What's Important: Finding Your Truth…
Introduction
Thank you for that warm welcome. I have an interest in gutsy beginnings like Olin's.
I know it doesn't seem possible to you, but I was born 10 weeks premature weighing only one and a half pounds. Since I wasn't born yesterday, I wasn't expected to live. The doctors told my mother every few hours things were “touch and go.” There were a couple of things the doctors couldn't explain that might of worked to my favor. Unlike most preemies who can't make noise because the larynx is one of the last things to develop and don't eat well because the sucking function is late to develop, I was hungry and yelling like crazy about it.
It's an article of faith in my family that those two things have never changed. I left the incubator and hospital 10 weeks later, weighing five pounds. There was a plaque at that hospital for a long time saying I was the smallest baby born there to survive.
I've always believed that my unusual entry (and my fight to stay) set me apart and gave me a sense that I was special and put here on this earth for a reason – I believe each one of us is. I have often considered that that my early impatience and perseverance were inborn traits that have served me well.
History
While I was looking forward to talking to you today, I hadn't realized what a challenge it would be to translate my life and choices into a philosophy of “what's important.” I say this because I think if you are to achieve a successful life there is no substitute for hard work and persistence, although a little luck never hurts.
My career has been divided into work for four kinds of institutions. I've worked for the federal government, corporations, a university, and started and run the non-profit organization, StandardsWork. I did all this before I decided to go to Iraq – a war zone –to help rebuild the country's education system. This has made for a diverse, challenging and unpredictable set of experiences.
I assure you that at 17 or 18 years of age, in my senior year of high school, I could not have imagined the diversity of my assignments or that underneath all of them were some important philosophical inter-connections. As a teenager all I knew was that I wanted to do something that “made a difference for people” and I wanted to make the world a better place – in that vague way that all young people have for wanting to fix things that the prior generations appear to have messed up.
I grew up in a family with high-expectations. Both of my parents had advanced degrees, however my mother's educational pedigree was especially unique. She had been born in a little bitty town in Texas and at age 14 she went off to study at Rice University. At 18 she went to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, and by 20 she had earned a master's degree from Columbia University. After she graduated, she was expected to return to her little hometown and teach school because she wasn't married. She didn't really challenge this idea but she didn't like it. Thanks to my mother, by the time I was 11 I knew I was going to have lots of choices and I was going to make them!
Despite my lineage and ambition, I was an average student. I just had every educational advantage. My parents were political activists and they expected us to have a point of view and defend it. I was well into adulthood before I realized what an important gift this was.
During childhood, my parents encouraged word games at dinner to build vocabulary. We wanted mostly to stump my parents, but the idea was to learn to appreciate words and to use them correctly. One night someone, I don't remember whether it was my brother, sister or me, brought the word serendipity to the table. The dictionary defines the word as the faculty for finding desirable things by accident, but I remember my parents talking about serendipity as being prepared to take advantage of a good thing when it presents itself .
I think this is a concept encouraged at Olin where the curriculum guides say (among other things) that students are expected to display an ability to identify and respond to opportunities. The notion here is that everything that happens is not planned. Some of your best opportunities will come by accident. Will you have enough skill, insight, and courage (also called preparation) to take advantage of being in the right place at the right time?
I think it's fair to say my life has been opportunistic. I've been able to connect the things I've learned and the people I've worked with to the next thing I wanted to do. This will become clearer as I tell my story.
Before you can take advantage of unexpected opportunities you need a skill and knowledge base. If you want to legitimately argue for a different approach or a new way of thinking, you need to know what the “conventional wisdom” is and why it is the prevailing view. This is an especially valuable lesson for young people who often want to be in charge before they know why things are set up in a certain way. Sometimes there is actually a good reason for the prevailing viewpoint. It is also a keystone of education reformers that you must first know things before you can think critically about them.
Here were the first lessons I learned about getting a job out of college:
- You had to have the essential workplace skills for your tasks.
- You had to be able to define what you wanted to do and what you didn't want to do.
- You had to accept that you would have to do many of the things you didn't want to do.
- If you worked hard, people would notice and you'd have to do less of what you didn't want to do over time.
For my first post-college job I had to learn to type. I'd avoided this skill for fear, that as a woman, it would limit my opportunities. On the first day, my new bosses asked me to drop checks into an automatic endorsing machine (this was worse than typing). All day that's all I did. Tears rolled down my cheeks on and off my face. I thought I'd die. I was humiliated, but I did it and in subsequent days I'd hurry to get it done and volunteer for other things. Soon I was getting better assignments, but I never forgot how indignant I felt. I knew once and for all that I couldn't use my time doing mindless things, even if someone was willing to pay me for it! I have never understood people who were willing to work their prescribed amount of time and watch the clock to leave the office as though their lives were on hold until the workday ended. You will meet people like this, but I hope you never hire one of them.
In a series of early jobs, while I wasn't totally content that the tasks I managed were all I was capable of doing, I dug in, fine-tuned my skills and learned all I could about the broader context of the work. As a result, I developed a broad skill base. I learned how the media worked, how issues developed, how to articulate a point of view, how to build alliances, how to develop an action plan and define the steps that had to be taken to engage the intended audience in an action. You would call these my skill base for a career in public affairs.
Public affairs is a combination of functions that include working with the media, government and community leaders, and other external stakeholders of an organization. What I liked about this role was working at the intersection where public policy and real people living their day-to-day lives actually meet. At this place people either understand their role and what action they must take, or no change occurs. This is often called creating “ownership.” This is especially important in a democracy, where leaders are supposed to follow their constituents. I was pretty good at translating policy and understanding how to help ordinary people get where they wanted to go.
Over a 14-year period I did a lot of different things and moved a lot. To understand what motivated me, here's a quick review of what I did.
I worked for President Nixon in the White House – first in personnel and then on the White House news summary staff. Before everyone had VCRs, and word-processors, much less the Internet, we worked six days a week digesting print and TV news into 24 page summaries. We worked until midnight on alternating days to put an original document on the President's desk every morning – no matter where he was in the world. I lived through the embarrassment of Watergate and the fact that a lot of the important people I knew had done improper things and ruined their careers.
After working with President Nixon I thought I wanted something a lot less controversial and was happy to take a position in the newly established U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. My job was to expand a new children's environmental program designed “to keep America beautiful” – a campaign to engage children in picking up litter and tin cans. I wanted to take the program in a new direction that encouraged a more enduring good and focused teachers and students on environmental science, and noise abatement exercises for the classroom. This was my first experience building a new mission from scratch. I would learn over time that building a new enterprise requires a special blend of persistence and risk-taking that isn't for everyone, but was right for me. People who want all the rules and systems laid out are likely to be uncomfortable in this kind of uncharted arena. You probably know this from being at Olin.
During my first few months on the job, the first environmental health crisis that linked a toxic chemical to a human health hazard burst into the news. I was asked to serve as the press officer on an interagency task force at EPA that was going to analyze, report, and recommend regulation of this hazardous substance. I was at the center of this worldwide news story for two years. I loved the work, but not the bureaucracy, which frankly drove me crazy. Once the standard was promulgated, I was ready to move on. As it happened, my boss at the EPA accepted a job in the Washington office of a Fortune 50 chemical company, Union Carbide. She hired me as her deputy not to continue my work on chemical issues, but to explain how this industrial company used gas products that were growing precious and scarce in the international energy crisis.
After a few years of being shut out of corporate decisions because I was in the Washington office, I decided I needed corporate headquarters experience, which is why I move here to Boston to join Cabot Corp. Cabot was very similar to Carbide, but smaller. Just as Cabot was preparing to celebrate its 100th birthday year, I was hired to create their first ever centralized corporate communications department. The company had many different business divisions with offices in over 20 countries. There was only one woman in senior management. I stayed at this company seven years and experienced enormous professional growth. In the last two years, the company was dealing with an economic downturn and restructured twice. I was a good soldier the first time, but the second time I had little to say about whom, in my department, would be let go so I quit.
It took some courage to do this, but working in the back of my mind was this notion that while I was on the corporate fast track, making a lot of money, I didn't have much control over the substance of my work and I wasn't enjoying what I was doing any more. It just didn't seem important, or valuable. I didn't know then what research tells us now about jobs and work life, but it turns out, increasing income doesn't (over the long term) make you happier.
At this time, in my story, the MegaBucks lottery had just started in Massachusetts. It was only once a week at the beginning and EVERYONE was swept up in the excitement. Each time someone won, whether it was a house painter or hairdresser, the winner would say, “I'm thrilled with the money, but I love my job.”
My colleagues and I who were going through this dark period would laugh and say, “Not me! If I win I'm going to…” and then weekly each of us would fantasize about what we would do. I started thinking seriously about this and decided I wanted to be free to think about what to do next. I wanted to try my hand at writing a book. I wanted to write and publish articles and try being a consultant, which is hard to do when you're working more than 60 hours a week. All of a sudden, it occurred to me that I didn't have to win MegaBucks to do this. I just had to have the fortitude and discipline to do it.
So, I took a cabin in Maine and started working on a novel. I stayed in Maine four months. I did write and publish an article for Boston Woman magazine. I also took on a consulting assignment, but I didn't finish the novel. Taking that break was one of the best things I have ever done for myself. It gave me a chance to begin consideration of what was important to me.
What's Important
I knew right away that I was much happier when I was dealing with strategy and engaging people in implementation, rather than event planning and the sales pitch to the media. I also knew that I often supported a minority viewpoint and I needed to be in a place where doing so had value. I liked to start things from scratch that weren't weighed down by bureaucracy. When I had the chance to establish a vision, adapt to meet the market, and hang-in when the going got tough my work and life were really “singing.” Or what I now know from a new book is called “flowing.” I'll get back to this notion of “flow” shortly.
I had barely made progress on this thinking when I got a call from a former colleague – who I had worked with at EPA – Marlin Fitzwater, who had just been named Press Secretary to President Reagan. He wanted me to be his Deputy. I turned him down in three separate phone conversations, but finally I accepted.
I learned most of what I believe about leadership from Ronald Reagan and I believe (like the other steps that moved me through my life) that it was serendipitous that I was able to meet and work with him. I hadn't been a particular fan of his when I took the job, but in fairly short order I came to recognize what people admired about him. He knew what he believed in, he stuck to those convictions even when everyone else thought he was wrong and he was a warm and gentle soul with a great sense of humor. On his desk was a motto that I believe is true: There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit.
Working in the White House gives you a lot of élan. I traveled the world with the President. I went to Venice, Rome, and Moscow and to nearly every state in the nation, but I wasn't doing those things that had been emerging as important to me during that summer in Maine. So even before the election decided things, I applied for the senior public affairs position at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. I got the job, and in less than two years there I was able to rethink and rebuild the news and public affairs office that had been stuck in the 1950s. Many of the things I started are still reaping rewards for the university and my successors.
For me, what was important about Vanderbilt (besides meeting the Kerns') was it offered exactly those things I had decided were important to me. I had a broad canvas on which to paint, as faculty, alumni, students, parents of students, and even the local community, were all willing to help the guide the university to reach a new and higher profile.
In addition, and serendipitously, the Chancellor was very interested in the role of higher education in improving K-12 education, a decidedly minority position for a higher education official. This connected work I had done in education at EPA with work I had done in plant communities around the world. It was a perfect fit for me; except as much as I liked Nashville, it was the smallest place I'd ever lived and was probably too small for me to want to spend my life there. I wasn't ready to go when I got a call from now Senator Lamar Alexander, who had been named Secretary of Education in the first Bush Administration, but I knew that I should grab for the brass ring that would take me back to Washington when it presented itself. I knew would eventually want to go back to Washington and I might not have so good a chance in the future.
It became clear to me that the place of my work was nearly as important as the quality of the work. This might not be true for everyone, but it is for me. To validate this point, I should say, I turned down a move to New York City, to help the newly appointed school chief in the summer of 2003, but was immediately ready to accept the opportunity to go to Iraq when the offer came just a month or so later.
It's really key to know the unique set of conditions or preferences that are necessary for your work to thrive and your life to “flow.” In this case, I knew I would be fighting internal battles just to be heard in New York City and I didn't want to live there. Iraq offered the kind of challenge one can only dream about and yet, I was certain it would be a temporary assignment.
Now, I am going to stop giving you my chronological career path and start talking about some of the things that I believe to be true about the choices I've made. These transcend the fact that they were my choices and might offer some clues about your life. During this section, I'll reveal what I've done since my stint at the Department of Education and why.
I've been reading a new book by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman called Authentic Happiness with the subtitle: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment . I'm not a big consumer of self-help books, but there are some things in this book that I think are both interesting and relevant. The author offers some key definitions of happiness and distinguishes between pleasures and gratifications in ways that I think cause people to think more deeply about what makes them happy in an enduring way.
Here's a section from the book that sets up my point. The author, Seligman argues that momentary happiness can easily be increased by any number of uplifts, such as eating chocolate, seeing a comedy film, getting a back rub, a compliment, flowers, or buying a new blouse. Gratification is something else, which we often don't distinguish. Gratification in this definition calls on “your personal strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge.” This book is designed to help you identify your personal strengths.
Seligman says that when “well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.”
The book contains a fuller description (p. 115) and says, “Playing a close game of tennis that stretches one's ability is enjoyable, as is reading a book that reveals things in a new light, as is having a conversation that leads us to express ideas we didn't know we had. Closing a contested business deal, or any piece of work well done, is enjoyable. None of these experiences may be particularly pleasurable at the time, but afterward we think back on them and say, ‘That was fun,' and wish they would happen again. That's what's meant by gratification; it stays with you.”
The book continues (Pg. 116) by saying, gratification has these components:
- The task is challenging and requires skill
- We concentrate
- There are clear goals
- We get immediate feedback
- We have deep, effortless involvement
- There is a sense of control
- Our sense of self vanishes
- Time stops
- The resulting good feeling from these ingredients of gratification is now called “flow”
The author continues, “When we engage in pleasures – we are perhaps just consuming… the smell of perfume, the taste of raspberries, and the sensuality of a scalp rub are all high momentary delights, but they do not build anything for the future. These are not investments – nothing is accumulated. In contrast, when we are engaged (absorbed in flow), perhaps we are investing, building psychological capital for our future. Perhaps flow is the state that marks psychological growth.”
When I started applying my skills and knowledge to the reform of K-12 education I hit this feeling. I realized the power education had to empower and transform people, especially disadvantaged ones, and I was motivated to take this message far and wide to both those who wanted to listen and those who didn't. For more than a decade now, this has been “my truth” – the principle that guides my effort. For you, it will be a different combination of factors that create “flow.”
Here I go back to my original tenet that each person is put here on this earth for a reason. I wouldn't have described it this way unless I'd read Seligman's book, but I'd say that my life started “flowing” when I was contributing to something bigger than myself, utilizing the skills and knowledge I had mastered over time in an environment where I felt at home. I can't define the specifics for your flow, but I hope you'll pursue it. From my conversations with some Olin students I know some of you are experiencing it here.
I want to share just a little bit more about this with you. This from page 117:
“Flow is a frequent experience for some people, but this state visits many others only rarely, if at all. In one of the studies reported here that I think will resonate with you…researchers studied 250 high-flow and 250 low-flow teenagers. The low-flow teenagers are ‘mall kids' who hang out at malls and they watch television a lot. The high-flow kids have hobbies, they engage in sports, and they spend a lot of time on homework. On every measure of psychological well being (including self-esteem and engagement) save one, the high-flow teenagers did better. The exception is important: the high-flow kids think their low-flow peers are having more fun, and say they would rather be at the mall doing all those ‘fun' things or watching television. But while all the engagement they have is not perceived as enjoyable, it pays off later in life. Researchers theory that flow is the state that builds psychological capital that can be drawn on in the years to come.”
Living a life that “flows” or defines your truth is worth the hard work. I believe this deeply, as I've often chosen the road that is tougher going, and feel life is more rewarding for it. As you work to discover the components necessary for your life to flow, I'll share with you a few lessons learned on my path.
• A balance of ambition and perseverance is hard to achieve, but hitting this equilibrium allows you to learn all you can in the present, while never loosing sight of the future goal.
• Work hard where you are and keep one eye open for those unexpected opportunities.
• Learn yourself. Learn your truth. Don't fear changing course. Know what unique combination of factors are prerequisites for flow. For me it was location, the sense of contributing to something greater than self, and applying the skills I'd accrued over a lifetime to making public schools work better for students and teachers.
• Money and recognition aren't strong motivators over time. Remember the quote from Ronald Reagan: There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit…and I'll add: or the financial rewards or fame.
Why am I telling you this here, at the equivalent of the mid-point of my career? Because this is worth consideration when evaluating the variables that affect your life choices. I was recruited away from Vanderbilt – before I was really ready to go – it was a great job, but in weighing my choices I decided that where I wanted to be (in D.C. vs. Nashville) was a tipping point in deciding to take my skills to the U.S. Department of Education. Once there, I was able to use my skills on a subject that produced enormous gratification, really a life's passion for me. But it wasn't a plan, it was an outcome revealed through my strengths and interests and desires.
When I got to the U.S. Department of Education, Lamar Alexander was espousing for changes in education – a kind of Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for parents to organize themselves around the national goals. The plan called for using proven practices, but in fairly short order the education establishment opposed most of the steps. They demanded more money, even though spending for education continued to increase annually. They fought being held accountable for student failures, and even protested proven methods of instruction. They advocated for popular instructional fads because they thought it preserved their ‘creativity.' Reformers like me were demonized for wanting to undermine public schools by standardizing them. In fact, academic standards offer the best tools for managing learning in creative ways.
The bottom line is that student learning is the reason schools exist. If learning isn't happening, changes in practice are called for. Once I learned that a whole body of literature existed that defined what schools should be doing to improve performance and that (by and large) schools weren't using these research-driven practices, I knew what I wanted to be doing.
Because public education in the U.S. is seen as one of our birth rights, many people (really a majority of the public back in the early 1990s) did not know what distinguished a good school. They simply wanted to support the system, even if that meant closing their eyes to the plight of disadvantaged children. These children always end up with the least prepared teachers, the weakest curriculum choices, and the lowest performance. It didn't take long to figure out that the federal government was the wrong entity to be trying to mobilize the public about these things.
I left the U.S. Department of Education to start a non-profit education organization to help policymakers, school districts, schools and parents better understand what a good school looks like and to help them engage other stakeholders and implement those things.
In the beginning, we planned to operate StandardsWork on the idea that families and civic leaders needed tools and information to make decisions and take action to improve schools. We were motivated by the adage that “institutions don't change because they see the light but because they feel the heat,” as one school superintendent famously said.
The nation's governors had agreed with the first President Bush that states should adopt academic standards, but they rightly didn't want to impose them. Initial efforts were these broad, vague immeasurable standards. The governors thought teachers would know how to tailor and improve standards, but neither district administrators nor teachers knew how to do this.
Helping states, districts, and schools write clear, specific, rigorous standards and helping teachers align their lesson plans to those standards became a central part of StandardsWork's skill base. Developing a process that engaged teachers so they ended up owning the standards was another key step in our maturation. It's important to mention ‘process' here because a lot of training is empty process and much of bureaucracy is process without purpose. The trick is developing process that serves the content so that people leave with a sense of learning something concrete.
To understand how hard it is to reform a venerable institution, and how hostile the established system is to change you might think back to the movie, Stand and Deliver . In this true story, a dedicated teacher – Jaime Escalante – inspires his dropout prone students to learn calculus to build up their self-esteem and they do so well that they are accused of cheating. Years later, teachers would say that Escalante was just a gifted teacher, disregarding the fact that there is now research from the “No Excuses” schools around the country, which says ordinary teachers with high expectations for their students and competent knowledge of their subjects can make it possible for all students to learn at high levels. Escalante simply proved that persistence and dedication to a larger good was worth the resentment and resistance of his colleagues.
It's important to note that success for StandardsWork's effectiveness didn't follow a straight line either. It came after we'd made several stabs at using technology to advance best practices and recruiting national companies, which we thought would become advocates for education reform. We found our best practices database was swept away by the World Wide Web, and national organizations were more interested in warm and fuzzy approaches to education. It took a decade and a federal law to move U.S. businesses into their current role as real advocates for improved teacher and student performance. Charitable foundations disappointed us time and again as they preferred glitzier approaches to the hard slogging required to help broken schools implement proven repairs.
One of the seminal truths about new organizations is that sometimes you are right, but ahead of the market. If the market isn't ready for what you are selling that doesn't make you wrong, but you can go broke even if you are right. Simultaneously, your clients might love what you are doing but you can't make your services financially viable and this could be true whether you are a non-profit or profit-making company.
StandardsWork challenged publicly conventional wisdoms by advocating reform principles:
• Disadvantaged children should have a rigorous curriculum and well-prepared teachers so they could succeed, rather than the “dumbed down” variety they typically get.
• Phonics-based instruction helps all students read.
• All students should take algebra (even if they don't do well) because it teaches them to think in abstract ways.
• Teacher and student absences should be monitored as part of an accountability system. Teachers and kids missing a lot of school means kids aren't learning and teachers aren't teaching.
Not everything worked the way we wanted, or was as cost-effective as we hoped -- admitting this and moving on was very hard to do. We got very good at creating new ways of talking about and addressing vexing problems and not being satisfied until a group of states or districts or schools were moving successfully on those fronts.
We embraced the notion that “truth is not determined by how many people believe it.” We pushed and we prodded – we were persistent – and a remarkable number of states using standards we helped them create, or districts adopting time-tested strategies we recommended, improved their performance. We could celebrate that success, especially when the districts or states took the changes so totally as their own that they barely remembered what we had done for them.
When the No Child Left Behind Law emerged, it was clear that all the things we (StandardsWork) had been advocating had become mainstream views. Now, StandardsWork is working to be sure that parents know their rights under No Child Left Behind and that principals know how to reach out to parents to make them partners with the school in their child's learning.
I came to believe that this work was a mission and a calling for me, which brings me back to Seligman's book. He talks about building authentic happiness as determining your signature strengths and applying them in all aspects of your life. I believe I was doing this during 13 years I was at the helm of StandardsWork, but it all became crystal clear to me when I was unexpectedly given the opportunity to help rebuild the education system in Iraq. I had been preparing all my life for this challenge and found (to my delight) that many people around the globe share the same truths about education. The skills and processes developed at StandardsWork were well received in Iraq, not because they were “western,” but rather because research has shown them to be effective in cultures around the world.
Between Sept 2003 and March 2004 I worked with Iraqi expatriates to train 32,000 high school teachers and 3,000 administrators in effective instructional strategies and proven classroom management practices. After 35 years, of brutality and repression where Saddam Hussein had made ideology and loyalty the requisite teaching credential, I saw teachers reawaken to their mission. In very short order, by the middle of the fourth day of this training, you could see the spark ignite behind their eyes. There was a change in their body language as they practiced new skills and evaluated each other on merit, not cronyism. These teachers began to understand they could have some control over their own destiny and could have an important role in building the new Iraq. This became their truth, as it is mine.
You won't read about this in newspapers or see it on TV, but I saw it. And I saw them pass it on to other teachers in subsequent trainings -- this new sense of freedom was unstoppable and unquenchable. Iraqis are living difficult, even frightened lives but they are considerably more optimistic about their country's future than Americans or the rest of the world. For the first time, in most of their life times, they can have something to say about their nation's fate and who will lead them. They are working toward “authentic happiness.”
While I was in Iraq, despite the constant dangers and the close calls, I felt inner peace. I had a sense that I belonged there -- that I was in the right place with the right skills. The opportunity and the goal of spreading freedom were more than worth the risks.
Lots of people would not have done this -- it was my choice.
I am in awe of America's gift to all of its children. We ask even the youngest among us ‘what do you want to be?' and ‘what do you want to do?' In most parts of the world children are not asked to consider these things and it limits them.
Spread before you is a lifetime of choices.
I hope that my story has helped you see that getting to ‘your truth' is a journey. It is not likely to be a straight line so, give yourself time to experiment and learn, to balance your ambition with hard work and resilience, and to take chances when you believe you are right and to change direction when that is right. Be ready for serendipity to reward you.
You have access to all the tools you'll need to find “your truth.' Commit yourself to finding it. From what I have learned about Olin, this is fertile ground for that exploration. When you pursue that truth both you and those important in your life will be gratified.
Thank you.
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