What is new-world chutzpah?
The art of becoming determined, courageous, and optimistic that anything can be achieved.
You might know chutzpah (which originally derives from the Yiddish language) as the quality of being audacious, insolent, or cheeky — for good or for bad.
“New-world chutzpah” is a term I coined while living in Israel — a paradigm shift in thoughts, perspectives, and actions that allows you to power up your passions (either as hobbies or careers), maximize your inherent potential, and inspire others to do the same.
Now more than ever, the power of the individual reigns supreme. The you of today has the rarest of opportunities (compared to someone in your shoes 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago). While it’s true that some people are born into dire situations or acquire an unfortunate set of circumstances at different points in their life, it’s also true that billions of people have unabridged access to the internet, which means unprecedented access to knowledge, wisdom, travel and other types of new experiences, new technologies and digital tools, and various kinds of education, both formal and informal.
Such access is the bedrock for “new-world chutzpah,” but it all starts in the mind of an individual; the ability to think about and look at your world differently — which is the focus of my chutzpah MasterClass — with the goal of propeling you to a life you’re proud to live!
The late Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis distinguished the meaning of chutzpah as stubbornness and contrariness from what he called a tradition of “spiritual audacity” — or in Hebrew, chutzpah klapei shmaya.
“We are conventionally raised to believe that Jewish faith demands unwavering obedience to the law and the law-giver. That attitude tends to cultivate a temperament of compliance and passivity; for conventional thinking, ‘talking back to God’ smacks of heresy,” Rabbi Schulweis said. But a significant genre of religious, moral, and spiritual audacity toward the divine authority finds a place of honor in Jewish religious thought.”
As an example, Rabbi Schulweis cited a case where Moses argued with God about the justice of His commands: For Moses, that God should “visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation” was an unacceptable form of group punishment akin to the morally indiscriminate punishment of Sodom. Challenging God’s pronouncement of the punishment of the sons for the sins of the fathers, Moses argued with God, against God, and in the name of God. And Moses engaged God with fierce moral logic.
Trained to view God as an unyielding authoritarian proclaiming immutable commands, we might expect that Moses would be severely chastised for his defiance. Who is this finite, errant, fallible, human creature to question the explicit command of the author of the Ten Commandments? The divine response to Moses, according to the rabbinic moral imagination, is arresting: “By your life Moses, you have instructed Me. Therefore I will nullify My words and confirm yours.”
Why live with more chutzpah?
“To be a good person, you do need these two opposites: a sense of shame that prevents you from acting with chutzpah to do the wrong thing, and a sense of chutzpah that prevents you from being ashamed to do the right thing.” — Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
There are both logical and emotional reasons to live with more chutzpah.
You will experience higher and more consistent levels of joy, fulfillment, and optimism by living with more chutzpah, since you’ll continuously surprise yourself with how much you can accomplish (and more importantly, everything you will learn on the journey, an accomplishment in and of itself). According to Jonathan Howard — a renowned advertising consultant, startup mentor, and improvisational theater teacher — chutzpah is simply refusing to be limited by imaginary boundaries.
Living with more chutzpah is also sure to make you more successful in your personal and work life, since it compels you to “show up” more. “80 percent of success is showing up,” Woody Allen famously said, and “90 percent of success is persevering longer than anyone thinks you have a right to persist,” according to worldwide bestselling author Robin Sharma.
Now, for the practical argument, living with more chutzpah is all about developing transcendental soft skills — including but certainly not limited to creativity, imagination, confidence, courage, time management, and deep work.
Soft skills are defined by the World Economic Forum as skills for the future, as nearly 50 percent of companies expected that by 2020, automation will lead to reduction in their full-time workforce, while more than half of all employees require significant re-skilling and upskilling. Naturally, the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated these trends.
The King and His Two Daughters
There’s an old proverb about a king and his two daughters: one who was capable, and one with chutzpah. When the one with chutzpah came before him, he answered immediately to her requests so she would go away. When the capable daughter came before him, he didn’t bow to her requests, because he enjoyed hearing her begging.
This is a lesson in the new-world notion that your “I can” is better than your “IQ.” Being capable (that is, relying on your hard skills) is no longer enough in today’s increasingly globalized, digital, and soon-to-be virtual world.
To be successful and lead a successful life — a life you’re truly proud of — we must not just be capable; we must live with what Israeli author Inbal Arieli calls “the Chutzpah Power” — determined, courageous, and optimistic that anything can be achieved.