Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An essential guide to tackling what students, families, and educators can do now to cut through stress and performance pressure, and find a path to purpose.

Today's college-bound kids are stressed, anxious, and navigating demands in their lives unimaginable to a previous generation. They're performance machines, hitting the benchmarks they're "supposed" to in order to reach the next tier of a relentless ladder. Then, their mental and physical exhaustion carries over right into first jobs. What have traditionally been considered the best years of life have become the beaten-down years of life.

Belle Liang and Timothy Klein devote their careers both to counseling individual students and to cutting through the daily pressures to show a better way, a framework, and set of questions to find kids' "true north": what really turns them on in life, and how to harness the core qualities that reveal, allowing them to choose a course of study, a college, and a career.

Even the gentlest parents and teachers tend to play into pervasive societal pressure for students to PERFORM. And when we take the foot off the gas, we beg the kids to just figure out what their PASSION is. Neither is a recipe for mental or physical health, or, ironically, for performance or passion. How to Navigate Life shows that successful human beings instead tap into their PURPOSE--the why behind the what and how. Best of all, purpose is a completely translatable quality to every aspect of life, from first jobs to last jobs and everything in between.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part 1 The Five Purpose Principles
• 1 Mindset (p. 13)
• 2 Games (p. 42)
• 3 Skill Sets (p. 64)
• 4 Value Archetypes (p. 93)
• 5 Needs in the World (p. 119)
• Part 2 Re:Purpose
• 6 Relationships (p. 155)
• 7 School (p. 184)
• 8 Higher Ed (p. 215)
• 9 Work (and the World) (p. 246)
• Conclusion (p. 269)
• Acknowledgments (p. 271)
• Notes (p. 275)
• Index (p. 301)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Arguing that the United States is essentially split between those who are educated and those who are not, which makes access to college today's most crucial issue, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bunch investigates everything that's wrong with U.S. higher education in After the Ivory Tower Falls and proposes how to build it better (50,000-copy first printing). In Historically Black Colleges and Universities' Guide to Excellence, President Harvey of Hampton University--one of 107 HBCUs in the United States--explains that HBCU graduates have achieved success through a blend of moral values, personal grown, and community responsibility that has allowed them to navigate the white world while retaining their core Blackness. Award-winning educators Liang and Klein look at the newest generation of stressed adolescents, whose physical and mental burnout will carry through college right into their first jobs, to show how they can shut out the noise and shift from performance to purpose in How To Navigate Life (50,000-copy first printing).

Publishers Weekly Review

Boston College psychology professor Liang and clinical therapist Klein debut with a thoughtful guide for mentors--be they parents, teachers, or others--on how to set up young people for academic and professional success. Holding up the Varsity Blues admissions scandal as a cautionary tale, the authors warn parents against viewing life as a game to be won and advocate for adopting a "purpose mindset" that values a balanced pursuit of "outward success" and personal gratification. Liang and Klein encourage mentors to identify and nurture their students' natural talents, which might manifest as creativity on TikTok or collaboration in multiplayer video games. A young person's values can help them find a niche, the authors contend, providing a questionnaire to assess whether someone privileges individualism over collectivism and to match them to creative and independent roles (people the authors deem "trailblazers") or routine and communal ones ("guardians"). Liang and Klein also proffer "toolkits" that provide questions and scripts to help mentors connect with mentees. The thorough and systematic advice prioritizes the cultivation of responsibility and independent critical thinking in young people, adding up to a lucid antidote to snowplow parenting. Practical and wise in equal measure, this hits the mark. (Aug.)

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Belle Liang is a professor of Counseling Psychology in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She is Principal Investigator in the Purpose Lab; her research focuses on positive youth development, including mentoring and relational health in adolescence and young adulthood. She lives in Lexington, MA.

Timothy Klein is an award-winning urban educator, clinical therapist and school counselor. He has served as the director of strategic partnerships for Project Wayfinder, an organization that designs purpose education for secondary schools, was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard University, and Director of School and Community Engagement at Medford High School, where he implemented strategies that increased college matriculation by 30%. He lives in Jamaica Plain, MA.

Together, Liang and Klein developed True North, a curriculum and web-based application for creating purpose profiles to be used in schools, universities, and workplaces.