Dr. Kevin Leman - The Firstborn Advantage: Making Your Birth Order Work for You

Guess the Firstborn

Ill give you a pair of names, and you pick the firstborn in each pair.

1. Jennifer Aniston or Courtney Cox Arquette

2. Harrison Ford or Martin Short

3. Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee

4. Ellen DeGeneres or Oprah Winfrey

5. Bill Cosby or Chevy Chase

If you picked Aniston, Ford, Grant, Winfrey, and Cosby, youre right. (Ulysses S. Grant not only helped win the Civil War, but he was the only general ever to get his likeness on a fifty-dollar bill.)

Try these next five and see how you do:

1. Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan

2. Steve Martin or Jay Leno

3. Jacqueline Kennedy or Whoopi Goldberg

4. Martin Luther King Jr. or Jim Carrey

5. Matthew Perry or Arnold Schwarzenegger

If you picked Clinton, Martin, Kennedy, King, and Perry, youre right. See how good at this you are?

But wait right there, Dr. Leman, youre saying. Why are you calling Steve Martin a firstborn? I happen to know hes the youngest kid in his family. And theres no way Martin Luther King Jr. is a firstborn. He had an older sister.

Ah, but they are firstborns. And you might be too, even if you werent the first child born in your family. For why, read on.

THE

FIRSTBORN

ADVANTAGE

MAKING YOUR BIRTH ORDER

WORK FOR YOU

Dr. Kevin Leman

2008 by Kevin Leman

Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.revellbooks.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Leman, Kevin.

The firstborn advantage: making your birth order work for you / Kevin

Leman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8007-1911-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8007-3337-7 (intl. pbk.)

1. Birth order. 2. First-born childrenPsychology. 3. SuccessPsychological

aspects. I. Title.

BF723.B5L464 2008

155.9 24dc22 2008016084

To protect the privacy of those who have shared their stories with the author, some details and names have been changed.

Affectionately dedicated

to our daughter,

Holly Kristine Leman.

Your birth was our wonderful, precious gift from God. As new, excited parents, we made all the mistakes. Yes, we admit we practiced on you. You, our firstborn, were our guinea pig. But what a great privilege it has been for us to be your dad and mom throughout all these years. Youre an achiever with the priceless qualities of grace, compassion, and wisdom. We couldnt be more proud of you.

Acknowledgments

To Ramona Tucker: Thank you for your dedication and hard work in making this book all it could be. I appreciate so much the opportunity to work with you. I love the fact that you shoot it to me straight and that you are a woman of integrity.

Grateful thanks also to Laura Carter, founder of the First Born Girls Social Club (www.firstborngirls.com), for her invaluable insight on what it means to be a firstborn woman; and to Bob Shaff, founder and president of Customers for Life Consulting (www.cflconsulting.com), for his 14 Actions Your Company Can Take to Earn Customer Loyalty.

H ow many firstborns did you peg in the Guess the First-born quiz? Total up the ones you got right. Okay, got your answer?

Id bet my wife and a couple of my five children on the fact that you were able to pick out all ten, or at least nine out of ten.

Now how did that happen? What is it about these firstborns that stand out from the rest? And why?

You dont have to have a PhD in psychology to figure out who the firstborns in the world are. Firstborns are the natural movers and shakers. Theyre the leaders. They can accomplish just about anything.

Think of the governor of your state, the US senators, the mayor of your town, the president of your school board, the head of the company you work for. Chances are, theyre all firstborn children.

If youre reading this book on an airplane or a commuter train, chances are high that the person across from you doing a crossword puzzle or Sudoku book is a firstborn. If youre an adventurous sort, why dont you ask the stranger, Do you happen to be a firstborn? Who knows? You might end up with a lively conversation on your hands.

Certain professions also seem to attract firstborns. For example, in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona, there is a group of twelve anesthesiologists. Nine of them just happen to be firstborns, and the other three are only childrenthe only children in a familywhich are basically first cousins emotionally to firstborns. Is this happenstance, do you think? Or is there something about firstborns that attracts them to the precision required for such a career?

Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was a firstborn (the eldest of three children). All of the Mercury Seven astronauts were firstborns. In fact, of the first twenty-three astronauts in outer space, twenty-one were firstborns. The other two were only children. There wasnt a middle or youngest child in sight.

The majority of the US presidents have been firstborns.

Take, for instance, the 2008 US presidential election. The final three contenders for the biggest job in the world were an only child (Barack Obamamore later on why hes considered an only child), a firstborn daughter (Hillary Clinton), and a firstborn son (John McCain).

There is truly something unique about firstborns, the leaders of the pack. You may be one of them. Or you may be one of them and not know it. (More on that in this book too.) But how did theyand youget to be that way?

Firstborns are the natural movers and shakers of the world. Theyre the leaders. They can accomplish just about anything.

Take a look at your own familyyour brothers and sisters. Isnt it true that the firstborn and secondborn are day-and-night different? And if youre a parent today, isnt it true that if your firstborn travels east, your secondborn will travel west? These differences can be explained by birth order.

If youre reading this book, chances are its because youre a firstborn, or you know (and are driven crazy by) a firstborn. Firstborns can take the world by stormand accomplish more than you think is humanly possible, because they are exacting and precise.

But out of balance they become driven, overly perfectionistic, and critical-eyed. Just imagine a group of firstborns getting together to wallpaper your kitchen. Within thirty minutes there would be blood on the floor, since everyone would want to be in charge. Thats why baby-of-the-family folks like me are so needed. Without the balance of middle-borns and lastborns, firstborns can become too intense on completing the task the right way (translation: their way) and lose the relationship. Then they make their own and others lives miserable.

For instance, take Mrs. Marcourt, the den mother of my Cub pack when I was young. I was actually asked to leave the Cub Scouts because she didnt appreciate my baby-of-the-family antics. She had little tolerance for them. What had happened to bring this about? Well, I ask you, if a bunch of boys were coming over and you wanted to serve them chocolate chip cookies, would you place those cookies on your grandmothers precious china serving dish?