It was a simple enough question from a friend I hadn’t talk to in months.
“What did you do this your summer?”
My answer condensed one hundred days into a handful of stories. Each capturing a brief moment in time.
I am of the age, where several times a year, I will learn of a friend’s father’s death. Attending these funerals becomes an affirmation of a life well lived. The chief signal being the quality of the eulogies provided by fully-grown sons and daughters.
With families of their own, they demonstrate by words and actions, how well their father’s had done in raising them. In doing so, they pay the ultimate tribute to the man they called Dad, Pop, Daddy, or Father.…
Over the next two months, approximately 3 million young adults will graduate and enter the job market. About half will graduate from college and the other half will graduate from high school with no plans for higher education.
Despite the differences in career paths and future opportunities, how they find that next job is likely to be similar. According to this study, 80% of people will find a job through someone they know.…
During a classroom visit last week, my nine-year-old daughter showed me a project, featuring side-by-side drawings of the same subject – in her case spring. One was a realistic depiction and the second an abstract version. Accompanying the pictures was a biography on the Russian artist Kandinsky whose work they learned had a similar transition from the realistic to abstract.
The most remarkable thing about this lesson in perspective was that it was not part of their art class, but instead central to a social studies unit on Russia.…
In Alaska, salmon swim up to 31 miles upstream to spawn, while bears fresh from hibernation will take their young cubs on an equally incredible journey. The bears begin by walking two weeks without eating while avoiding predators and battling the elements until they get to the same final destination as the salmon.
The reward for the bear’s hard work: feasting on salmon. The reward for the salmon’s 31-mile swim: the chance to avoid being eaten by very hungry bears.…
Where were you born? What is your birthday? How much did you weigh?
Answers to these three questions might be more important than you think.
Clinicians use a common tool to assess the extent of toxic stress a child experiences during his or her childhood. It’s called the Adverse Childhood Experience test, or ACE for short. It’s a simple tool made up of just 10 yes/no questions.
Please take two minutes and take the test.
In his New York Times column, David Brooks succinctly summarized the adult outcomes associated with higher ACE scores.…
When we look at successful adults, we often see a consistent set of character traits that were ingrained when they were children. For example:
The factors that contribute to our success work in concert, not isolation.
Our health impacts our ability to learn. Our ability to learn impacts our health. A single traumatic event from our childhood can have lifelong consequences.
When we don’t connect the dots, we draw incomplete pictures that make little sense. This fosters multiple bureaucratic systems working in silos and frustrating systems that add to core problems instead of solving them.…
When we think about the economy, we tend to talk in the macro sense using terms like GDP. But economics is a very personal matter. Each of us has our own personal economic landscape that plays a significant role in how well we do in life.
When you enter the job market, the industries that rise and fall during your prime earning years, shifts in your local economy, the changes in tax policy, industry regulation — all of these factors impact your own personal economic story.…
When asked in a national survey, Americans will tell you that the role of government is pretty far down the list of what is necessary to achieve the American Dream. Yet education, which is third on the list (behind hard work and a strong family) is largely financed and run by local, state and federal government.
During the recent debate over health care, many Americans expressed concern that the new Affordable Care Act would result in government-run health care.…
He was, at different points in his life, a journalist, a school teacher, a nurse and a government worker. If these were his only contributions in life, his human impact would have still been immeasurable. After all, he tended to Civil War soldiers in their greatest hour of need and educated children at a time when most received little.
But what Walt Whitman is most known for is a short collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, that he self published in 1855 and continued to revise throughout his life.…
In New York and other cities, we have become conditioned to largely ignore homeless people. Sometimes, not even acknowledging their requests. Exceptions are made. For example, when someone performs a song or a dance we may reward their obvious talent with a dollar or two, perhaps rationalizing this as a fair exchange.
Recently, I’ve seen several instances where a homeless person asked for either food or money so they could buy food.…
There is a spate of new books coming out that examine different aspects of what it takes to get ahead. One getting a lot of attention is from Angela Duckworth called Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Another is Success and Luck by Robert H. Frank. And yet another covers the role of government by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson called American Amnesia.…
Three simple words, yet so seldom heard.
Recently, after an especially stressful day, I came home to a chaotic house — kids being kids, running around and not particularly listening to anything any grownup had to say.
On a good day, this would have rolled right off my back. Maybe even caused me to get lost in it myself and act equally silly.
But not on this day.…
In his acceptance speech after winning the Golden Globe in 2015 for his role in “Creed,” Sylvester Stallone said, “I am the sum total of everyone I’ve ever met and sort of lucky that I’ve absorbed some of it.”
This was a bit ironic given that most people think of the character for which he is best known and won the award as one of America’s greatest stories of the “self-made” man.…
This morning children from all over will start bustling back into their classrooms.
Presumably, we send them off to learn, but learn what? How to acquire knowledge, get good grades, or perform well on tests? How to get along with others or be a better person?
Is the purpose to prepare them for college, a job, or life?
Recently, someone shared with me this video (scroll down) of the student speaker, Donovan Livingston, at Harvard Graduate School of Education’s 2016 Convocation.…
Recently someone told me that the scariest part of bungee jumping wasn’t taking the first step off the bridge. It wasn’t even at the nadir of their fall when they were closest to the river below. Instead, it was when they began bouncing back up.
The reason? This was the only point when they didn’t feel the safety and support of the harness and it was terrifying.…
In our lives we make and receive thousands of recommendations. From books to read and places to visit to foods to try and people to meet, and so on and so on. But perhaps the most important recommendations are those that help someone else move up in life — an idea worth pursuing, a job recommendation, a letter of reference for school.
Is there a recommendation you’ve received that came at the perfect time, that changed the trajectory of your life?…
It’s natural to want to do what we think is best for our kids. Consider these three scenarios:
1. Your daughter makes two different travel soccer teams. After committing to one, you agree to switch her to the other team after you learn the second offers, what you hear is, better coaching.
2. After your son mentions the extra time he is spending preparing for standardized testing, you decide that it would be better to minimize his stress and you opt him out of the state test.…
Typically we hear this expression when someone is voicing extreme frustration or disgust. People become fed up about one thing or another and on the verge of having a Howard Beale moment—”I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Often there is good cause for their angst. Systems continually fail, organizations are dysfunctional, and people are, well, human.
Yet the reaction may be out of proportion to its true impact in our daily lives, especially when compared to being literally sick and tired.…
Recently, I was listening to Clifton Truman Daniel talk about his grandfather, President Harry S. Truman. He spun one charming tale after another of how his grandfather taught him lessons about humility, courage and education.
Perhaps my favorite was when he told how he didn’t even know of his grandfather’s past life until his 1st grade teacher asked:
“Didn’t your grandfather used to be President of the United States?”…
Generally speaking, there is no person more responsible for who we are or become than our mothers.
There are the obvious reasons: they give us life, carry us for nine months, bring us into this world, and nurture and protect us throughout.
Now not all moms are perfect and many are far from it. They are, after all, human, with their own life story, full of their own hardships and challenges.…
The late Elie Wiesel often wrote of the importance of memory. In this book, The Forgotten, he shows a father’s struggles with Alzheimer’s and his urgency to transfer his life story to his son. Explaining this in an interview with Charlie Rose, Wiesel said, “If the son does not truly know his father’s story, he can never truly know himself.”
In Michael Moore’s recent documentary, “Where to Invade Next,” he travels around the globe looking for ideas that he can bring back to America, only to realize in the end that many of these ideas originated here in the first place.…
“I cry because life is so beautiful and so short.”
This quote ends the poem, “Bygones,” written by Marina Keegan, author of The Opposite of Loneliness, published posthumously.
At the young age of 22, Keegan died in a car crash on her way to her father’s birthday celebration, just days after graduation from Yale University — and weeks before she was to begin her dream job writing at The New Yorker.…
