"Follow a Career Passion? Let It Follow You"
Cal Newport, New York Times, September 29, 2012

"IN the spring of 2004, during my senior year of college, I faced a hard decision about my future career. I had a job offer from Microsoft and an acceptance letter from the computer science doctoral program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had also just handed in the manuscript for my first nonfiction book, which opened the option of becoming a full-time writer. These are three strikingly different career paths, and I had to choose which one was right for me.

"For many of my peers, this decision would have been fraught with anxiety. Growing up, we were told by guidance counselors, career advice books, the news media and others to “follow our passion.” This advice assumes that we all have a pre-existing passion waiting to be discovered. If we have the courage to discover this calling and to match it to our livelihood, the thinking goes, we’ll end up happy. If we lack this courage, we’ll end up bored and unfulfilled — or, worse, in law school.

"To a small group of people, this advice makes sense, because they have a clear passion. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be doctors, writers, musicians and so on, and can’t imagine being anything else.

"But this philosophy puts a lot of pressure on the rest of us — and demands long deliberation. If we’re not careful, it tells us, we may end up missing our true calling. And even after we make a choice, we’re still not free from its effects. Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: “Is this what I’m really meant to be doing?” This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.


"As I considered my options during my senior year of college, I knew all about this Cult of Passion and its demands. But I chose to ignore it. The alternative career philosophy that drove me is based on this simple premise: The traits that lead people to love their work are general and have little to do with a job’s specifics. These traits include a sense of autonomy and the feeling that you’re good at what you do and are having an impact on the world. Decades of research on workplace motivation back this up. (Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” offers a nice summary of this literature.)"

"Olympian Thoughts"
Paul Houston, Developmental Studies Center, September 19, 2012

"I watch the Olympics, not for the overblown pageantry, or the bloviating commentators, or the warped up nationalism; I watch them because in a concentrated form they give us insight about what is best about our species. And they offer lessons for any mindful educator. How can you watch and see the “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” that is on display in every event and not see the struggles of mankind rolled up into a few minutes or seconds of competition?
...
"The lessons for educators are as varied as the flags that fly during the Olympics. The power of social and emotional learning are central to education and the lessons from the games give us insight. Making your best effort, preparing well, going the distance, learning to overcome adversity, collaborating and cooperating and putting your ego aside for the good of the team are but just a few that come to mind. Perhaps the greatest lesson is that success only comes from failure. No one starts out a gold medal winner. We are all losers to some degree or another. What is clear is that simply relying on a learning system that uses the arbitrary measure of a test score but which doesn’t allow for broader life experiences that are critical to a child’s future is not one that will win gold or even a bronze."

'Children Succeed' With Character, Not Test Scores
NPR Staff, NPR.org, September 4, 2012

"A child's success can't be measured in IQ scores, standardized tests or vocabulary quizzes, says author Paul Tough. Success, he argues, is about how young people build character. Tough explores this idea in his new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character.

"On how schools are focused on scores rather than noncognitive skills

""Right now we've got an education system that really doesn't pay attention to [noncognitive] skills at all. ... I think schools just aren't set up right now to try to develop things like grit, and perseverance and curiosity. ... Especially in a world where we are more and more focused on standardized tests that measure a pretty narrow range of cognitive skills, teachers are less incentivized to think about how to develop those skills in kids. So it's a conversation that's really absent I think in a lot of schools, to the detriment of a lot of students.""

"Study: Kids' Friends — Not Grades — Lead To Adult Well-Being"
Anna North, BuzzFeed, August 2012

"Stories of parents pushing kids to succeed in school above all else have been making headlines lately, but new research has found that social relationships are a much better predictor of adult well-being than a kid's grades.

"They found that social connectedness was highly correlated with adult well-being. Academic achievement, however, was not. The authors noted that they might have seen more of a connection if they'd included factors like job satisfaction in their measure of well-being, but they left these out on purpose. Their goal was to study not the traditional markers of success, but instead to look at peoples' "positive emotional functioning, sense of coherence, social engagement and character values." And as it turns out, kids' social lives seem to have a greater effect on the development of those qualities than their test scores do.

"This came as no surprise to John Stanrock, psychologist and author of the textbook Adolescence. He says there's a general feeling among some child development experts that in an age of No Child Left Behind and constant standardized testing, "the social world of adolescence has totally been neglected." He adds that schools don't spend enough money on counseling services, which can help kids with difficulties fit in better.

Middle-School Friends Are Critical For Future Success
RICK NAUERT PHD, Psych Central, January 13, 2011

"Hanging out with the right group of friends is especially important as children transition from elementary to middle school.

"University of Oregon psychologists say the new friendships may directly influence a teenager’s potential academic success or future challenges in high school and beyond.

"A new study, appearing in the February issue of the Journal of Early Adolescence, found that boys and girls whose friends are socially active in ways where rules are respected do better in their classroom work.

"Having friends who engage in problem behavior, in contrast, is related to a decrease in their grades.

"Having pro-social friends and staying away from deviant peers proved more effective for academic payoffs than simply being friends with high-achieving peers."