by Alexis Redding
The first GoodWork Conference was last weekend in Dedham, Massachusetts. The conference focused on developing responsible, caring and balanced youth and included inspiring speakers including Howard Gardner, Bill Damon, Eric Liu, Damien Woetzel and more. Panels at the conference featured discussions of growing up in the digital age, the arts and good work, engaging youth in empathy and a discussion led by Howard Gardner with adult good workers. In the coming weeks, we will post a series of reflections by PZers and our colleagues on the conference, highlighting key moments and takeaways from the exciting 3 day event.
As a child, I relied on the oft-used ploy to delay lights out by demanding “just one more story” at bedtime. My father, no stranger to my antics, would stand at the doorway and convey the final tale of the night: “Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after, the end” before plunging the room into darkness with the flip of a switch. The first time he did this, I protested. He was cheating, I said. It wasn’t a real story, I argued. But, over time, I embraced this 11-word tale as part of our evening ritual.
I hadn’t thought about his abridged story for nearly three decades, but was reminded of it over the weekend during the “Developing Responsible, Caring, & Balanced Youth” Conference in Dedham, MA. In the morning on our final day together, Dr. William Damon described to the audience how “finding a sense of purpose doesn’t always work in a neat and pretty way.” He warned of our over-simplified ideas about finding one’s calling and cautioned us about the “egocentrism in our dreams for our children.” After spending more than a dozen years working with college-bound students, his admonitions rang true. Allowing teens the space to listen to their own voices, to formulate ideas about the future that may look quite different from what their parents expected of them, and giving them room to fail is only a small part of the dialogue today. Too small.
Listening to Dr. Damon’s description, I recognized that the little joke my father used to tell me is a very real part of the narrative we continue to tell teens today. We lead them to believe that life offers a direct path towards purpose, suggesting that jumping through each hoop along the way will lead to a “happily ever after” that may not actually be waiting at the end. What we fail to tell them is that the middle part of the story, the meaty bit where all of the richness of real life takes place, isn’t a straight line. And we forget to share with them the truth that life will be filled with many endings, some happier than others, followed by new beginnings and new dreams along the way. And, worst of all, we neglect to point out that the obstacles that we climb over, tunnel under, and maybe even succumb to are what make the story interesting. Indeed, it is in these details that we are most likely to find our true purpose. Life should not be about the perceived “happily ever after” of getting into the right college, securing the dream job, or building the perfect home. Though, for many adults – and for too many teens – we intone that it is.
To meet the conference goal of “Developing Responsible, Caring, & Balanced Youth,” we need to foster these traits in ourselves first. And, above all else, we need to be truthful. We need to show teens the people we revere as role models are almost always those who fell down or got lost along the way. These are the risk-takers and dreamers of our contemporary mythology – our Horatio Algers and American dreamers of the modern world.
All weekend long we listened to such visionaries speak about the circuitous paths that they took and we felt inspired by them. Teens also need to be let in on the secret that getting off the beaten path can lead in the right direction and that failure is an integral part of success. As educators, we talk passionately about developing ‘grit’ in kids today. However, without preparing them for the fact that life doesn’t always look like we expect it to in the end, we are not giving them the real tools to develop this kind of resiliency.
After this weekend, I propose a new version of my father’s story for the next generation: “Once upon a time, life got messy. But, then I made meaning… and it was mostly happy in the end.” My dad didn’t include that middle bit in his nighttime tale, but he did include it in the decades of lessons he has taught me since then. These are the messages he has given me as I have fallen down, dusted myself off, and ultimately found the renewed sense of purpose that led me to this inspiring weekend conference.