[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.
It takes a certain amount of intelligence, and bravery, to live your life without someone constantly telling you how to live it.
Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.
Your mind wants to succeed, but your life does not want; how will you succeed? Success is not an easy thing! Success is allergic to laziness! However, it is amenable to intelligence and diligence.
Your passport to influencing others is emotional intelligence, your fabric to choosing the right friends is social intelligence, your path to creating lasting wealth is financial intelligence, and your key to identifying your future is brand intelligence.
Are schools rewarding the right people as the highest achievers? If the goal is hard-working, productive, adaptable adults, then U.S. high schools are recognizing precisely the correct group.
For all students, a network of career exploration opportunities, sponsors, and mentors is a critical accompaniment to coursework.
Higher education, in contrast, did not always keep its promise to develop the talents of even its best students. Left with classroom achievement alone, many students never found a negotiable path to a clearly envisioned career corresponding to their deepest interests and values.
Women—and only women—lowered their intellectual self-esteem between high school graduation and sophomore year of college.
As valedictorians matured from high school they began to change their views of success from stereotypical ideals such as material wealth or emulating their parents’ lifestyle to an idea created on their own. They now sought balance between money, career and family as opposed to, say, only wealth. Academically and careerwise most of them were traditionally successful.
Are valedictorians successful a decade and a half after high school? Yes is the simple answer to this straightforward question…Yet the answer becomes infinitely less simple when we examine what society and the valedictorians themselves mean by “success.
The record is clear; nothing succeeds like success and there is no predictor of academic success better than a history of academic success.
Extremely talented students face an odd danger: they do so well in the paths they choose that they might not question whether the direction really fits them.
Male valedictorians attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Only one woman chose an Ivy League university-Cornell.
For academically talented women, in contrast, school success does not guarantee occupational success. Even the best female college students need people who will support them, encourage them, and – most important—who will connect them to opportunities.
Outstanding students of color arrived on campus without the web of white middle-class family and school structures that provided Anglo students with practical knowledge in such areas as college choice strategies and career planning.
College bonds weakened for students of who lived off campus, took outside employment, and maintained active family commitments. Unskilled in navigating the university, these students were unlikely to enter the personal networks where insiders traded the practical information they desperately needed.
For minority students, as for women and working-class white valedictorians, superior college grades did not lead smoothly to high-level satisfying work.
The stories of successful channels, stifling ruts, and missed paths all point to the same conclusion: the successful passage from school to postschool achievement requires an interpersonal process of increasing self-understanding, career socialization, and tacit knowledge.
Academically capable men and women almost never follow a single-minded interest from childhood into careers.
