How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, and Beyond

This is a book about how to equip young people to navigate school, career, and life with joy and excellence. The first step to doing this job well as parents, educators, or life mentors is to know ourselves. We have to be students of ourselves—by learning who we are, where we came from, what we believe, and where these beliefs came from. How we raise and guide our people is deeply influenced by our own stories. If we’re aware of the core values and scripts that were passed on to us from our families of origin, we can be compassionate toward ourselves—understanding our knee-jerk reactions to our students and their life choices. We can be intentional about what we choose to pass on to the next generation. This has been true for us, as you’ll see from our stories.

Belle’s story: I am the middle daughter of first-generation Chinese immigrants who, like their compatriots, sacrificed heroically so that my brothers and I could get an education in the United States. My father borrowed the little money his sister had to come to the United States to pursue his graduate degree on a student visa. This decision came with another, more significant cost: leaving behind his wife and six-week-old firstborn child, my brother. It was two years before they were reunited on American soil. My mother abandoned her career aspirations when she arrived in the United States, leaving her family and home to live in a country where she struggled to work, communicate, and feel a sense of belonging.

She pushed through language barriers to befriend neighbors so I would have neighborhood playdates. She clipped coupons so I could buy trendy clothes. All of this probably helped me fit in with the popular kids at my affluent suburban high school. My parents relished the thought that I was a teacher’s pet, two-time homecoming princess, student leader in clubs, class government officer, and a graduation speaker at the John F. Kennedy Center. These “achievements” were shamelessly evoked at afternoon tea with the aunties, because they satisfied everyone’s expectations for me. They were proud that I “fit in” so well.

All their dreams and efforts to make ends meet were fueled by hopes that my brothers and I could achieve more. They expected that we would. It was never a question of “whether I would go to college,” it was a matter of where I went and what I did there to become “successful.” I internalized the cultural value that the point of education was to achieve financial security and respect in society. Like other “first-gen” people, we bought into Horatio Alger’s myth that if you worked hard, you could achieve the American dream, not only for yourself, but to validate your parents’ sacrifices. All of this prepared me to be the most successful student I could be. A rule-following, risk-averse, people-pleasing success. I was the opposite of Cheryl Strayed in the wild, driven by a free spirit to conquer the dangers of the Pacific Crest Trail. My ambition was to take the safest path to financial security and prestige.

I had gleaned from my upbringing that there were certain careers that were especially acceptable. Doctor, lawyer, engineer. I later realized that these were actually the acceptable choices for boys, but that there were alternatives for girls.

Up to this point, whenever faced with a big decision about school, work, and life at large, I asked myself: “What should I do?” Often, the answer that felt right to me was the one that matched the expectations of those around me. After two years of bouncing around multiple majors in the hard sciences and internships in health fields, a well-meaning auntie offered me this career guidance: “Don’t work so hard, you’ll prematurely age and lose your beauty. Just take good care of your hair and skin (your best assets), marry a doctor, and you’ll be fine.”

Imagine how those words landed on an American college woman. Yep, just the nudge I needed to begin listening more closely to my own heart. And trusting the wisdom and direction that could be found there. The women in my life were smart and competent, while content to sit in the back seat. Few were trailblazers, civic leaders, public speakers. With the most honorable intentions, they sacrificed personal goals and derived their identities from others. I realized that the standard-bearers I had followed were no longer a perfect match with my own journey. My spiritual-faith adventure provided fresh insight and courage for rewriting the script, following my call.

When I announced to the family that I planned to pursue a career as a psychologist, it was as if I had announced that I was dropping out of college. Had I thought this through? Could I get a job doing such a thing? They saw a huge distinction between doctors who focused on people’s mental health and those who treated their physical health. But they comforted themselves by thinking girls shouldn’t work too hard and that I would be fine as long as I married a real doctor, who could take care of me.

My transformation continued during graduate school, where I met a mentor and role model who believed in me and nurtured my creativity and confidence. She introduced me to community psychology, a field focused on addressing systemic injustices and partnering with disadvantaged and marginalized people. I felt such a sense of mission … Here was a way that my values, strengths, and skills aligned with meaningful work that could make a difference in the world.

I need to say that as I write this, I am so genuinely grateful to my cultural roots, family, and mentors for watering the seeds of my purpose today. At the same time that there are cultural and moral virtues to my story that I deeply cherish (like respect for your elders and sacrifice for others), there are imperfections. And all of it inspires my current work. I see that while the world is progressing, stories like mine reflect an ongoing ethos that reaches beyond the immigrant experience. In hundreds of our research interviews and surveys, adolescents (and their parents) lamented: “I’m living someone else’s life. I don’t know who I really am and what I’m really living for, apart from others’ expectations of me.” Similarly, I’d been basing my identity on what others told me about myself when I was a child. Trying to mold myself into someone’s stereotype of me left me exhausted and confused. But as my understanding of who I am came into sharper focus during my later college and adult years, this understanding became my guide. It continues to shape what I value and believe, and how I feel, act, and connect. Brené Brown calls this embracing of who you really are true belonging:

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.

She goes on to say: “True belonging is not something that you need to negotiate externally, it’s what you carry in your heart.”^* This internal belonging, this sense of understanding who I was—what I stood for, what I had to offer in the world—began to free me from the need for external approval. It’s been a glorious adventure to discover my innermost being, and to realize that what I’ve turned up there can meet a great need in the world.

Tim’s story: I am the son of two Jewish/Anglo-Saxon parents who grew up in New York City. They were the quintessential hippies. Both were the youngest of three children, and both came from families with high expectations for academic success. Seeing their siblings achieve the heights of education, both parents, separately, eschewed these values. They each vowed to make their own way in the world. Growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, my mom backpacked across Europe barefoot. My dad, sporting a foot-long beard, made his living driving a taxi in New York City. Their love was founded on their shared dream of adopting a yeoman farmer’s lifestyle in the rural Green Mountains of Vermont.

Both my parents found success in life, but not by traditional definitions, and not by traditional paths. They passed this ethos of fierce independence on to me (so, interestingly, whereas Belle felt a pressure to meet family and cultural expectations for success, I couldn’t even begin to tell you what those expectations were for me). My parents never pushed me in any one direction; instead, their constant message seemed to be: “Just do what you want, follow your bliss.” And so I did just that, drifting through college without clear direction. I studied sports media and marketing because I “liked sports.” In college, the one extracurricular activity I engaged in wholeheartedly (outside of heavy partying) was becoming the president of the student government association. I strategically positioned myself in the election as the candidate you would most want to drink a beer with. My campaign, called T.H.E. Party: Tim Helps Everyone Party, won me the presidency in a landslide. Upon graduation, I continued to drift, first landing a job as an ice cream truck driver. “Mr. Ding-A-Ling Driver” would be the first item on my résumé after SGA president (if I had thought to write a résumé). I then moved to Chicago and became a waiter at ESPN Zone, a chain restaurant based on the sports channel. Given my sports background, family friends mistook this job as working for the actual ESPN (my parents weren’t quick to correct them).

I had the privilege of doing what I wanted when I wanted, and so I lived it up, prioritizing the here and now over sacrificing for the long-term. Where Belle’s energies were directed toward family and community responsibility, I focused on myself. I came first, and I concerned myself very little with the world beyond that. This worked for me … until it didn’t. As time passed, I found my existence hollow and unfulfilling. It was harder and harder to get the same high from this self-indulgent lifestyle. Something was missing.

The turning point was getting a job at a Boys and Girls Club at the Julia C. Lathrop Homes, the oldest public housing development in Chicago. There I worked every day with young people growing up in circumstances drastically different from my own rural Vermont roots. Vermont is the least diverse state in the country, and I often joke that as a result I am “glow-in-the-dark white.” The Cotter Club was my first experience with people who didn’t look like me. However, the more I got to know my students, the more they reminded me of my friends back home. Their humor, their passions, their dreams … I felt a kindredness with them in so many ways. Except one big way. They had not been born with the silver spoon. These kids struggled with immense barriers to success completely foreign to me—food insecurity, lack of access to stable housing, exposure to violence. In that first year at the club, 185 high school students in Chicago were victims of gun violence. I was humbled by their strengths and resilience, but the challenges and injustices they faced ate away at me. For the first time in my life, my attention shifted beyond myself. It was as if a light switch turned on. I was hungry to contribute to lives other than my own. And as my efforts to do so gained momentum, so did my sense of meaning, fulfillment, and joy.

I graduated from the University of Chicago and became a clinical social worker. I counseled noncustodial fathers trying to get custody of their kids. I worked as a community organizer, leading advocacy campaigns to fight extreme poverty. I have served as an outreach director for a national nonprofit. I’ve been a therapist, school counselor, and mentor. Most important, for the last fifteen years I’ve worked with low-income, first-generation students to support their purpose discovery, the same purpose I found in that Boys and Girls Club.

As we reflect on our drastically different stories, we laugh that our paths ever crossed. Not sure we would’ve liked each other in college, much less that we would find ourselves coauthoring a book, sharing a common goal. But while our routes here may be different, our stories illustrate a universal truth: that contexts shape our identities and values. We’re sculpted by people who raise and mentor us. And those people are sculpted by their cultural and societal surroundings. Belle mirrored a generational and cultural belief in education meritocracy, whereas Tim is a product of the self-empowerment, countercultural era of the 1960s.

We’re sure you have your own story to tell about history’s hand in who you are, and how you parent and mentor your people. We’ll shed light on how personal narratives—and societal narratives—animate our life choices. Some deep influences are painful to acknowledge. But facing them squarely is critical to rethinking and sometimes undoing them.

We’ll start by naming societal strongholds: fear, uncertainty, and anxiety.