How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results

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Esther Wojcicki is a journalist, educator and the mother of two of Silicon Valley’s most successful female entrepreneurs, Susan and Anne Wojcicki. Something that rubbed me the wrong way - that speaks more about me than the author - was the name dropping. Questions like these might seem insignificant, but for the author, they represented an important break with the suffocating sexism of her own childhood. And I like the approach of coming to terms with your own childhood first rather than simply parenting from a reactive place.

She's also the mother of three highly successful daughters: Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of of YouTube, Anne Wojcicki, who is the CEO of 23andMe, and Janet Wojcicki, a professor in the medical school at the University of California, San Francsico. Beautiful book on installing TRICK (trust, respect, independence, collaboration and kindness) values into human beings. In her defense, you need to come across as confidant in your abilities if you’re going to be writing a book about this topic; giving parenting advice is general is an act of boasting by claiming you know more than others about this impossibly difficult job.

She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Palo Alto University (2013) and has been a speaker at multiple TEDx events. A big element of that is to instill in them an understanding that things like intelligence, talent, and skills are malleable. That section could have been eliminated without an issue and I'm surprised an editor didn't step in and say so.

She developed their decision-making abilities by asking them questions like, “Is it a banana or an orange that you want? Growing up in an orthodox Jewish family in the 1950s, the author experienced her fair share of damaging parental behavior. Virtually all her sentences could be tighter, and she takes an inconsistent approach to punctuation.Raising children with a high sense ofgratitude helps them deal with disappointment and setbacks better, lowers their likelihood of experiencing depression, and makes them more kind and generous to others. While many parents would have panicked at this lack of ambition, the author’s attitude was much more relaxed. It wasn’t terrible, and I got most of the way through, but the incessant name dropping and self-aggrandizing was too much for me to take.

Unfortunately, Gady’s classmates failed to recognize his merits, and selected someone else to act as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. Each child is different, has different personality traits, falls more or less to different tendencies - even the best effort may be fruitless if applied to a child that doesn't resonate with it.A child already conditioned to believe their choices don’t matter is much more likely to end up in abusive relationships, much more likely to be taken advantage of, and much more vulnerable to things like sexual harassment and coercion. Drawing on the poignant real-life experiences of her own family, as well as those of her students, these blinks show you how you can excel at the most important job you’ll ever have: raising the next generation. the 2002 California Teacher of the Year by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing; the 2011 Charles O'Malley Award recipient from Columbia Scholastic Press.

And although she does stray into topics that don’t center solely on children (she proudly declares that she is not tempted by bad foods, and that people should try harder at their marriages in general) I still found this book useful and worthwhile. Despite that, polls show that people in general are convinced that we live in a more dangerous time than ever. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. She argues kids are depressed because of this pressure to succeed, yet the book's very reason for existence is the success of her daughters.By not trusting kids to be independent, we’re teaching them that the world is a dangerous place, that people can’t be trusted, and that they can’t trust themselves. Much of Esther’s philosophy is geared towards raising kids who are resilient, respectful, and self-driven.