Make him tick?

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence: “Franklin’s secret, the thing that ‘made him thick’ and pulled every aspect of his mind together, was his love of people.” What does “made him thick” mean exactly?

My comments:

Made him tick, not thick.

Tick?

Yeah? Tick like clock.

The old time piece, that is. Today, most people use digital clocks to tell time, such as the one incorporated in our mobile phones. Time was when clocks were a piece of intricate machinery. When the old-time clock runs properly, it makes a sound, like this: tick, tock; tick, tock; tick, tock….

This is where the expression “make someone tick” comes from. When we say someone knows how to make a person tick, we mean to say they understand that person really well and know what that person likes, dislikes, what makes them different, unique, and what motivates that person to do things he or she likes to do.

And things like that. What makes people tick is what makes them get up in the morning and go to work, so to speak.

And work.

And work – tirelessly like a clock, if you will.

In our example, Franklin (Benjamin Franklin that is) has a secret motivation that enables him to work tirelessly, whole-heartedly for his countrymen.

That secret is love. He loves them. He loves all his fellow men.

Not all of them perhaps, because we are talking about the time of the American Revolution, a time when America was known for having not only the likes of Franklin and George Washington but also black slaves from Africa.

Still, Franklin, who invented, among many other things, the lightening rod we now see regularly on top of tall buildings, was a great man. He left America a better place, as they say, than when he found it.

Anyways, Franklin’s love of people (white folks only, if you insist) is what made him tick.

All right?

OK, here are more examples for us to further examine what makes different people tick:

1. If you come across Nicola Sturgeon on a desert island, expect to find a “hot-headed, impulsive” character, blasting out a Cilla Black record and reading a biography of Lady Thatcher.

Don’t take my word for it.

Scotland’s first minister has appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, so these choices of words, records and books are hers, not mine.

“My childhood obsession with the wonderful Cilla Black,” the SNP leader tells Kirsty Young, led to “the first ever tantrum I remember”.

Her mum and dad had said no when she asked if they would buy her Cilla’s new album.

But her “wonderful granddad” saved the day and bought it for her instead.

....

It has been quite an 18 months for Nicola Sturgeon.

From losing Scotland’s referendum on independence, which left her “in floods of tears… totally and utterly devastated” to the euphoria of this year’s general election, where the SNP won every seat in Scotland bar three.

But this was an interview more about what makes Scotland’s first minister tick than day-to-day politics.

Her nationalism, her instinct that Scotland would be better off as an independent country, had been shaped, she says, by her grandmother.

Her English grandmother.

“She came from just outside Sunderland and yet had this belief that Scotland should be an independent country,” the SNP leader says.

- Sturgeon reveals what makes her tick on Desert Island Discs, by Chris Mason, November 15, 2017.

2. I was moved by the many tributes to Prince on the news last night, how his philanthropy, though widely undercover, assisted many in need, and how many fans were awakened or inspired or just plain made happy by his music and his invitation to dance and to choose life. In the middle of the night a vague memory came to me of how, a number of years ago, I was lecturing in his hometown of Minneapolis in a large Lutheran Church with a full house and lots of electricity in the air and, shortly before entering the sanctuary to begin my talk, a stranger came up to me and said, “Look over there and you will see Prince. Well, actually, you may not see Prince. You’ll see his big bodyguards, but he is there between them.” After my talk the same person came up and said, “Prince stayed for your talk but left during the Q and A. He’s sort of introverted, you know, and I’m sure he wanted to avoid the crowd.”

I confess to not being a devoted Prince fan so much as a distant admirer for his sense of independence and sometimes purposeful outrageous efforts to distinguish himself from the crowd. I liked that and I liked his song titles, especially “Purple Rain.” Yet I did not follow his music nearly as religiously as did his strong fan base. I always wondered what made him tick and where his spiritual sensibilities were rooted. I knew he had some roots in conservative Christian movements like Jehovah Witness, and I heard him cited that reading the Bible kept him grounded most of the time.

But of course one goes to the artist’s work to get glimpses into his or her soul and Prince’s work offered many a glimpse into his spiritual roots. His attention to detail, his obvious genius at song writing and singing and acting and dressing up and handling an audience, all of it speaks to great discipline as well as great devotion to his calling, one might even say his priesthood. For if a priest is, as I propose it is archetypally speaking, a “midwife of grace,” then clearly Prince was a priest to many of his ardent fans. He graced them and he brought out the grace in them.

His philosophy seemed to be especially devoted to cutting through dualisms, whether those of gay and straight, male and female, sex and spirituality, black and white, personal and societal. The fact that he grew up in Minneapolis, one of the whitest cities in the US, and called that his home by choice his whole life long says something about his ability to cross boundaries. It was striking that the big party that gathered last night at his compound to celebrate his life was probably 95% white—which is pretty much the case for the twin cities themselves.

There was something wild about Prince, not only his outfits and hairdos and other out-of-the-box stylish effects but his willingness to sing about sexual taboos and hints at androgyny that seemed to some over-the-top. But as a writer in The Nation magazine put it, he was celebrating sex when the AIDS epidemic was making sex scary to everyone from President Reagan on down. He was non-dualistic about sex and sexuality and not afraid to link sex and spirituality. And do it loudly.

- Some Thoughts on the Passing of a Prince, by Mattew Fox, HuffingtonPost.com, April 23, 2016.

3. Colin Cowherd knows that there’s a decent chance you want to punch him now and then. Perhaps most of the time, in fact. Forgive him. He can’t help it. Deep down, this is just who he is.

“I wish everybody in the world liked me,” he said, “but a lot of them don’t. That’s because my whatever — my weakness, my vulnerability, my ego, whatever it is.”

But this isn’t really about whether you like or dislike Cowherd — that’s a discussion reserved for barstools and Internet comment sections — but rather something more innate. It’s about Cowherd’s complete self-awareness about all of it.

“Deep down, I want to be liked,” he insists, “but in the end, I’m willing to argue. Is it because I’m seeking attention? I don’t have the answers to that.”

....

For three hours each day, Cowherd, 52, sits behind a microphone and talks, trying to dig his way to the roots of sports teams, characters and issues for his radio listeners. He likes to talk through things. Each week, he will visit a therapist and similarly dig for the roots of what make him tick as a father, a husband, a man.

“I think everybody wants to be liked. Everybody,” he said in a recent interview. “You read stories about serial killers, and in the end, they follow their own press. They want to be adored. . . . So we all want to be liked; I just don’t always think I’m that likeable. I think my personality is really 50-50.

“I can’t control myself. I wish I could. I’ve gone to parties, I’ve gone to games, and I drive home and think, ‘God, can’t you just not argue for once? Can’t you just take what people give you and be happy with their answer?’”

- Colin Cowherd wants you to like him — but really just wants you to listen to him, WashingtonPost.com, June 12, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.