The Self-Driven Child

by William Stixrud

  The reality is that we become successful in this world by working hard at something that comes easily to us and that engages us. We need to tell our kids that the skill set required to be a successful student is, in many ways, very different from the skill set that will lead you to have a successful career and a good life.

  Being a straight-A student almost by definition requires a high level of conformity, which is not the route to a high level of success. A 4.0 GPA also points to an attempt to be equally good at everything, which doesn’t necessarily translate well in the real world. We need to assure kids that the majority of successful people were not straight-A students. It turns out, in fact, that high school valedictorians are no more successful than other college graduates by their late twenties.1 Ability is not a simple matter of grades.

  Don’t misunderstand us: being a good student and getting a degree from an elite college clearly have their benefits, but there are alternate paths. Focusing all our attention on just one path will make a lot of kids feel left out.

  The Real Reality

  Each time he closed his Prairie Home Companion series, radio host Garrison Keillor said the following: “Well, that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” His gentle humor is right on point. We all want to believe that our child is above average, and ignore the simple fact that every parent thinks so and we can’t all be right. Since we test kids for a living, we know that a third of the population has math and language skills below the 33rd percentile. And yet many kids with these skill levels are preparing to go to college, unaware of the great difficulty they’ll have in handling the conceptual and quantitative work they’ll encounter. The idea that you have to get a college degree is, for many, a toxic message. Many of these students, no matter how hard they try, simply cannot complete four years of college-level work. Instead of living in this delusion, we should be sharing realities, like:

  The majority of Americans do not graduate from college. Although the statistics vary from year to year, the findings have indicated for decades that only somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 32 percent of the adult population holds a degree from a four-year college.

  Many people who finish college or graduate school end up taking a circuitous route to academic success.

  Many adults who were top students and have forged successful careers are miserable.

  Where—or if—you go to college does not set the path for your life. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are probably the most famous college dropouts. Many others went to “just fine” schools and went on to do extremely well, like Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who went to the University of Maryland. The last two dozen Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine got their undergraduate degrees at places like Harvard and Brown, sure, but also from DePauw, Holy Cross, and Gettysburg College.2 The recently retired president of Princeton University went to Denison University, a small liberal arts school in Ohio.

  Following your passion is more energizing than doing what you feel you have to do.

  There are currently over 3,500 occupations through which Americans make a living, many of which do not require a college degree.

  The Virtues of Diversity

  Society thrives on the diverse talents of its people. Biodiversity is a sign of a healthy system. We need dreamers, artists, and creative people. We need entrepreneurs and people who make things happen. We need people who are physically strong or gifted at working with their hands. Albert Einstein said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” As developmental psychologist Howard Gardner pointed out, there are many different forms of intelligence: it can be musical-rhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic.3 In other words, you can be a poor student and a brilliant dancer (or vice versa). You can be average in most things but exceptional at reading others’ emotions. The key is in finding your strength.

  The problem we see—in high school in particular—is that kids are led to believe that in order to be successful they need to be superior at everything, from English to science to foreign languages. It’s all too easy to look around and find others who are better at most anything. Making it your goal to be “the best” means constantly comparing yourself to others. It could motivate you, but more often it will be demotivating. Part of growing up is knowing when to let go, and choosing what not to pursue.

  Bill frequently tells the older children and adolescents he is testing, “I hope I find things you suck at—because successful people are good at some things and not so good at others, but wisely make a living doing something they’re good at.” (With younger kids he simply says, “I hope I find something you’re not very good at.”) Put another way, you are unlikely to find the path to success by building on your weakest skills and working to become merely adequate. Many students have trouble accepting this. One of Ned’s students, David, balked when Ned suggested that part of his work as an adolescent was to explore not only what he liked but what he was better at than most people and to work hard at that.

  “But isn’t that wrong?” David asked. “Isn’t it cheating to just do what’s easy?”

  Ned’s response: “Look, you’re five eight and 180 pounds. You can bench press 380 pounds. That’s why you’re a running back. But you would be a horrible marathoner. You don’t have the build.”

  Ned wasn’t suggesting that David give up on everything he wasn’t naturally good at. There’s important learning to be done in school and in life, even in subjects that don’t come easily. But there’s also value in recognizing and nurturing your natural talents.

  When kids tell their parents, “I’m not as smart as Eric,” or “I’m not as smart as most of the kids in my math class,” many parents will try to reassure their kids by saying, “Yes, you are. You’re just as smart as they are.” Bill takes a different approach. He tells kids that you only have to be smart enough to do something interesting in this world—which they are. He also tells them that he’s grateful for all the people in his field who are smarter than he is. They’re the ones who make up the theories and tests that allow him to make a living by helping people.

  Breaking the Mass Psychosis

  Bill once evaluated an eight-year-old boy whose mother told him that she would only pay for college if her son went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Brown. Bill laughed, assuming she was joking, but the mother curtly assured him she was not. Trying to sound as reasonable as he could, Bill said, “You realize that’s a little crazy, in the sense that the vast majority of successful people do not go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Brown?” The mother was clearly infuriated and snapped, “That’s the way I feel about it. That’s the way it’s going to be.”

  Many people hold beliefs that are simply not in touch with reality. We refer to this kind of unfounded belief system that many—especially affluent—adults subscribe to as a “shared delusion.” Schools know the odds better than parents—after all, they see hundreds of kids each year—and yet they often support this kind of out-of-touch thinking. When we ask high school principals and independent school heads, “Why don’t you just tell kids the truth about college? That where you go makes very little difference in later life and isn’t a predictor of success?” they consistently say, “If we did that, we would get angry calls and letters from parents who believe that if their children understood the truth, they would not work hard in school and would fail in life.”

  We have found that simply telling kids the truth about the world—including the advantages of being a good student—increases their flexibility and drive. It motivates unmotivated kids to shift the emphasis from “Here are the hoops I will have to jump through to be successful” to “Here are some of the many ways I can choose to develop myself in order to make an im
portant contribution to this world.” When we talk about alternate routes with friends and colleagues and at talks in schools, everybody has a story. Their car mechanic has a PhD in engineering from MIT but left engineering for a more satisfying career; or perhaps their mechanic did not go to college, but was so outstanding at what he did, and was such a successful businessman that he retired at age thirty-two because he had twelve mechanics working for him. Or, on the flip side, their friend has two PhDs but dropped out of high school.

  In the name of undermining the mass psychosis, and because anecdotes are often more powerful than statistics, we will use the rest of this chapter to tell some of our favorite stories of happy, successful people who have gotten there via unconventional means. Bill himself took an alternate route to neuropsychology, so we’ll start with him.

  Bill

  I graduated from high school with a 2.8. I was much more interested in playing rock and roll music (organ, bass, guitar) than in studying, and I flunked English the first quarter of my senior year. My intellectual interest did hit, though, when I was nineteen. I got my college degree from the University of Washington and went on to attend graduate school in English at the University of California, Berkeley. I envisioned getting my PhD and becoming Professor Stixrud at age twenty-six. It did not turn out that way. I suffered from anxiety, a lack of self-confidence, and probably overuse of caffeine, and I was more gifted at avoiding assignments than anything else. I went for twenty weeks without turning in a single paper. (I tell the serious underachievers I see, “Top that!”) Not surprisingly, I flunked out of graduate school. I was beyond embarrassed and very worried that I had blown up my whole future. Then I came home to the Seattle area to think over what to do next. (My father had recently passed away, and my mother was supportive and encouraging that I would figure out something else.) I took a job in a typing pool, and was soon fired from that . . . probably because my anxiety made the other workers in the typing pool nervous (I wasn’t that bad a typist). Then I landed a job doing manual labor, filling orders in a warehouse. All things considered, it wasn’t a great time in my life.

  I had a lot of free time outside of work, and I found that I greatly enjoyed spending time with my four-year-old niece. I remember taking her on her first bus ride and how much fun it was just listening to the questions she asked and the way she answered my questions. I thought back to the times in my life when my family had vacationed with families who had younger children and how, although I didn’t like to admit it, I enjoyed being with younger kids. This gave me the idea to work with children.

  I started taking education classes and eventually got a degree and became a teacher. I went on to get a master’s degree in special education and taught off and on. The one year I taught full time I had a headache every Monday. In retrospect, I think this is because, while I had some strengths as a teacher (I was nice), I had terrible behavior management skills and found it stressful trying to manage a group of young students with special needs. This made me realize that if I was going to work with children, it would have to be in a different context. At the age of thirty-two, I finished up my doctorate in a school psychology program before going on to do a postdoc in clinical neuropsychology. In forty-three years, I have not looked back, and I have not had a headache since that one year of teaching full time.

  I realized within six months of leaving Berkeley that flunking out was the best thing that could have happened to me. So often, when it feels like everything is going wrong, things are just being reorganized in helpful ways that we could never anticipate.

  Robin

  Robin grew up in a middle-class family in Maryland. Through junior high she was at the top of her class and a leader at her school. As an eighth grader, she successfully petitioned to skip the last half of the coursework and move directly on to ninth grade, which she completed in one semester. She began wandering from the standard path the following summer. She became pregnant, ran away with the father of her child, and lived in and out of group homes and seedy hotels. She got her GED, divorced her teenage husband, and soon remarried. Her second husband was a doctor who was controlling and could be cruel.

  Though she was a mother of a young boy and stepmother of two others, she found a way to enroll in college at Keene State College of New Hampshire, and finished at age twenty-seven with a 4.0 GPA. She had always been interested in spirituality, so she applied to Harvard Divinity School. To her surprise, she was accepted. She attended for one semester but then realized that if she wanted to be on a strong-enough financial footing to leave her husband, she would need to make a better living. So she got an MBA and a corporate job as a training and development specialist. When she was more financially secure, Robin left her husband, and soon after, she met Peter, to whom she has been happily married for twenty-four years.

  On the professional front, Robin’s life took yet another turn. She didn’t love the corporate world, so she studied to teach yoga and dance. She published a book on women’s spirituality and taught yoga and meditation to at-risk girls. Within a few years, she started working with active-duty military personnel who suffer from acute PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury. She taught yoga and meditation to soldiers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and cofounded an organization, Warriors at Ease, that trains yoga teachers to teach yoga and meditation to soldiers in a way that is sensitive to the effects of trauma and military culture. Her organization has trained over seven hundred teachers around the world, and Warriors at Ease currently serves approximately ten thousand service members each year.

  Brian

  Brian was a bright kid from a DC suburb who found the school environment to be punishing. His relationship with his parents as a teenager was filled with conflict. They worked hard to set limits, but Brian always managed to work around them. He was cruel to his sister, stayed up late listening to music—largely to keep his parents awake—and challenged them to come in and do something about it.

  When he was sixteen, Brian was doing poorly in school, hated it, and spent no time attempting to learn or develop his academic skills. His parents did not feel comfortable letting him drop out, so they ultimately sent him to boarding school in New England. The staff there wasn’t much better at setting limits, and Brian ran away to Florida with his girlfriend. In Florida, he and his girlfriend worked at minimum-wage jobs. Eventually, the appeal of freedom waned. The drudgery of menial work caught up with him, and Brian asked his parents if they would fund classes at a community college in Florida, which they agreed to do. After gaining a number of credits there, Brian applied to Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, where he graduated with a degree in education. Brian later earned a master’s degree in education, and he is currently a master educator in the District of Columbia public schools.

  The standard route of doing well academically all through school didn’t work for Brian. But he was able to find his way to a happy and satisfying career and personal life. Curiously, after struggling to do well academically himself, he has come full circle and his life’s work is supporting kids to do well in school.

  Peter

  Peter was a mediocre student in the Chicago public school system. After attending five different schools he eventually graduated from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest (now an online college) with a degree in English. Because he could find nothing useful to do with his English degree, and because he always enjoyed cooking, he started working as a short-order cook, and pursued the dream of running his own restaurant. For years, Peter held numerous jobs in the food industry, including waiter, maître d’, cook, and chef. At one point, he even opened a hot dog stand. Then Peter started working for a chain of restaurants as a lower-level manager, and got experience purchasing supplies. This job was a good match for Peter, who had a good mind for math, exceptional interpersonal skills, and great capacity for “win-win” negotiating. He was soon approached by a start-up restaurant chain with three locations. Peter’s work in pur
chasing impressed his bosses, who gave him shares of stock in the company. When the company went public, it had over three hundred restaurants around the world. Peter has done extremely well professionally and financially, and he also has a wonderful family.

  How many ten-year-olds have a burning desire to grow up and be a purchaser for a major restaurant chain? And yet what a wonderful life and career it’s been for Peter.

  Ben

  Ben struggled in school, and remembers science and math as being particularly hard. He found it difficult to motivate himself to do schoolwork, and he (barely) graduated high school with a GPA below 1.0. He always excelled in his art classes, though, and a course he took in calligraphy as a seventh grader made a big impression on him. His parents, a clinical psychologist and an oncology nurse, supported him in taking an alternate route and exploring an art-focused secondary school. Ben’s brother had blazed the trail by studying cinematography in a two-year program, and was killing it in Los Angeles. (He is currently one of the most successful cinematographers in Hollywood.) Though Ben enrolled in a three-year art program, he didn’t finish three full semesters. He had developed enough skills, though, to get a series of graphic design jobs, and he found one that particularly appealed to him, with an emphasis on branding. When he was just twenty-nine, Ben started his own company, Brand Army. Ironically, since he never got a college degree, his many clients now include George Mason University and Georgetown.

  Ben and his brother both followed their passions and were so successful that they’re now making far more money than either of their parents. As their dad says, “What I have learned from this is, if you see a spark in your kids, pour gasoline on it.”