to them, and I will admit that there was like a brief moment when I felt this frenzy, you know, to make sure that my kid went to the Carnegie Mellon Summer, this or that he signed up for that.

And it turns out that I just, you know. My kids aren’t like that. They’re pretty easygoing. They don’t have that, like they, they love sports, they’re super bright, but they also really love sports and they didn’t wanna go to a Carnegie Mellon super high charged, you know, math program.

And so that was kind of the end of that. And if anything, the story that I tell the most about impacting me was this story about how Marilyn Holifield, didn’t even make it into the book, that Marilyn Holifield, when she was young, was a very talented piano player and she just mentioned to me once that her mother used to come sit in the room and listen to her play and just quietly enjoy it. And in a way that became such a. Important guiding principle for me because I am the kind of mom who played piano myself and might be inclined to say, you know, I think you might wanna slow it down in that little interlude. Or can you play it with a little more feeling? How annoying, right? Like, I don’t think that stuff works. I think it turns kids off.

And so I, I made a point of, I do make a point when my son plays piano and he plays quite beautifully of sitting there and just enjoying it. And you have to almost do it enough so that he trusts that you’re not gonna chime in with some helpful suggestion, quote unquote, it’s much more meaningful for your relationship, for him, for his enjoyment of the music, for you just to be there enjoying it and him, and that was in the end, you know this other woman in the book, her name is Teruko Paulus, she’s the mother of Diane Paulus and Steve Paulus. Diane was the director I spoke of earlier. Diane said that her mother had a way of watching without desire, meaning when Diane danced with the American Ballet Theater at a very young age, her mom came to every dance performance, but she watched without desire. She wasn’t, her own ego wasn’t involved. Diane felt supported, she felt loved, but her mother wasn’t giving her notes afterwards. She was supporting her and being proud of her, but not in a way that was bound up in her mother’s own ego. And I think those are really valuable goals. So that’s what I took away in my own parents, not push harder, but enjoy more and step back a little bit. And so that’s the parent dynamic.

The sibling dynamic that was executed in my house was this idea about how siblings can give more practical advice, like when kids say to parents, you just don’t understand. A lot of the time that’s true. Like parents are a different generation. They don’t go to school with those kids. They don’t know how the cliques work. They don’t know that teacher really is a jerk. You know what I mean? But your siblings do. And so your siblings can say to you, no, no, not that AP class, this AP class, or I’m telling you that is gonna be a waste of time.

My brother said to me. What? There’s no more high school newspaper at Harrison High, like you should start a high school newspaper. There used to be one and you would like it. And also democracy will die without one, you know? And so I did, wouldn’t have, I never, ever would’ve done it if my brother had not really harangued me into doing it. And. As soon as I started, it was bizarre. It was like I knew it was the thing I wanted to do within the, as soon as the first article started trickling and it just felt like I was in the right place. And that’s the kind of thing, I think I say that in the book, that siblings evaluate each other with a more dispassionate eye. You know, there’s sizing up the competition and they don’t see you the way that your parents do. You know the way you were when you were a toddler. And so I think they can give each other really valuable advice.

My brother’s six years older. I think that helped a little bit in terms of he’s a very benevolent figure in my life. There wasn’t any rivalry or competition, so I think that was very helpful for me.

Zachary Karabell: You’re still immersed in the current book as one ought to be, but do you have a next passion project on the horizon, or how do you get into these in the first place? So these all start as articles that then morph into books? Are you done with writing books? Do you have any idea? Are you, are you just gonna rest on your collective laurels?

I mean, who knows, right? You’re enjoying the summer in France. I mean, for all I know, this is like, I’ve done what I, my work here is done.

Susan Dominus: It is very nice of you to ask that question. This book started with a question. I’ve always been interested in these kinds of families. I’m not exactly sure why, but I, you know, I grew up going to summer camp with children who hailed from the great Wasserstein clan, Bruce Wasserstein the financier and Wendy Wasserstein the playwright.

And I was always just so curious about how one family generated this kind of success. And also, I’ve been very interested in people who. You know, dream big because I grew up from a very cautious family. My mom had grown up really poor, and for her, like stability was just simply the most important thing.

So I was always wondering like, what’s it like to grow up in a family where people are like, of course you can land on the moon if you want to, you know, that kind of thing. I just was curious about it, like people’s, whenever I read bios, the first third of the book is about as far as I go, and then I’m done.

I wanna know about the childhoods. I’m not exactly sure why.

Zachary Karabell: Wow. I’m like the total opposite with the biography. I’m like, I’m just gonna skip over the first 60 pages, so the next time. There’s like a big 900 page biography with that first hundred pages about like the grandparents and the parents and the kids. I will email you, you can read the first a hundred pages.

Tell me what you, tell me what’s in it, and I’ll read the other 400 and tell you what’s in it.

Susan Dominus: This would be so fantastic. I would love that. Yeah. No, I’m just like, what did their mother do? What did their dad say? How did the siblings influence, influence each other? Were they encouraged, were they not? Was it a teacher? Was it a parent? Like what? I’m always interested in childhoods. I think if I were gonna do a second book and I do hope to do another book, I’d much rather tell a narrative and really good yarns do have a question at the heart of them generally. But this was a book that did span many years and many different families and it was a lot of moving parts. And you know, the Brontes are in there and like the Henry James and his brother William are in there. It’s, there’s a lot of social science in there. It was sort of a construction that I think hangs together in the end.

But my dream next time would be to do one of those really intense narratives that maybe tells the story of something that happened over the course of like three weeks. You know, for example, that terrific book about the flight of John Wilkes Booth, I think it’s called The Fugitive, like that takes place over a very discreet period of time.

It’s very narrative, it’s very fast moving, it’s very, his, historically researched. I, that would be my dream project next time.

Zachary Karabell: Susan Dominus, Thank you so much for your time today and for your book. It’s illuminating, it’s entertaining, it’s worth buying. Should be bought. Everyone knows how to do that. There’s this thing called Amazon. There’s also these things called local bookstores, so, and audiobook. So go listen, read, be illuminated, be entertained, and always pay attention to Susan Dominus’ work in the New York Times magazine or wherever else. And I want to thank you for your time today.

Susan Dominus: I just can’t thank you both enough. These were such great questions from both of you and I really enjoyed it, and I look forward to following your work going forward.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks so much Susan. Thanks for coming on.

Alright, so that was fascinating. One question that we didn’t get into is the role of genetics. How much genetics actually plays in this, and how much of that is set in stone by your DNA? Right. So I think it’s an awkward thing to talk about because it, it certainly plays with our idea that, especially in the United States, right, that anyone can make it.

But I wonder what she would’ve had to say about that.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, and she does talk about it in the book. And look, the challenge of the nature nurture question is like, what nature are we talking about? So genetics, when it is pure physical sports acumen. And even then we talked a little in the podcast about the Serena Ve, Venus Williams question. Even then, there’s the nature nurture question, like raw talent doesn’t necessarily translate into high achieving in sport X, Y, or Z, ’cause that’s a whole other thing of, you know, you have to harness that raw talent and practice and hone it. And what’s the environment in which you do it.

And when it’s not about those things alone, as we know, intelligence is a relatively fuzzy concept intelligence to do what? In what way? There’s people who have spatial intelligence that don’t have verbal intelligence and verbal intelligence without spatial blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So I do think the issue of genetics is interesting. I think the problem is I don’t think we know quite enough about characteristics that are specific and then lead to particular societal outcomes. And then how the interplay between that raw factor and nature. So. I think one of the reasons we probably didn’t talk about genetics on my end is that I’m a little less interested in it.

I mean, I’m interested in it as a concept and I’m interested in the discussion. I just don’t think we, we yet know enough about the interplay and may never, because it may be too multi-variant to really establish anything clear about all this. Them’s my thoughts about that.

Emma Varvaloucas: No, I mean that’s fair enough. It’s also like. If you even had those answers, then what do you do with them? I feel like that kind of leads you into a uncomfortable place again about choosing your baby. Uh, yeah, so understandably, I mean, I was doing a lot of self-reflecting in this conversation too, because I have one sister who’s older than me and she definitely did set the tone in the household. She was a high achiever. I wrote my college essay about her.

So I was thinking to myself, I don’t know if we were, are exceptional to the point of, you know, the families that Susan talks about in her book, but as a younger child, I kind of wish that I could have some sway in the other direction. I feel a little bit like you were molded by somewhat your parents, definitely your older siblings, and then you’re just responding to that.

I don’t know, are you’re a single child, right, Zachary?

Zachary Karabell: I am, although I have two much younger half siblings, but I grew up as a single child, and so just watching the interplay between my own kids was fascinating because I’d never really been around that so intimately. And I was definitely aware of the influence on that score. You know, the influence. Although I do think there is influence that younger siblings have on older siblings that is not as discernible, but in terms of like how you respond to those inputs in many ways, shapes the person inputting them. Just like teachers will often say they’ve learned a lot from their students, but they haven’t learned something that’s like a clear lesson. It’s more like their personality and their worldview has been shaped by the process of teaching and by student reactions and the interplay.

I would venture to say, knowing nothing about your sister, and I’m not even sure she or anybody consciously would say any of this, are indeed shaped by the younger sibling because of the feedback mechanism. So it’s not as simple as like, just like parents are shaped by the process of parenting.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would like to think so that, you know, she was shaped by me. She, she’d probably be like, yeah, you’re so irritating. That’s what I’m being shaped by.

Zachary Karabell: To have far less tolerance for X, Y, and Z than you did.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: That’s how you shaped me.

Emma Varvaloucas: Exactly.

Fascinating topic. I feel like everybody should read the book because it might not be a how to manual. I feel like, as you said during the conversation, we all have that gut instinct to be like, how do I do this? But just reading the stories of these families is endlessly fascinating.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah and again, it’s something that weirdly has not received the attention you think it would, given that it’s such a fundamental relationship. And part of that I’m sure is the freudian slash psychotherapeutic and developmental psychology biases of the past 100 plus years, that really is just focused on, we are all the product of, in both a positive and pathological way of our parenting, of our parents.

And that’s just been a dominant theme. And I don’t think anything that this book or any of our conversation suggests that it isn’t a dominant theme. It’s just saying there’s actually these other things going on really profound within a family unit that should absolutely receive more attention they’ve, than they’ve received. And that’s what Susan Dominus does about looking at siblings.

So with that, we will wrap up this episode of What Could Go Right? Thank you all once again for listening. We value your time. We don’t take it for granted. You could be listening to lots of other things and instead you’re listening to this, maybe even made it this far in the podcast so that you’re listening to me thanking you.

We’ll be back with you next week. Please tune into our Progress Report, which is our shorter form look at some of the good news stories of the week that you almost certainly would’ve missed, ’cause we all miss the good news because the good news hardly exists. And sign up for What Could Go Right? Not the podcast which you’re listening to, but the newsletter that you can get weekly in your inbox that Emma and her team construct, and you can find that at The Progress Network dot org website. It’s free, simple, it’s a click.

So we will be back with you next week, right, Emma?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yes, and don’t forget to thank your older siblings today.

Zachary Karabell: Okay. Absolutely.