It takes courage to face our fears about the future. It also takes humility to accept that we don’t often know what’s in our kids’ best interest. It takes a change in mindset to focus on ourselves—our own emotions and attitudes—as an extremely important element of our child-rearing.

Learning about other people’s journeys can be enormously empowering, and we hope these will be just the start of your collection.

So often, when it feels like everything is going wrong, things are just being reorganized in helpful ways that we could never anticipate.

Many people hold beliefs that are simply not in touch with reality. We refer to this kind of unfounded belief system that many—especially affluent—adults subscribe to as a “shared delusion.”

Bill frequently tells the older children and adolescents he is testing, “I hope I find things you suck at—because successful people are good at some things and not so good at others, but wisely make a living doing something they’re good at.”

In other words, you can be a poor student and a brilliant dancer (or vice versa). You can be average in most things but exceptional at reading others’ emotions. The key is in finding your strength.

Albert Einstein said, “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Many adults who were top students and have forged successful careers are miserable.

Being a straight-A student almost by definition requires a high level of conformity, which is not the route to a high level of success. A 4.0 GPA also points to an attempt to be equally good at everything, which doesn’t necessarily translate well in the real world. We need to assure kids that the majority of successful people were not straight-A