One of the best ways to kick off the New Year, besides goal-setting, is to practice thankfulness for the positives in your life. What better way to put that into action than by giving thanks to the mentors who have influenced personal and professional growth? January is National Mentoring Month and, more specifically, January 21st is Thank Your Mentor Day. Mentoring has been proven to have positive effects, especially on young people. According to Mentoring.org, young adults who were at-risk for falling off track but had a mentor are: 55% more likely to enroll in college 78% more … [Read more...]
The Secret to Learning = Curiosity
From Chapter 9 “Learning” in Ingredients of Outliers. A Key Ingredient Fair enough! But what’s the secret, the primary ingredient, to being a lifelong learner? The answer, of course, is curiosity! The 18th century English author Samuel Johnson called curiosity “the thirst of the soul.” Two centuries later American author William Arthur Ward described it as “the wick in the candle of learning.” And the late, great Walt Disney claimed that it “keeps leading us down new paths.” If asked to nominate one person who, perhaps more than any other, might epitomize the word “curiosity,” it … [Read more...]
Teen Outlier, Bringing Power and Clean Water through New Invention
What were you doing when you were 17? For many of us, this was a time of both disorientation and discovery, if spending way too much time updating the newest selife on social media, or heading to the nearest party. As for Cynthia Sin Nga Lam, this was a time to innovate the unexpected. This teen took full advantage of the period of cognitive growth by thinking abstractly to solve a problem. Lam was looking for away to help the millions of people lacking access to clean water and electricity. The Australian high school teen developed a device that purifies wastewater and creates power at … [Read more...]