Sunday, February 23, 2014

Navigation to Happiness and Success

As a parent, educator, and now, grandparent, I find myself constantly trying to connect the dots on guiding children, adults, and myself to happiness and success. The first big dots for me were listening to Sir Ken Robinson at an NAIS annual conference and hearing and reading Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's theory of Flow; then these other dots followed . . .


It was Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character andThomas Friedman's op-ed piece "How to Get a Job at Google" in today's NYTimes that provided the mental pencil for me to actually draw the lines between the dots.

Don't worry if you have not read or watched my "dots" mentioned above, but do take five minutes to read Friedman's article, and you will see what I mean when it comes to arriving at happiness and success—not by academic achievement but—by all of the other difficult-to-quantify characteristics, i.e. perseverance, empathy, critical thinking, curiosity, impulse control, . . .

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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousFebruary 28, 2014 at 1:40 PM

    Dane, I love this "connect the dots" piece. I've read all the works you mention, and I like the way you pulled them together.
    As an administrator and the mother of three children -- two who took the traditional educational path and one who is following his own curiosity, I sometimes feel bad that so many parents of graduating seniors haven't yet had access to this point of view.

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  2. UnknownApril 21, 2014 at 10:08 AM

    Got totally immersed in the well written article and accurate information. A helpful article for everyone. Great to see such knowledgable articles on your blog.

    ReplyDelete