In August 2013, scholar and author Shadi Hamid wrapped up the research he was doing in Egypt and left the country. Two days later, security forces slaughtered at least 800 protesters who supported the first democratically elected Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, who had just been ousted in a military coup. To Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, the event marked an end to the promise of the Arab Spring. Where democracies once seemed possible in Egypt, Syria, Libya and elsewhere, civil wars dragged on, religious factions stifled dissent or lost power in coups, and extremist groups like the Islamic State filled power vacuums. The question he ponders now is how to decipher what role religion plays today in Middle Eastern politics. NationSwell spoke to Hamid from his home in Washington, D.C.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
Believing in something is very important. That sounds banal, in the sense that it should go without saying. But as someone who lives in Washington, one thing that bothers me about this town is when people lose sight of why they do what they do. Sometimes the passion is lacking, and people get stuck in a routine. You don’t want to ever lose sense of why you set out to do something.
Speaking for myself, I want to do what I can to improve US policy toward the Middle East. I have strong beliefs about America’s role in the world. We, as Americans, have a moral responsibility to try to live up to our own ideals when it comes to our foreign policy. Ultimately, we need to be inspired by something — whatever that happens to be — and not lose sight of that as we get stuck in endless careerism.
What’s the one book that you’d recommend to someone who wants to better understand the Arab world today?
“Misquoting Mohammad” by Jonathan Brown. It covers politics, history and theology, so it provides a good overview of how Islam, as a religion, has evolved over time and interacted with different political environments. A big focus of the book is on Islam’s encounter with modernity, and it helps challenge a lot of the Western-centric assumptions about the role of religion in public life.
What developments in the Middle East are you most excited about right now?
To be honest, very little. Watching Tunisia’s evolution gives me some optimism, though excitement is probably not the right word. Here is a country where Islamists and secularists might hate each other, but they’ve agreed to hate each other within the democratic process. The goal is not to get the other person to agree with you and come to your side; it’s to accept and respect those differences peacefully. Tunisia is an example of what that might look like in practice.
One other thing that gave me a brief jolt of optimism was the images coming from Turkey during the failed coup attempt in July. Yes, [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian in cracking down on his opponents, but in that moment — and that moment will matter for the foreseeable future — ordinary Turks took to the street to oppose a military coup. You had people who were unarmed facing off against tanks, and usually in the Middle East, people-power doesn’t work. This was one of the only times in recent years where the tanks didn’t win out. That, to me, was a powerful moment to watch.
Given the negative outlook, where do you find the motivation to continue your research?
What keeps it interesting for me is that I like to challenge myself in my own research. In my new book, “Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World,” it started out as one thing and ended up as something else, because through the process of research and writing, I found my own ideas evolving and even changing in ways that I was slightly uncomfortable with. Some of them are controversial, not just to other people, but also to me. But as a researcher, you have to be faithful to your findings, even if you’re not super-happy with them. But that’s also exciting, because it feels like I haven’t been stationary in my own work and that I’ve evolved based on what I’ve seen in the region and spending time in the field. I hope that in the coming years, my views will continue to evolve, and I’ll be challenged by world events that will force me and others to reassess opinions.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish someone told me about taking work-life balance more seriously. Really, for the past 10 years, I’ve constantly had an overarching, almost all-consuming project to worry about. First was my Ph.D. dissertation, then it was my first book, then it was my second book. There wasn’t much of a gap between any of them. That’s 10 years where, in the back of my mind, I’ve been like, “I’ve gotta be working on this.” I wish, in retrospect, I had spent more time thinking about my priorities, finding that balance and having more perspective about what’s ultimately important. You worry sometimes that your work almost becomes a vehicle for contentment. Yes, that’s a part of what makes us happy, but when it’s so intertwined with your identity it’s not always super-healthy.
What does a perfect day look like to you?
I love exploring new beaches. So being in front of the water, having a really good book, taking a nap and not worrying about work. Presumably, I wouldn’t be there all by myself, but with friends. And if I’m in D.C., I really enjoy binge-watching my favorite TV shows for, like, five hours straight and totally diving into a character-driven series.
What accomplishment are you most proud of?
My new book is probably what I’m most proud of, because in some ways, it’s more personal. Every day, I grappled with the ideas, and I wasn’t really sure what the end product was going to be. There was a lot of uncertainty: Would I be able to do this, given that the vision in the beginning wasn’t as clear? But there came a point where I was able to let it go and to be happy with it. It may not be perfect, but in this moment, it’s perfect for me and I’m ready to have other people read it and, hopefully, enjoy it.
Tag: Leadership
Being a Great Leader Means Being in Service to Others
It’s hard to decipher a through-line in Shaifali Puri’s 13-year career that spans the New York State Attorney General’s Office, the Empire State Development Corporation, the nonprofit Scientists Without Borders and the Nike Foundation. But look a little deeper and you’ll see that Puri has the spark of spontaneity that allows her to leap at opportunities and a core mission to improve people’s lives. Currently a visiting scholar at New York University’s journalism school, Puri is researching how technology can be harnessed to benefit the developing world. She spoke to NationSwell about the lessons she’s learned from her eclectic career.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
When I got hired at Fortune (a Time Inc. magazine), they only hired young people, and the only job you could get was to be a fact-checker. What was really great was that these kids came from [top] colleges and universities, and [the company started] them all at the bottom of the totem pole, in a job that required you to do what felt like menial work. Later, when I got a federal clerkship after law school, I was incredibly proud of myself. On day one, when the judge came into the chambers and said hello, she said she had a very important lesson to impart: the proper way to staple memos in her chambers, which was at a 45-degree angle in the top left-hand corner. Some people might say that’s crazy. But I’m grateful for having had those jobs — where you had to pay immense attention to detail — because so much of our focus today is on leadership. But it’s hard to be a great leader unless you also know how to be great at not being the leader, and how to be great in service to others in the organization.
What’s on your nightstand?
I usually have one fiction and one non-fiction book going at all times. My fiction book is called “The Flamethrowers,” by Rachel Kushner. The nonfiction book I just started is called “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires,” Tim Wu’s book on net neutrality.
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What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
Worry less about the title and much more about the skills map. What are you learning in each job? Sometimes in my career, it was learning how to be a deputy, how to manage big projects, how to be a boss. You’ll get a career in which you’re doing meaningful work. It’ll be eclectic enough to expose you to many different things, and you’ll get to learn a variety of skill sets so you can figure out which ones you truly want to run with. I wasn’t smart enough or didn’t have the foresight to plan out my career, but looking over my shoulder, I’m glad that without knowing what I was doing, I was jumping at opportunities that had something to teach me, more than I was worrying about a particular industry. Ultimately, by total chance, I think it served me better than had I tried to plan my way here.
What’s your perfect day?
One that has a lot of serendipity in it. Something that I love but don’t do enough is ramble around New York. [So I’d] get up when the mood strikes (I’m usually a pretty early riser), have that cup of coffee, read The New York Times totally unrushed and head out with my boyfriend in tow to leisurely see where the day takes us. It might involve museums, the park, just staring at the architecture through Chelsea or the West Village, checking out what endlessly new thing is happening in the Lower East Side or going through Chinatown (which is one of my favorite parts of New York). Just walking and taking it in without a plan, ending at one of my favorite, not-overrun, neighborhood West Village restaurants. Then, a perfect evening stroll back home. When I forget why I love this city, a good walk always reminds me.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I want to preface this by saying, I’ve been very lucky because I have been very privileged. I did not have to worry about financial circumstances when I came out of college. The thing I feel most proud of isn’t any individual accomplishment. I’ve really tried to build a career of purpose. When I went to Scientists Without Borders, I didn’t know the field. The New York Academy of Sciences took a chance on me, and I’m really proud of having built something. It was like being a tech startup CEO: taking a germ of an idea to a full organization. I made a lot of mistakes, and it wasn’t always clear we were going to have the funding. It felt really important to me, because the promise of what the organization could achieve: eradicating global poverty, trying to bring science and technology resources to solve the challenges of the world’s poorest people. So I’m really proud that, in the face of a tremendous amount of terror and self-doubt, I persevered. That’s been something I’ve tried to do in my career, which is take on things that have scared me and do it anyway.
What don’t most people know about you?
I was, at some point, a certified bartender. I got my certificate in college. I figured if you ever needed a fun back-up career, that was it.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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Headlines Focus on Environmental Disasters. But the Real Story Is How Renewable Energy Is Effectively Reducing Emissions
In the early 1970s, as part of an internship with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Frances Beinecke spent a summer developing land use policies in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. That experience jumpstarted a long career of environmental advocacy that culminated in Beinecke becoming NRDC’s executive director in 1998 and its president in 2006. During her tenure, she built the organization into a powerhouse of lawyers and scientists that vocally advocated for green policies and forged connections with global organizations in China and India. From her office in midtown Manhattan, Beinecke, now retired, reflected on her career and conservation with NationSwell.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given on leadership?
The most important thing that I have learned is that it’s not about you. It’s about the other people you’re working with and motivating them to reach the result. When I was at NRDC (and I was there for a very long time), being able to be on boards in other organizations and really watch other people operate, to see how other people provided leadership and how other organizations worked, was absolutely essential to doing the best job that I could do at NRDC.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Right now I’m reading Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac,” because I happen to be going out to give a talk in Wisconsin. In the early 80s, I had an opportunity to visit the shack that Leopold wrote about in the book, and I wanted to relive that experience in preparation for this talk. It’s interesting because Leopold was one of the early people to work on restoration of ecosystems. He had his old farm that had been exhausted by homesteaders, and he replanted the trees and restored the soil. A lot of what people are focusing on now is how do you restore these depleted ecosystems? How do you store carbon? So, it’s inspiring to read that.
This other book I’m reading is called “Braiding Sweetgrass,” also by an ecologist: Robin Wall Kimmerer. I recently went to Montana and visited this very exciting project called the American Prairie Reserve, where they’re trying to restore 3 million acres of prairie in eastern Montana right where Lewis and Clark took their Corps of Discovery through the Missouri River. One of the interesting things is all these lands were, of course, Native American lands. What our relationship is with that heritage is one that I felt I wasn’t thinking about enough. This is a book by a Native American ecologist about that relationship with the land.
What innovations in your field are you particularly excited about?
I’ve been working on climate for almost 30 years. In the early days — for the first 20 years, anyway — we talked about solutions, but it was hard to see how to put them in place. One of the things that has happened in the last three to five years is this very rapid deployment of renewable energy, particularly wind and, more recently, solar. Policies have been put in place to deploy it, and there’s been a drop in price. I get excited when I go around and I see wind farms or solar panels. If you go around the United States, you can see the difference in state policies by going across a border. Recently, I was in New York and we crossed over to western Massachusetts. There were a dozen wind turbines and every barn had solar panels — because they put these policies in place to make it very appealing for people to make the investment.
What do you wish someone had told you at the beginning of your career?
If you start in this line of work, you start very idealistically. You have hopes and you want to put solutions in place. One of the things that is very hard to understand is why doesn’t everybody think this way? If you’re very mission based, it’s so obvious. To be effective, it’s important to try to understand why people think differently. You can only be effective in advancing a solution if you understand why someone has a different perspective: their priorities are different. I didn’t understand that.
What inspires you?
[I]f you look back year-to-year, it’s hard to see progress. But if you look back 10 years, the progress is really significant. We used to say green jobs; now we can see green jobs. We used to hope we would have a strategy that would drive down emissions, but emissions are being driven down. We wondered if China would ever get on board to be a player on climate change, because they were going to be the largest emitter. Well, they are the largest emitter, but they’ve also agreed to capping coal at a certain point and they’re unleashing clean energy. One thing in the environmental sector that’s very different than the private sector is that the time frames are much more long-term.
How do you inspire others?
In the beginning, in the 90s, when we talked about climate change, we talked about it as a global problem, and then over time, we realized we had to break it down into a local problem. There was a lot of discussion about climate change in terms of how many parts per million or degrees in the atmosphere…Most people respond to things that are personal to them. That’s the way most people behave — if they’re concerned about their family’s health, their community’s well-being or what they are experiencing in their own lives. Being able to document that, tell the story and engage people in how things are happening in their community, rather than in abstract that the whole planet is heating up, provides a level of engagement that we never had before.
What’s your idea of a perfect day?
To spend some of it outside. I’m fortunate enough to have a dog who requires that on a daily basis, because, for me, being inspired by and connected to nature is essential to doing my work. And then, I like to feel during the course of the day that somehow I’ve been successful in either opening a dialogue or advancing a solution.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
I have two adorable grandchildren. They’re nearly a year old, twins. The thing about that’s wonderful [about them], it gives you a time reference. My father is 102 years old. He was born in 1914. They were born in 2015. If they live long as he has, it’ll be 2117. Can you imagine? The thing about that is, that gives you a frame of reference for what you’re trying to accomplish. When we’re talking about climate change and 50 or 100 year increments, we know people who will be there then. It personalizes it in a much more significant way. It gives you even more motivation.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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Forget Clickbait. This Is How Technology Improves News Reporting
Steve Grove, a onetime print reporter at the Boston Globe and a broadcast journalist for ABC News, joined YouTube and helped the homemade video site influence world events (becoming a platform for investigative video reportage like Sen. George Allen using the obscure racial insult “macaca” and a way to mobilize millions, such as President Obama and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” music video). Today, as head of Google’s News Lab, he’s enthused about virtual reality and big data becoming an integral part of storytelling. NationSwell spoke to Grove from Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters about the future of newsrooms.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
[T]o make it something that you practice, not something that you are. I tell my team at Google all the time, “You’re all leaders.” What I mean by that (this comes from some books I’ve read, a few classes I’ve taken and also my own experience) is leadership is helping a group that is facing a challenge grapple with it in an honest and productive way. It’s really getting to the root of what a problem is, engaging in various interventions or techniques to really get to the core issue they’re trying to solve. Great leaders are able to exercise leadership, not just embody it.
What’s on your nightstand?
I just finished a book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” which is about the modern economy and how technology has actually, in some ways, made us more distant from the actual work-product. The guy who wrote it was a motorcycle mechanic, and he talks about the power of working with your hands and how the trades are actually a really active way to use your mind and develop yourself. It’s not just an argument for, hey, you need to go start your own mechanic shop, but that you should understand how the things you own work.
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
There are all kinds of new storytelling devices that are making journalism and frontiers really hopeful. While getting traffic to your site is a challenge and thinking about catchy titles or even clickbait is part of a conversation, deeper, more immersive storytelling is even more exciting and differentiates your site or broadcast. Virtual reality’s a part of that. You’re not just clicking and leaving: you dive into it. But another really interesting development (we’re not quite there yet) is journalism via drones. It’s really powerful for things like crisis response… and climate journalism — looking at ways different ecosystems have changed and are changing from above. It’s just a totally new perspective. There’s lots of challenges to figure out there ethically and technologically, but that’s exciting.
Data journalism itself is probably one of the biggest frontiers for journalism right now. It takes a massive amount of computing power that we now have, the extraordinary access to data sets we didn’t have before and a shift of how newsrooms think about telling stories. We, of course, work on Google data in that space, but ProPublica, FiveThirtyEight, The UpShot, Vox — they’re all really innovative data-driven journalism. That’s one of the things we’re betting big on: that data journalism has a huge potential for making readers around the world smarter about topics they’re discovering. Newsrooms are beginning to understand there’s never been a better time to be a storyteller, given the tools they have.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish somebody had told me to lead with passion and manage with consistency. A lot of leaders are very good at one, but not the other. They can crisply manage a spreadsheet, a meeting schedule, a document and metrics tracker, but they don’t have the vision or the passion to lead an organization. Other leaders give the inspiration and purpose. That’s great, but the management piece falls off a little bit, because it’s harder for them to operationally develop things. Most leaders need to have both. I wish someone had defined that for me. I came into my work with the former — the passion and excitement — and I don’t think I was incapable of the latter, but I didn’t know when to toggle between the two.
What inspires you?
What’s most inspiring to me about my time at Google is amplifying stories or voices that wouldn’t have otherwise been heard. You look at YouTube as a platform for that, or the Internet in general as a chance to discover stories that wouldn’t have otherwise made it into our conversations — that’s a really powerful additive element of technology in media. Whether that’s citizen-captured videos from streets of the Arab Spring or whether that’s someone “coming out” to their community on a blog or whether that’s a kid in his bedroom in Philly or a mom in her house in Montana getting to ask the President a question in a Google+ Hangout, there’s all kinds of elements that plays itself out.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I feel very fortunate to have had some amazing experiences at Google. But if I had to pick something I was most proud of, I might go back to before I was a journalist, in my early twenties, when I spent about half a year in India. I just sort of went; I didn’t know anybody there. I bought a plane ticket and landed in Bombay [now Mumbai]. I wanted to do something that went beyond being a tourist, but I didn’t know what. I ended up finding the opportunity to work for an organization that did interventions in small rural Indian towns to try to get 30,000 people above the poverty line. They would help these people grow mango forests or cross-breed cows to create their own dairies. I [wrote] profiles of the people who this group was helping. I got to spend two months in rural villages, finding my own translators, talking to different people who were in these situations. It wasn’t the best journalism or work I’d ever done, but early in my career, it was a really transformative experience.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Home page photo courtesy of Steve Grove.
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How Star Trek Is Inspiring Diversity in the Workplace
The recent tech boom inaugurated an age of invention, but NationSwell Council member Greg Gunn, who founded his own education technology software startup, has been “frustrated” by the sector’s lack of diversity. For the last five years, he had an open-door policy of passing on advice to anyone who asked, but he recently formalized his informal professional coaching into Lingo Ventures, systematizing his advice, researching how programmers enter their chosen field and investing in platforms that connect diverse employees with tech companies.
Across a round dining room table on the first floor of his Brooklyn brownstone, NationSwell spoke to Gunn about how technology is changing our lives, where it falls short and how the future might be different.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
The power of the leader is to provide stability, or even just the feeling of it. When the boss comes in, things don’t go into freak-out [mode], but calm down. There’s the importance of the boss coming in every day with positivity. If you’re freaking out, everybody around you feels the freak-out 10 times as much. So, it’s being conscious, grounding yourself and coming in with positivity and stability every day, no matter how tough things are.
What’s on your nightstand?
I draw a lot of my inspiration from science fiction. I’ve been reading “The Three-Body Problem” series. It’s a science-fiction trilogy by the most award-winning science fiction author in China, Liu Cixin. Only two of the books have come out in English, so [I’m] waiting for the third one. It…starts in the Cultural Revolution in China and ends up in the future in space. It’s got these powerful ideas of how society responds to stability and chaos and how it survives those cycles. Some of the strengths you build during a period of great stability can become not-strengths or liabilities in a moment of chaos, and I’m really thinking of it right now in terms of economic change that our society is going through. Everybody’s worrying what’s happening to the American economy. Is it stable? How do we really know? And I think about it even more in terms of the impact of technology on the economy, which is already starting have profound changes, but people aren’t predicting how profound those changes are going to be. How does our way of thinking about work evolve in the face of that?
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
The most important educational technology today is YouTube, because any time you need to learn something — whether it’s a small thing or a big thing — there are resources out there. Not only can you learn whatever skill it is, but there are 100 different ways out there that people [acquired] it, and you can find the one that actually works for your brain. I don’t know if democratizing is the right word, but that literally makes the best personalized education experience out there and free for everybody.
People talk a lot about Khan Academy, which I think is just a subset of the bigger phenomenon of people sharing how they learn things. More and more learning content is coming out of the universities, so things like EdX, Coursera. The edge of innovation right now is we’ve gone through this great wave of getting a whole bunch of content out there, and now that it’s all out there, we’re figuring out: Where do I actually need human touch again to get the optimal learning experience? How do I bring human tutors, teaching, peer support and coaching back into that? Now we’re remembering what we’ve always known: the content itself motivates to a degree, but having a human really motivates you a lot more.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
One thing that I started to learn and I think I’m still learning now is to be more open about what you’re working on. I’ve always been a perfectionist and a bit afraid to share what I’m working on or what I’m thinking about until it’s a finished product, especially with what I’m trying to do with Lingo Ventures. I think it’s important that I’m talking to more people, so that I’m both sharing and learning at the same time. It’s taking that personal risk to put the half-baked idea out there so that I can bake it with others.
How do you try to inspire others?
For my coworkers, in the work we do, part of which is diversity related, it’s easy to look at what’s happening in Silicon Valley and be really frustrated. So a big part of the work is how to flip that script. If this thing is wrong, where can we get value to get past it? If I’m working with an entrepreneur of color who feels like they’re constantly at a disadvantage in fundraising, part of the work is figuring out how do we turn those things that you believe are being perceived as disadvantages into things that are competitive for you. It’s not easy work, but you’ve chosen the problem because it’s a hard problem.
What’s your perfect day?
Have breakfast with my son and take him to school. Go to the white board with two or three entrepreneurs. Write a piece on something I’ve been thinking about. Get my team unblocked on whatever the organization needs that day. Then spend the rest of the day doing art: drawing, sculpting, whatever.
What don’t most people know about you that they should?
Star Trek is the vision that guides almost all of my work; it always has. My vision of what I want the future to look like and my companies to look like is really guided by the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in Next Generation: the way people interact, the diversity, the values, the goals, the technology. What would Captain Picard do? It sounds geeky but it really shapes what inspires me and what I want my workplace to look like.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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This Professional Risk-Taker Explains Why Exceptional Leaders Aren’t Always Confident with Their Decisions
In the early aughts, Annie Duke was an unbeatable poker player. At the very first World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions in 2004, she brought home the trophy and a $2 million pot. Later, in 2012, she turned her gambling wins into a speaking business, offering classes to Wall Street traders on risky decision-making and what they could learn from her card-playing successes and mistakes. Once that business became self-sustaining, she folded her cards and largely retired from the game to focus on education, her real passion. Drawing on what she’d learned from volunteering for an after-school program in Northern California and the latest research in behavioral economics, she founded How I Decide, a nonprofit that focuses on developing students’ critical thinking and socio-emotional skills. NationSwell spoke with Duke by phone about the topic she knows best: decision-making, its emotions, risks and rewards.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
People believe that to be a good leader, you have to be incredibly confident. They tend to equate confidence with this idea that you’re 100 percent sure about your decisions and that it’s an unwillingness to admit failure. In order to really effectively lead, you have to allow people to understand that confidence is not that. Admitting when you’ve made a mistake or letting people know that you’re not 100 percent sure of every decision is actually a better way to lead. A lot of people I admire have set a great example by saying, “I just wanted to let you know that I just made this really big mistake, and I thought I’d share it with you because I learned from it.”
What innovations in your field are you most excited about right now?
In the world of behavioral economics, there’s a big push recently towards actually applying the research in the field to improving people’s lives in the real world. You can really see this with [Stanford psychologist] Carol Dweck, who is very vocal in saying that she felt like she was sort of locked in a box doing her research for a long time, and now, she’s actually bringing that work to the populations that really need it. With behavioral economics, there was a long period of time where people were saying, “Oh, isn’t this interesting? People are very irrational.” And now that it’s starting to be a focus on, okay, that’s true, but how can we actually improve people’s lives through understanding what we know and trying to figure out real-world strategies that would improve decision-making?
What’s on your nightstand?
Right now, a bunch of stuff. I’m reading “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction” [by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner] and “The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and Investing” by Michael Mauboussin. I just finished “Kluge: the Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind,” which is by Gary Marcus, and “Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation” [by Gabriele Oettingen], which is fantastic look at mental contrasting.
What do you wish someone had told you when you started this job?
I wish when I first started out as an adult, I had a broader view of what success looked like. I think that I had a super-narrow view of what it meant to be successful, and I wish that there was a more complete view of success, so it also included emotional success: what it means to really be happy or feel fulfilled. I think that there’s a big push right now around mindfulness, which is really wonderful, because I think that it does treat the person as a whole. When I was growing up, success meant you went to this school and you had this kind of job. I think that when I was younger, I was sort of judgmental about that. Like when I met someone, one of the first questions I asked was, “What school did you got to?” As if that matters. I look at people who didn’t take that particular path, and many of them are incredibly successful individuals. But also I think that taught me to be incredibly judgmental of myself, when I felt like I wasn’t being successful or following whatever path I thought I wanted.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
My children. I don’t think that there’s a close second to that.
What inspires you?
As far as poker is concerned, the inspiration was definitely my brother. He was already doing it, and he’s largely responsible for the success that I had, because without his mentorship, I don’t think that it would have happened. Going into the more academic side of things and decision-making, my children really inspired me to work in that [field]. Another person that inspired me is my paternal grandfather, who emigrated from Eastern Europe [and only] graduated from sixth grade, and I went to two Ivy League schools — the journey you can take from getting here not even speaking English to just two generations later. If you get somebody an education, it really removes limitations from their life. I appreciate the arc that happened in my family and how quickly that changed occurred through education.
How do you try to inspire others?
I don’t think about that. I try to focus on doing the stuff that I do, which is what really brings me a lot of happiness. And if someone is inspired by that, that’s great. Obviously, when I’m going and giving speeches, I’m hoping to inspire people to make changes in the way they think. The stuff that we do with kids is to inspire them to continue their education and become better thinkers and all of those things. But me personally, I think if I were really focused on that, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do very well. Because you have to live within yourself and the moment to be effective.
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This interview has been edited and condensed.
How Do You Truly Transform Education in America? Teach This Subject in Grammar Schools
Nothing stops Mike Erwin. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., he enlisted and served in the Army for three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s athletically fit — an endurance runner who’s finished 12 ultra-marathons — and mentally sharp — once a graduate student in psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who later taught at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He founded Team Red, White & Blue, a nonprofit consisting of 96,500 members in 178 chapters worldwide that enrich veterans’ lives by connecting them to their community through physical activity.
Lately, Erwin has focused on a very unique area than his military pedigree would suggest, but it’s one he believes is vital to the country’s future: How do you teach a second-grader about leadership?
It’s a question Erwin and several elementary school teachers in upstate New York have been contemplating over the past year as part of his latest venture, The Positivity Project. Originally sparked at a discussion group at West Point and later available only as a Facebook page, The Positivity Project now aims to be the defining curriculum for character education in America’s grade schools. (Talks are underway to see it in more than 20 schools across the country by next year.) Amid all the intense pressure to score highly on standardized tests and meet Common Core standards, Erwin is focusing on how public education can mold better citizens.
“I think a lot of people are scared right now. They see the levels of divisiveness. Just read the comments on Facebook threads on an article, they’re angry and negative,” Erwin says. “A lot of parents are looking at that and seeing we have got to create a better society for our children and how they interact with each other.”
Rooted in the concepts of positive psychology — a rigorous, if somewhat new, field of inquiry examining the conditions for happiness — Erwin and the teachers at Morgan Road Elementary School in the Liverpool, N.Y., school district are developing lesson plans based on the two dozen different character strengths at the core of the field, concepts like creativity, love, bravery, teamwork and forgiveness. For 10 to 15 minutes a day, four days a week, the teachings are a simple way to spark discussion in the classroom, a dialogue that’s continued outside of the school grounds via The Positivity Project’s savvy use of social media.
So how does The Positivity Project teach character? The short answer, the teachers say, is a subtle distinction in instruction: Don’t tell kids about behaviors — what they should be doing — and help them realize how their actions affect other people and their own identity — the why behind the behavior. That’s because, when it comes to character, a child is more likely to be respectful if he’s given models of courteous individuals (real or fictional) than if a teacher barks, “Be polite!”
At least that’s how second-grade teacher Amy Figger feels. Before The Positivity Project reinvigorated the school’s strategy for character education, several teachers had dropped it from their day, unwilling to sacrifice 15 minutes that could be used for test-prep skills, she says. But Figger never wavered. “This isn’t about elementary school; this is about something lifelong,” she says.
In her Morgan Road classroom, where she team-teaches 46 students with her colleague Marc Herron, another Positivity Project proponent, she says the focus on 24 character strengths gives them a way to pinpoint unique qualities in each 7-year-old student. “To be a leader, you have these strengths inside of you. Tap into them. And if something’s not your strength, surround yourself with other people to get something done,” Figger says. “You’re not teaching or telling, we’re saying you already have this inside of you. You only need to recognize it.”
Herron notes that character lessons can also help to create a conducive learning environment. Character strengths like curiosity come up in science lessons, and perseverance is noted after hard math problems. With the same lessons taught throughout the school, there’s a stronger sense of community. “We have a common language to use,” Herron says. Sometimes, the character strengths even make their way into faculty meetings, as the educators discuss a student’s progress or their own educational challenges.
Outside Morgan Road Elementary, clinical research seems to give credence to the effect of The Positivity Project on student behavior. Christopher J. Bryan, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, concluded that kids between three and six years old were up to 29 percent more likely to assist with a task when they were asked to “be a helper,” compared to children who were asked simply “to help.” Same went for cheating, which was reduced by half when youngsters were told, “Please don’t be a cheater,” compared to the other group, told, “Please don’t cheat.” (Younger children learn more from nouns than verbs.)
A similar study by Joan E. Grusec and Erica Redler, psychologists at the University of Toronto, found that praise was better reinforced when it was tied to a fuller sense of self, rather than an isolated behavior. In an experiment, after giving marbles to other children, some kids were told “it was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” Others heard: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.” When researchers returned weeks later and gave the children another chance to share, those in the latter group was more generous because they felt their actions were essential to being a “nice and helpful person.”
Taken as a whole, the findings suggest that positive reinforcement is not just working Pavlovian tricks on kids. Instead, as soon as children begin to recognize their actions are intrinsically related to who they are, they begin to act with a clearer moral compass.
Erwin steeped himself in this research as a graduate student at the University of Michigan under one of positive psychology’s co-founders, Dr. Chris Peterson, the co-author (along with Martin Seligman) of the influential text “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification.” As a professor at West Point teaching about leadership, Erwin took heart in Peterson’s fundamental idea, “other people matter,” and invited him to speak to his students. But three weeks before the engagement, Peterson died of a heart attack.
Erwin grappled with how to memorialize Peterson’s legacy as he got Team Red, White & Blue — a organization Peterson inspired Erwin to create — up and running, On the side, he started a Facebook page that collected inspirational quotes on character strengths, drawing from the archives of Peterson’s research into how these ideals persisted back to ancient times: Plato, Aristotle, Sun Tsu and Lao Tsu. In March 2015, Herron, an old buddy, reached out to Erwin about the social media account, telling Erwin he loved sharing the quotes with his second graders. After more conversation about how the ideas could translate for young, The Positivity Project began.
Fitting with the times, Erwin’s curriculum has a special focus on technology and social media. Each classroom has a Twitter feed, where the teacher posts quotes that reinforce discussion and model good behavior online. Erwin concedes this focus is also a convenient marketing tool, spreading The Positivity Project’s message across the Internet. But his intentions are deeper. “We’re not very mature in how we [as a society] use our social media and technology. All this change has been thrust upon us so rapidly,” he says. “We need to make sure that we’re talking to our kids about being good people and about their strengths. Before you hit send on something or repost something or text something, okay, am I stopping to think what this is going to do to somebody?”
It all goes back to Peterson’s original message: Have I remembered that other people matter?