"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.)"

'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.""

"Raising Successful Children"
Madeline Levine, New York Times, August 4, 2012

"HANGING back and allowing children to make mistakes is one of the greatest challenges of parenting. It’s easier when they’re young — tolerating a stumbling toddler is far different from allowing a preteenager to meet her friends at the mall. The potential mistakes carry greater risks, and part of being a parent is minimizing risk for our children.

"What kinds of risks should we tolerate? If there’s a predator loose in the neighborhood, your daughter doesn’t get to go to the mall. But under normal circumstances an 11-year-old girl is quite capable of taking care of herself for a few hours in the company of her friends. She may forget a package, overpay for an item or forget that she was supposed to call home at noon. Mastery of the world is an expanding geography for our kids, for toddlers, it’s the backyard; for preteens, the neighborhood, for teens the wider world. But it is in the small daily risks — the taller slide, the bike ride around the block, the invitation extended to a new classmate — that growth takes place. In this gray area of just beyond the comfortable is where resilience is born."

"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.

"The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men"
Robert Pondiscio, Core Knowledge, May 7th, 2012 

“As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students,” writes Scott Joftus in Education Next. “As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.” 

"Protecting the heart with optimism: Positive thinking linked to reduced risk of cardiovascular events."Harvard Gazette, April 17, 2012

"In the first and largest systematic review on the topic, Harvard School of Public Health(HSPH) researchers found a connection between psychological well-being and a reduced risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events."