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 . . .

• Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind
• Dr. Carol Dweck's Mindset
• Ellen Galinsky's Mind in the Making
• Daniel Pink's Drive TED Talk
• Martin Seligman's Flourish
• Angela Duckworth's TED Talk on Grit 

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, . . .