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LEAN IN

WOMEN, WORK, AND THE WILL TO LEAD

BY SHERYL SANDBERG

 Introduction: Internalizing the Revolution

P. 5 “Knowing that things could be worse should not stop us from trying to make them better.”

P. 7 “A truly equal world would be one where women ran half our countries and companies and men ran half our homes.”

P. 7 “Conditions for all women will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.”

P. 8 “Men are promoted based on potential, while women are promoted based on past accomplishments.”

P. 9 “Internal obstacles deserve a lot more attention, in part because they are under our own control.”

P. 10 “Many people are not interested in acquiring power, not because they lack ambition, but because they are living their lives as they desire.”

P. 11 “Shift to a more equal world will happen person by person. We move closer to the larger goal of true equality with each woman who leans in.”

1. The Leadership Ambition Gap – What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?

P. 15 “Girls growing up today are not the first generation to have equal opportunity, but they are the first to know that all that opportunity does not necessarily translate into professional achievement.”

P. 17 “Men are continually applauded for being ambitious and powerful and successful, but women who display these same traits often pay a social penalty. Female accomplishment comes at cost.”

P. 23 “Women are not thinking about having it all, they’re worried about losing it all—their jobs, their children’s health, their families’ financial stability—because of the regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and a responsible parent.”

P. 24 “Children, parents, and marriages can all flourish when both parents have full careers. Sharing financial and child-care responsibilities leads to less guilty moms, more involved dads, and thriving children.”

P. 24 “Fear is the root of so many barriers that women face—without fear, women can pursue professional success and personal fulfillment—and freely choose one, or the other, or both.”

P. 25 “Find the right career for you and go all the way to the top.”

P. 25 “As you walk off this stage today, you start your adult life.  Start out by aiming high. Try—and try hard.”

P. 26 “Ask yourself: What would I do if I weren’t afraid? And then go do it.”

2. Sit at the Table

P. 38 “Feeling confident—or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities.”

P. 36 “If we want a world with greater equality, we need to acknowledge that women are less likely to keep their hands up. We need institutions and individuals to notice and correct for this behavior by encouraging, promoting, and championing more women. And women have to learn to keep their hands up, because when they lower, even managers with the best intentions might not notice.”

P. 38 “No one can accomplish anything all alone.”

3. Success and Likeability

P. 40 “Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. When a man is successful, he is liked by both men and women. When a woman is successful, people of both genders like her less.”

P. 43 “If a woman is competent, she does not seem nice enough. If a woman seems really nice, she is considered more nice than competent.”

P. 44 “Owning one’s success is key to achieving more success.”

P. 47 “Women can increase their chances of achieving a desired outcome by doing two things in combination. First, women must come across as being nice, concerned about others, and ‘appropriately female’. Second, what women must do is provide a legitimate explanation for the negotiation.”

P. 50 “Everyone needs to get more comfortable with female leaders—including female leaders themselves.”

P. 51 “When you want to change things you cannot please everyone. If you do please everyone, you aren’t making enough progress.”

4. It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder

P. 53 “Careers do not need to be mapped out from the start. Job seekers often have to accept what is available and hope that It points in a desirable direction.”

P. 58 “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat. You just get on.”

P. 59 “Employees who concentrate on results and impact on results are the most valuable.”

P. 62 “Women need to shift from thinking ‘I’m not ready to do that’ to thinking ‘I want to do that—and I’ll learn by doing it.’”

P. 63 “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

P. 63 “Do not wait for power to be offered.”

5. Are You My Mentor?

P. 69 “Capturing someone’s attention or imagination in a minute can be done, but only when planned and tailored to that individual.”

P 74 “Guidance can come from all levels.”

6. Seek and Speak Your Truth

P. 78 “Communication works best when we combine appropriateness with authenticity, finding that sweet spot where opinions are not brutally honest but delicately honest.”

P. 79 “Great leadership is ‘conscious’ leadership.”

P.  79 “Communication starts with the point of view (my truth) and someone else’s point of view (his truth). Rarely is there one absolute truth, so people who believe that they speak the truth are very silencing to others.”

*P. 80 “The ability to listen is as important as the ability to speak.”

P. 80 “Restate the other person’s point before responding to it.”

P. 81 “We all want to be heard, and when we focus on showing others that we are listening, we actually become better listeners.”

P. 81 “Being aware of a problem is the first step to correcting it.”

P. 81 “We can try to guess what they’re thinking, but asking directly is far more effective.”

P. 83 “As hard as it is to have an honest dialogue about business decisions, it is even harder to give individuals honest feedback.”

P. 84 “Being open to hearing the truth means taking responsibility for mistakes.”

P. 86 “When people are open and honest, thanking them publicly encourages them to continue while sending a powerful signal to others.”

P. 86 “Humor can be an amazing tool for delivering an honest message in a good-natured way.”

P. 88 “Sharing emotions builds deeper relationships.”

P. 88 “Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about.”

P. 88 “Recognizing the role emotions play and being willing to discuss them makes us better managers, partners, and peers.”

7. Don’t Leave Before You Leave

P. 95 “No one should pass judgement on highly personal decisions.”

P. 95 “The months and years leading up to having children are not the time to lean back, but the critical time to lean in.”

P. 99 “It’s hard to predict how an individual will react to becoming a parent, it’s easy to predict society’s reaction—when a couple announces that they are having a baby, everyone says ‘congratulation’ to the man and ‘congratulation! What are you planning on doing about work?’ to the woman.”

P. 102 “Child care is a huge expense, and it’s frustrating to work hard just to break even. But professional women need to measure the cost of child care against their future salary rather than their current salary.”

P. 103 “We make it too easy for women to drop out of the career marathon; we also make it too hard for men.”

8. Make Your Partner a Real Partner 

P. 109 “Anyone who wants her mate to be a true partner must treat him as an equal—and equally capable—partner.”

P. 115 “The image of happy couples still includes a husband who is more professionally successful than the wife. If the reverse occurs, it’s perceived as threatening to the marriage.”

P. 115 “When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, crazy boys. But do not marry them. When it comes to settlement, find someone who wants an equal partner.”

P. 116 “If a relationship begins in an unequal place, it is likely to get more unbalanced when and if children are added to the equation.”

P. 117 “If you want an equal partnership, you should start now.”

P. 119 “A more equal division of labor between parents will model better behavior for the next generation.”

P. 120 “We need more men to sit at the table … the kitchen table.”

9. The Myth of Doing It All

P. 122 “Pursuing both a professional and personal life is a noble and attainable goal, up to a point.”

P. 136 “Exclusive maternal care was not related to better or worse outcomes for children. There is, thus, no reason for mothers to feel as though they are harming their children if they decide to work.”

*P. 139 “Success is making the best choices we can… and accepting them.”

10. Let’s Start Talking About It

P. 155 “Don’t be afraid to ask, even if it seems like a long shot.”

P. 155 “Every job will demand some sacrifice. The key is to avoidunnecessarysacrifice.”

P. 157 “Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.”

P. 158 “The result of creating a more equal environment will not just be better performance for our organizations, but quite likely greater happiness for all.”

11. Working Together Towards Equality

P. 159 “True equality is long overdue and will be achieved only when more women rise to the top of every government and every industry.”

P. 160 “Equal opportunity is not equal unless everyone receives the encouragement that makes seizing those opportunities possible.”

P. 168 “We all want the same thing: to feel comfortable with our choices and to feel validated by those around us. So, let’s start by validating one another.”

P. 171 “If we start using the talents of the entire population, our institutions will be more productive, our homes will be happier, and the children growing up in those homes will no longer be held back by narrow stereotypes.”

P. 171 “If more women lean in, we can change the power structure of our world and expand opportunities for all.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

 

 

What School Could Be

By Ted Dintersmith

Overview

“What School Could Be” presents a vision and encouraging ideas of what schools can accomplish if teachers, students and parents work together innovatively to help students develop the skills and ways of thinking needed to flourish in today’s world of fast-paced technological change.

According to the author, actual learning happens when we give kids real-world challenges, have them work in groups with other kids and provide them with resources and adult support. If we give students credit for real-world projects and internships they have the opportunity to go deeply into a discipline to seek out potentially fulfilling career paths. Such projects also provide non-academically oriented students with opportunities to shine and thus broaden everyone’s perception of ‘intelligence’ beyond the traditional knowledge-based definition. Dintersmith states: “the purpose of education should be to develop potential, not to rank it.”

PROLOGUE

P. XVI “Students thrive in environments where they develop:

• Purpose—Students attack challenges they know to be important, that make their world better.
• Essentials—Students acquire the skill sets and mind-sets needed in an increasingly innovative world.
• Agency—Students own their learning, becoming self-directed, intrinsically motivated adults.
• Knowledge—What students learn is deep and retained, enabling them to create, to make, to teach others.”

P. XVII “We need to observe and create learning conditions that prepare students to capitalize on, rather than be victimized by, machine intelligence.”

P. XVIII “We need to have the courage to revolutionize paths forward and attack the many problems we’re dumping on student’s laps.

P. XVIII “We can’t keep feeding children into an education machine that churns out young adults lacking meaningful skills and purpose, primed to throw hand grenades into the ballot box, or worse.”

P. XIX “Our children should study what’s important to learn, not what’s easy for us to test. Schools should develop each child’s unique potential, not rank it with high-stakes standardized tests of low-level skills.”

P. XXI “Do better things,” not “do obsolete things better.”

1. Conventional Schools and Their Contexts

P. 12 “Children need to learn to leverage machine intelligence, not replicate its capacity to perform low-level tasks.”

P. 18 “Project-based learning is how people work in the real world.”

2. Real Gold Amid Fool’s Gold

P. 24 “When we let go and engage students, discipline issues disappear and real learning happens.”

P. 37 “Our world desperately needs young people who know how to think deeply, communicate clearly, resolve conflict, and lead with empathy.”

P. 38 “Once you jump outside of the box, there’s endless running room.”

3. Prepare for What?

P. 47 “Education should prepare our children for life, but we have it backward—we prepare children’s lives for education.”

P. 59 “If a goal of education is to get students excited about literature’s great works, an essential question is how to spark such passion.”

P. 60 “In today’s world everyone needs to be entrepreneurial. Not entrepreneurial in the sense of starting a for-profit business but in the sense of fighting tirelessly to improve your world through your skills, passions, perseverance, audacity and community support.”

P. 68 “School transcripts are designed so that the admission officer can review it in ten minutes or so.”

*P. 68 “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

P. 70 “Kids are rewarded more for memorizing than thinking—a balance that would shift dramatically if students were assessed on the basis of authentic and creative work.”

4. The Ivory Tower

P. 74 “Colleges should be valued for developing excellence in the students they admit, not for admitting students with excellent test scores.”

P. 82 “The issue with the liberal arts isn’t the failure to prepare students for careers. It’s the failure to convince adults—parents and employers—that liberal arts majors develop relevant competencies.”

P. 85 “Any college committed to educating kids from challenging circumstances is making an unequivocally positive contribution to our society.”

P. 89 “Education is no longer sitting in a classroom and telling students what’s going on; they have to relate what they’re learning in a classroom out to their life.”

5 & 6 Letting Go/ Social Equity 

P. 98 “In today’s world, we have to balance trade-offs—what colleges want, what twenty-first-century organizations want, and what leads to a fulfilling life.”

P. 121 “If young adults need to be bold and creative in a world brimming with innovation, we can’t tolerate education policies that destroy these characteristics.”

P. 124 “Education has become the modern American caste system. We fuzz up the issue in a sea of statistics about test-score gaps, suggesting that social inequality is a classroom issue.”

P. 125 “Achievement should be based on challenging real-world problems, not standardizing tests that amount to little more than timed performance on crossword puzzles and Sudoku.”

*P. 125 “If the cow is starving, we don’t weigh it. We feed it.”

7 & 8. Human Potential / Doing (Obsolete) Things Better

P. 133 “Science is so much fun, but we make it boring. We make it about rote memorization.”

P. 145 “We need to help students achieve self-sufficiency.”

P. 147 “Many people are quite capable of learning, just not in school. The right job can be their salvation. Internship, apprenticeships, and entry-level jobs can make or break a young adult’s future.”

P. 150 “Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubbles.”

P. 152 “We need to empower our teachers, engage our students, and deliver learning experiences that recognize, and capitalize on, the reality that our students will have digital devices at their fingertips for the rest of their lives.”

P. 156 “Doing obsolete things better will hardly ‘carry us across the water’.”

*P. 160 “Give teachers more respect, training and professional development. Have kids learn more by doing instead of memorizing.”

P. 162 “A lot of people can step up and do great work if they get training and support.”

*P. 166 “We’ll never fix our schools until we get rid of teachers’ unions and tenure.”

9. Doing Better Things

P. 170 “Education’s job today is less in purveying information than in helping people to use it—that is, to exercise their minds.”

P. 172 “Look what we do to our kids. If you’re a low performing student, we pull you out of the classes you enjoy and make you do more rote math—Our kids don’t know why they’re being educated other than to go to college. The role of intrinsic motivation has been completely lost in our school.”

P. 173 “Our education system spends billions of dollars collecting data precisely measuring student progress on material they’ll probably never use.”

P. 180 “When kids feel like a school is a great place to be, they learn—Making things is what we’re about.”

P. 184 “Education shouldn’t be about acquiring narrow content or specific skills, but helping students reach their full potential, and directing this potential to greater good.”

P. 188 “We just need to embrace the right kinds of assessments and ensure our kids are doing things that are valuable to them.”

10. It Takes a Village

P. 192 “Change is nigh impossible when people dump on anything new.”

P. 192 “Innovation has its inevitable hiccups, which can draw out critics.”

P. 192 “Everything changes in environments that celebrate creativity, welcome innovation, and accept setbacks as part of progress.”

P. 192 “It takes a village to raise a child.’ Well, a community can come together to transform its schools.”

P. 210 “Grades reflect factors unrelated to work quality—factors like effort, positive attitude, persistence, attendance, class participation, and meeting deadlines.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

 

 

Creative Schools

The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education

By Ken Robinson, Ph.D.

And Lou Aronica

Introduction

P. XVIII “We’re all born with immense natural talents, but by the time we’ve been very far into our education system, many of us have lost touch with these talents.”

*P. XXII “If you design a system to do something specific, don’t be surprised if it does it. If you run an education system based on standardization and conformity that suppress individuality, imagination and creativity, don’t be surprised if that’s what it does.”

P. XXIV “Whether you’re a student, an educator, a parent, an administrator, or a policy—if you’re involved in education in any way—you can be part of the change. To do that, you need three forms of understanding: acritiqueof the way things are, a visionof how they could be, and a theory of change for how to move from one to the other.”

P. XXIV “If you want to change education, it’s important to recognize what sort of system it is. It is neither monolithic nor unchanging, which is why you can do something about it.”

P. XXIV “The aims of education are to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.”

P. XXV “If you’re involved in education in any way you have three options: you can make changes within the system, you can press for changes to the system, or you can take initiatives outside the system.”

P. XXVI “The challenges we face on Earth are not theoretical; they are all too real and they are mostly being created by people.”

P.XXVII “The danger is not to the planet, but to the conditions of our own survival on it.”

Chapter 1: Basic to Basics

P. 3 “You’ve got to listen to what’s important to the child.”

P. 8 “Why is education such a hot political issue? The reasons are;

–Economic—Education has huge implications for economic prosperity.

–Cultural—Education is one of the main ways that communities pass on their values and traditions from one generation to next.

–Social—Education provides all students, whatever their background and circumstances, with opportunities to prosper and succeed and to become active and engaged citizens.

–Personal—Education contains ritual passages about the need for all students to realize their potential and to live fulfilled and productive lives.”

P. 19 “Unemployment is not only an economic issue; it’s a scourge that can destroy lives and whole communities.”  Children must get skills in school that are applicable and necessary for employment.

P. 20 “Education is not the only source of the income gap, but the forms of education that the ‘standards movement’ is promoting are exacerbating it. The drab nature of standardized education does little to inspire and empower those caught in poverty.”

*P. 24 “The best way to raise student motivation and expectations is to improve the quality of teaching, have a rich and balanced curriculum, and have supportive, informative system of assessment.”

Chapter 2: Changing the Metaphors

P. 33 “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

*P. 36 “The problem with conformity in education is that people are not standardized to begin with.”

P. 37 “The lives we create are the result of all sorts of currents and crosscurrents, most of which we can’t anticipate in advance.”

P. 39 “We are born with all the skills—all the basics—we need. Let’s really spend some time observing the kids in our nursery and early-years facilities and see how we can take forward what they’re doing.”

P. 41 “Education is about living people, not inanimate things. If we think of students as products or data points, we misunderstand how education should be.”

P. 44 “The emphasis in industrial education has been, and increasingly is, on outputs and yield: improving test results, dominating league tables, raising the number of graduates.”

*P. 44 “Education is really improved only when we understand that it too is a living system and that people thrive in certain conditions and not in others.”

P. 45 “What basic purpose of education should the culture of schools fulfill? In my view, there are four:

–Economic—Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent.

–Cultural—Education should enable students to understand and appreciate their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others.

–Social—Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens.

–Personal—Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them.”

P. 49 “There are three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence.”

P. 51 “Education is a global issue; it is also a deeply personal one. None of the other purposes can be met if we forget that education is about enriching the minds and hearts of living people.”

*P. 52 “All students are unique individuals with their own hopes, talents, anxieties, fears, passions, and aspirations. Engaging them as individuals is the heart of raising achievement.”

P. 52 “We only know the world around us through the world within us, through the senses by which we perceive it and the ideas by which we make sense of it.”

Chapter 3: Changing Schools

P. 66 “The best place to start thinking about how to change education is exactly where you are in it. If you change the experiences of education for those you work with, you can change the world for them and in doing so become part of a wider, more complex process of change in education as a whole.”

P. 70 “The fundamental work of schools is not to increase test results but to facilitate learning.”

*P. 71 “The heart of education is the relationship between the student and the teacher. Everything else depends on how productive and successful that relationship is.”

P. 72 “If students are not learning, education is not happening. Something else may be going on, but it’s not education.”

*P. 72 “A great deal of learning and education goes on outside the formal setting of schools and national curricula. It happens anywhere there are willing learners and engaging teachers. The challenge is to create and sustain those experiences within schools.”

Chapter 4: Natural Born Learners

P. 78 “For many students, the problem is not that they cannot learn but how they are required to learn.”

P. 90 “If different people learn best in different ways, they also learn at different rates.”

P. 91 “If the schedule is flexible and more personalized, it is more likely to facilitate the kind of dynamic curriculum that students now need.”

P. 93 “Good teachers know how to use a broad range of assessments.”

*P. 95 “Children are designed by nature, to play and explore on their own, independently of adults. They need freedom in order to develop; without it they suffer.”

P. 96 “Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or ‘quality time’ or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away.”

P. 96 “If the system doesn’t work, don’t blame the people in it—work with them to change it so that it does work.”

P. 96 “The people who are best placed to make the change are those who, in the right conditions, can have the most impact on the quality of learning: the teachers.”

Chapter 5: The Art of Teaching

*P. 100 “It doesn’t matter how detailed the curriculum is or how expensive the tests are; the real key to transforming education is the quality of teaching.”

P. 102 “Good teachers create the conditions for learning, and poor one don’t.”

P. 103 “There are two complementary ways of engaging students in the arts: “making”—the production of their own work; and “appraising”—understanding and appreciating the work of others.”

P. 104 “Great teachers understand that it’s not enough to know their disciplines—their job is not to teach subjects; it is to teach students.”

P. 111 “Students who are more confident of their own learning ability learn faster and learn better.”  Helping students develop a strong self-concept is critical to effective learning.

P. 113 “Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.”

*P. 115 “Classrooms shouldn’t be built around passivity, and around listening to someone and taking notes. It should be learning at your pace.”

P. 118 “Creativity draws from many powers that we all have by virtue of being human. And like many human capacities, our creative powers can be cultivated and refined.”

P. 126 “Subject expertise is often essential for great teaching, but it’s never enough. The other half of great teaching is knowing how to inspire students with materials so that they actively want to, and do, learn it.”

Chapter 6: What’s Worth Knowing?

P.130 “Reaching all students is exactly what is at stake in the transformation of education.”

P. 136 “A lifelong sense of curiosity is one of the greatest gifts that schools can give their students.”

P. 137 “The development of skills in spoken languages is now, sadly and wrongly, neglected in schools—verbal communication is not only about literal meanings; it’s also about appreciating metaphor, analogy, allusion, and other poetic and literary of language.”

P. 139 “Compassion has to be practiced, not preached.”

P. 140 “Citizenship education is not about promoting conformity and status quo. It is about championing the need for equal rights, the value of dissent, and the need to balance personal freedoms with the rights of others to live in peace—it needs to be learned and practiced.”

P. 146 “Effective learning in any field is often a process of trial and error, of breakthroughs punctuated by failed attempts to find a solution.”

Chapter 7: Testing, Testing

*P. 168 “The world economy no longer pays you for what you know; Google knows everything.  The world economy pays you for what you can do with what you know.”

P. 171 “Not everything important is measurable and not everything measurable is important.”

P. 171 “One problem with the systems of assessment that use letters and grades is that they are usually light on description and heavy on comparison.”

*P. 176 “Assessment and standardization is not the problem; the problem is what we choose to standardize.”

P. 179 “You need to have the skills to assess your work. You need to have the skills to assess other people’s work.”

P. 181 “Assessment should not be seen as the end of the education, in either sense.”

Chapter 8: Principles of Principals

P. 188 “Great principals know that their job is not primarily to improve test; it is to build community among the students, teachers, and staff, who need to share a common set of purposes.”

P. 191 “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us—Many of the conventional rituals of schooling are not fixed in law. Many schools are organized as they are because they always have been, not because they must be.”

P. 194 “How quickly things change will depend, in large part, on the vision of the people who run them, especially the principals, on how they set expectations, and where they draw the lines of permission.”

P. 205 “The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it is to encourage a culture where everyone has them.

Chapter 9/10: Bring it All Back Home/Changing the Climate

P. 208 “As a parent, you have an essential role in helping the schools evolve a more rounded understanding of your children’s unique qualities and capabilities.”

P. 213 “When children aren’t given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don’t learn to problem-solve very well.”

P. 218 “Family involvement is vital, but it is only possible if schools make such involvement accessible.”

P. 231 “Education should be based on the principles of health, ecology, fairness and care.”

P. 233 “The quality of education is not inevitably related to the amount of money spent on it.”

*P. 234 “One of the most powerful strategies for systemic change is to test the benefits of doing things differently.”

P. 234 “One of the rules of policymakers is to create conditions in which local innovation is actively encouraged and supported.”

P. 234 “It is essential to have high standards in schools in all areas of learning.”

*P. 255 “Effective education always ways a balance between rigor and freedom, tradition and innovation, the individual and the group, theory and practice, the inner world and the outer world.”

P. 256 “The experience of education is always personal but the issues are increasingly global.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Road to Character

By DAVID BROOKS

Introduction

P. XI “Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.”

P. XII “You have to give to receive.”

P. XII “You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself.”

P. XII “You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave.”

P. XII “Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride.”

P. XII “Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning.”

P. XIII “We live in a society that encourages us to think about how to have a great career but leaves many of us inarticulate about how to cultivate inner life—We live in a culture that teaches us to promote and advertise ourselves and to master the skills required for success, but that gives little encouragement to humility, sympathy, and honest self-confrontation, which are necessary to build character.”

P. XIII “Most don’t have a strategy to build character, and without that, not only your inner life but also your external life will eventually fall to pieces.”

P. XV “The heart cannot be taught in a classroom intellectually, to students mechanically taking notes… Good, wise hearts are obtained through lifetimes of diligent effort to dig deeply within and heal lifetimes of scars…. You can’t teach it or email it or tweet it.”

P. XV “Moral improvements occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed, when we come into contact with people we admire and love and we consciously and unconsciously bend our lives to mimic theirs.”

Chapter 1: The Shift

P.7 “You have a responsibility to do great things because you are so great.”

P. 8 “Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.”

P. 9 “We can be knowledgeable with other peoples’ knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other peoples’ wisdom.”

P. 11 “People who are humble about their own nature are more realists.”

P. 12 “Character is built not only through austerity and hardship. It is also built sweetly through love and pleasure.”

P.12 “The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own.”

P.13 “People with character may be loud or quiet, but they do tend to have a certain level of self-respect.”

Chapter 2: The Summoned Self

P. 23 “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly puts before us.”

P. 24 “It is not your obligation to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from beginning it.”

P.28 “Today, teachers tend to look for their students’ intellectual strengths, so they can cultivate them. But a century ago, professors tended to look for their students’ moral weaknesses, so they could correct them.”

P. 46 “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; so we must be saved by hope.”

Chapter 3: Self-Conquest

P. 63 “Always try to associate yourself closely and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.”

P. 63 “The plans are nothing, but the planning is everything,” “Rely on planning, but never trust plans.”

P. 67 “We should live our life being truthful to that authentic inner self, not succumbing to the pressures outside our self.”

P. 67 “To live artificially, with a gap between your inner nature and your outer conduct, is to be deceptive, cunning, and false.”

Chapter 4: Struggle

P. 78 “Everyone must go through something analogous to a conversion… conversion to an idea, a thought, a desire, a dream, a vision—without vision the people perish.”

P. 94 “Often, physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s perspective, an attuned awareness of what others are enduring.”

P.94 “The first big thing suffering does is it drags you deeper into your-self—The people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routine busyness of life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be.”

Chapter 5: Self – Mastery

P. 108 “Proper behavior is not just knowing what is right; it is having the motivation to do what is right, an emotion that propels you to do good things.”

P. 115 “If everybody is told to think outside the box, you’ve got to expect that the boxes themselves will begin to deteriorate.”

P. 116 “A person’s social function defines who he or she is. The commitment between a person and an institution is more like a covenant. It is an inheritance to be passed on and a debt to be repaid.”

Chapter 6/7: Dignity and Love

P. 149 “We could not be virtuous if we were really as innocent as we pretended to be—If we were truly innocent we couldn’t use power in the ways that are necessary to achieve good ends.”

P. 170 “We don’t build love; we fall in love, out of control.”

P. 170 “You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength.”

P. 172 “Love is submission, not decision.”

P. 182 “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

Chapter 8: Ordered Love

P.  200 “The self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact he is happy—posting highlight reel Facebook photos and all the rest—than he does actually being happy.”

P. 203 “If you work hard, play by the rules, and take care of things yourself, you can be the cause of your own good life.”

Chapter 9: Self-Examination

P. 219 “We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinions because we very often differ from ourselves.”

P. 222 “Happiness is not found in self contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.”

P. 224 “The happiness of society depends on virtue.”

P. 224 “The essential human act is the act of making strenuous moral decisions.”

P. 224 “The first step to greatness is to be honest.”

P. 225 “The reigning error of mankind is that we are not content with the conditions on which the goods of life are granted.”

Chapter 10: Big Me

P. 250 “To improve yourself, you have to be taught to love yourself, to be true to yourself, not to doubt yourself and struggle against yourself.”

P. 250 “The answers are all inside of me.  All I’ve got to do is believe.”

P. 262 “Although we are flawed creatures, we are also splendidly endowed—We are divided within ourselves, both fearfully and wonderfully made.”

P. 262 “In the struggle against your own weakness, humility is the greatest virtue.”

P. 265 “The struggle against weakness often has a U shape.”

P. 265 “Only by quieting the self, by muting the sound of your own ego, can you see the world clearly.”

P. 266 “The best leaders try to lead along the grain of human nature rather than go against it.”

P. 269 “People do get better at living, at least if they are willing to humble themselves and learn.”

P. 269 “Joy is not produced because others praise you. Joy comes as a gift when you least expect it.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

ENGINE of IMPACT

Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector

By William F. Meehan III

Kim Starkey Jonker

 

Introduction: Strategic Leadership in the Impact Era

P. 1 “We are the dawn of a new era—the impact Era—in which non-profits will play an ever more vital role in supporting, safeguarding and sustaining civil society.”

P. 19 “The practice of strategic leadership involves not just doing good work but also doing that work in a highly intentional and highly effective way.”

P. 19 “An engine of impact, as we call it, starts with the mission of an organization. That mission is the very air that people in the organization breathe as they do their work.”

P. 20 “Helping to generate power for an engine of impact are the twin “turbines” of insight and courage.”

P. 20 “To operate its engine of impact, meanwhile, an organization must draw on three varieties of fuel: well-managed talent and organization, sustained and sufficient funding, and effective board governance.”

P. 20 “When the engine works well, it creates thrust, or what we call impact.”

P. 20 “Strategic leadership in short, equals strategic thinking plus strategic management.”

P. 22 “Talent is a critical source of fuel for every organization, but talented people will thrive in an organization only if they have strong and responsive leadership.”

P. 23 “Nonprofit leaders must recognize that if they want to save the world, they have to knock on doors and ask for money.”

Part 1: Strategic Thinking—Build and Tune Your Engine of Impact

P. 29 “A mission-driven organization should pursue its mission like a lodestar that will always keep it on course.”

P. 29 “A well-conceived mission statement that can guide an organization in making key decisions should do the following:

• Be focused
• Solve unmet public needs
• Leverage distinctive skills
• Guide trade-offs
• Inspire and be inspired by key stakeholders
• Be timeless
• Be “sticky” – clear, understandable and easy to stay with over the long term

P. 44 “If you think that your organization’s vision is an essential element of its mission, then includes it in your mission statement.”

P. 45 “A clear focused mission statement is a necessary foundation for becoming a focused and effective organization.”

P. 45 “The ultimate test is not the beauty of a mission statement—The ultimate test is right action.”

P. 67 “An organization’s strategy must be built on its distinctive skill, or skills.”

P. 72 “The most important goal of excellent strategic planning is shaped by process rather than end product.”

P. 73 “Don’t underestimate the time and effort required for an effective strategic planning process.”

P. 73 “Remember that effective strategic planning is based on issues, not calendar.”

P. 90 “Strategic thinking can’t make real progress until it is supported by a feedback loop.”

P. 91 “If possible, don’t wait until your organization is firmly established to start measuring impact. Instead, start early and let evaluation results guide your program activities as you grow.”

P. 92 “Evaluation should be more than a onetime endeavor that tells an organization whether to shut down a program or to keep it going.”

P. 102 “Great nonprofits invariably start with a profound insight, that is, a distinct and compelling viewpoint about how social change can come about, including a sense of one’s personal role in that change.”

P. 111 “Courage, like insight, is an indispensable aspect of nonprofit strategic leadership.”

P. 112 “We cannot supply you with courage, but we can offer you examples that might help you find it.”

Part II: Strategic management—Fuel Your Engine of Impact

P. 121 “Your organization is only as good as those people within it who embody your mission and tirelessly strive to achieve it—your organization is only as good as your people—and how you organize and lead them.”

P. 123 “Empathy is foundational to the ability to resolve conflict, collaborate in teams, align interests, listen effectively, and make decisions where there are no rules or precedents—to solve problems and drive change.”

P. 130 “Those who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the key bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus.”

P. 131 “Letting people go, when appropriate, will not only improve the efficiency of an organization; it also sends a powerful signal about the values of that organization.”

P. 133 “Organizations must tightly manage things in a few areas even as they enable creativity and flexibility in other areas.”

P. 136 “There’s nothing more important in generating social impact than taking great care in selecting and developing the people engaged in the work.”

P. 136 “Great ideas don’t change the world, great people do.”

P. 153 “If you don’t know where to start, consider the power of networks.”

P. 169 “Make sure that your organization has a clear mission that is focused where the organization has the necessary skills/resources and embraced by the board, management, and other key stakeholders.”

P. 172 “Hire, fire and evaluate your executive on the basis of a sound, objective, ongoing process.”

P. 175 “Compose and structure your board using transparent structures and processes that support effective decision making.”

P. 176 “In determining the appropriate composition of a nonprofit board, you are unlikely to go wrong if you remember the venerable idea of the three Ws: work, wisdom, and wealth.”

P. 183 “The right time for the executive director and staff to bring up issues is early in the process, when board members can give real input and have a dynamic discussion.”

P. 195 “The primary role of nonprofit leaders is not to grow the size of an organization, or even to reach more people, but to achieve the greatest possible impact.”

P. 197 “Cost-efficiency and cost-effectiveness are critical for scaling, but impact must remain the top priority.”

P. 200 “Scaling typically requires proactive action to build necessary skills, resources, and processes.”

Priyanka Uprety

 

 

THE FOUR AGREEMENTS

A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

By Don Miguel Ruiz

Introduction

P. 4 “It was not your choice to speak English. You didn’t choose your religion or your moral values—they were already there before you were born.”

P. 6 “We train our children, whom we love so much, the same way that we train any domesticated animal.”

P. 7 “The rewards feels good, and we keep doing what others want us to do in order to get the reward.”

P. 12 “The human is the only animal on earth that pays a thousand times for the same mistake. The rest of the animals pay once for every mistake they make. But not us.”

P. 14 “Every human has his or her own personal dream and just like the society dream, it is often ruled by fear.”

P. 15 “All of humanity is searching for truth, justice, and beauty.”

P. 15 “We don’t see the truth because we are blind. What blinds us are all those false beliefs we have in our mind.”

P. 17 “Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive—the risk to be alive and express what we really are.”

P. 19 “The way we judge ourselves is the worst judge that ever existed.”

P. 20 “The more self-love we have, the less we will experience self-abuse.”

P. 22 “Each of us is born with certain amount of personal power that we rebuild every day after we rest.”

The First Agreement: Be Impeccable with Your Word

P. 27 “The word is so powerful that one word can change a life or destroy the lives of millions of people—your word can create the most beautiful dream, or your word can destroy everything around you.”

P. 28 “Every human is a magician, and we can either put a spell on someone with our words or we can release someone from a spell.”

P.32 “Being impeccable with your word is the correct use of your energy; It means to use your energy in the direction of truth and love for yourself.”

The Second Agreement: Don’t Take Anything Personally

P. 47 “Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally.”

P. 48 “Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves.”

P. 52 “If you are not afraid, there is no way you will be jealous or sad.”

P. 55 “We have a choice whether or not to believe the voices we hear within our own minds, just as we have a choice of what to believe and agree with our dream for the planet.”

 

P. 58 “If someone is not treating you with love and respect, it is a gift if they walk away from you.”

P. 60 “You need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you.”

The Third Agreement: Don’t Make Assumptions

P. 64 “All the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in making assumptions and taking things personally.”

P. 66 “Making assumptions in our relationship is really asking for problems.”

P. 70 “We do not need to justify love; it is there or not there.”

P. 70 “Real love is accepting other people the way they are without trying to change them.”

P. 71 “Find someone whom you don’t have to change at all. It is much easier to find someone who is already the way you want him/her to be, instead of trying to change that person.”

P. 72 “If you do not understand something, it is better for you to ask and be clear, instead of making an assumption.”

The Fourth Agreement: Always Do Your Best

P. 75 “Keep in mind that your best is never going to be the same from one moment to the next.”

P. 76 “Just do your best—in any circumstance in your life.”

P. 79 “Doing your best is taking the action because you love it, not because you’re expecting a reward.”

P. 83 “Whatever life takes away from you, let it go. When you surrender and let go of the past, you allow yourself to be fully alive in the moment.”

P. 84 “You are born with the right to be happy, to love, to enjoy and to share love.”

P. 84 “You can only be you when you do your best.”

P. 91 “Do not be concerned about the future; keep your attention on today, and stay in the present moment.”

Priyanka Uprety

QUIET

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

By Susan Cain

Introduction: The North and South of Temperament

P.3 “Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a nation of extroverts-which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are”.

P.4 “If you’re not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising, managing, married to, or coupled with one”.

P.4 “Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are.”

P.4 “Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”

P.5 “Introverts and extroverts differ in the level of outside stimulation that they need to function well. Introverts feel “Just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book, Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo.”

P.6 “A person cannot be either introverted or extroverted. A person will fall somewhere on the axis on the introvert-extrovert spectrum.”

P.6 “Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating.”

Part 1: The Extrovert Ideal

P.28 “Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind”.

P.28 “In 1950, Yale’s president, Alfred Whitney Griswold, declared that the ideal Yalie was not a “beetle-browned, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man.”

P.29 “According to some researchers, world travelers were more extroverted than those who stayed home – and they passed on their traits to their children and their children’s children.”

P. 73 “If you are a rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, advice that might be hard to take is: Work alone, you’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you are working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

P. 74 “The more creative people tended to be socially poised introverts. They were interpersonally skilled but “not of an especially sociable or participative temperament”.

P. 77 “Students take ownership of their education when they learn from one another.”

P. 77 “People’s respect for others is based on their verbal abilities, not their originality or insight.”

P. 77 “Cooperative learning enables skills in working as teams — skills that are in dire demand in the workplace.”

P. 94 “Our schools should teach children the skills to work with others — cooperative learning can be effective when practiced well in moderation, but also need the time and training to deliberately practice on their own.”

Part 2: Your Biology, Yourself?

P. 108 “Introversion-extroversion is only 40 to 50 percent heritable.”

P. 109 “Conversely, highly reactive children may more likely develop into artists and writers and scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar — and intellectually fertile — environment of their own heads”.

P. 129 “There is no one more courageous than the person who speaks with the courage of his convictions.”

P. 144 “The elements of the embarrassment are fleeting statements the individual makes about his or her respect for the judgment of others”.

P. 144 “Embarrassment reveals how much the individual cares about the rules that bind us to one another.”

P. 145 “The type that is ‘sensitive’ or ‘reactive’ would reflect a strategy of observing carefully before acting.”

P.  158 “The introverts are much better at making a plan, staying with a plan, being disciplined.”

P. 169 “It is not that I’m so smart,” said Einstein, who was a consummate introvert. “It’s that I stay with problems longer.”

P. 173 “If you’re an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts.”

P. 173 “Introverts need to trust their guts and share their ideas as powerfully as they can.”

P. 173 “The trick for introverts is to honor their own styles instead of following themselves to be swept up by prevailing norms.”

Part 3: Do all Cultures have an Extrovert Ideal?

P. 182 “If you were Asian, you had to confirm you were smart. If you were white, you had to prove it.”

P. 190 “The point is not that one is superior to others, but that a profound difference in cultural values has a powerful impact on the personality styles favored by each culture.”

P. 191 “Each way of being — quiet and talkative, careful and audacious, inhibited and unrestrained — is characteristic of its own mighty civilization.”

P. 192 “Asians are not uncomfortable with who they are, but are uncomfortable with expressing who they are.”

P. 200 “Quiet persistence requires sustained attention; in effect restraining one’s reaction to external stimuli.”

Part 4: How to Love, How to Work

P. 209 “We are born and culturally endowed with certain personality traits — introversion, for example — but we can act out of character in the service of “core personal projects.”

P. 216 “Taking simple physical steps — like smiling — makes us feel stronger and happier, while frowning makes us feel worse.”

P. 218 “Three key steps to identify your core personal projects are: First, think back to what you loved to do when you were a child. Second, pay attention to the work you gravitate to. Finally, pay attention to what you envy.”

P. 228  “Jealously is an ugly emotion, but it tells the truth.”

P. 228  “You mostly envy those who have what you desire.”

P. 231 “Introverts like people they meet in friendly contexts; extroverts prefer those they compete with.”

P. 248 “One of the best things you can do for an introverted child is work with him or her on their reaction to novelty.”

P. 248 “Introversion-extroversion levels are not correlated with either agreeableness or the enjoyment of intimacy. Introverts are just as likely as the next kid to seek other’s company, though often in smaller doses.

P. 249 “The key is to expose your child gradually to new situation and people — taking care to respect his/her limits, even when they seem extreme.”

*P. 255 “Do not think of introversion as something that needs to be cured. If an introverted child needs help with social skills, teach her or recommend training outside class, just as you’d do for a student who needs extra attention in math or reading. But celebrate these kids for who are they.”

P. 261 “Unleashing passion can transform a life, not just for the space of time that your child is in elementary or middle or high school, but way beyond.”

*Conclusion*

P. 264 “Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.”

P. 264 “Relationships make everyone happier, introverts included; but think quality over quantity.”

P. 264 “The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamp lit desk.”

P. 264 “Use your natural powers — of persistence, concentration, insight and sensitivity — to do work you love and work that matters.”

P. 264 “Figure out what you meant to contribute to the world and make sure you contribute it.” It may not be easy or comfortable to achieve, but DO IT!

P. 265 “Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you’re supposed to.”

P. 265 “If your children are quiet, help them make peace with new situations and new people, but otherwise let them be themselves.”

P. 265 “If you’re a teacher, enjoy your gregarious and participatory students. But don’t forget to cultivate the shy, the gentle, the autonomous, the ones with single-minded enthusiasms for chemistry sets or nineteenth century art. They are the artists, engineers and thinkers of tomorrow.”

P. 265 “If you’re a manager, remember that one third to one half of your workforce is probably introverted, whether they appear that way or not. Think twice about how you design your organization’s office space.”

P. 266 “Whoever you are bare in mind that appearance is not reality.”

Priyanka Uprety