Welcome To How To Navigate Life!

The journey begins.

Hey there - It’s been a while.

If you’re receiving this newsletter, you subscribed last summer while I (Tim) was writing about how educators, parents and students could adapt to a world transformed by COVID-19. In 2020, I was posting weekly, but then disappeared.

What happened? 

It turns out that writing a book is *all-consuming.* 

My co-author, Dr. Belle Liang, and I have spent the last 7 months thinking, researching, writing, and delivering our completed book manuscript to St. Martin’s Press, tentatively titled How To Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way In School, Career & Beyond. This book was born from our realizations as educators, mentors, and parents, about the gaps in American education:

We don’t teach people how to figure out what to do with their lives.

We tell them what to do (Get great grades! Go to a highly selective college! Get a prestigious, high-paying job! Etc, etc). We urge them to chase one goal after another. Goals dictated by society’s narrow definitions of success. Goals without a soul, that are ultimately disheartening for young people. 

What we aren’t taught  is how to make meaningful decisions that are guided by the core of who we are.  And this inability to make purposeful decisions contributes to the college and career navigation crisis we are mired in.

“Life hacks” and generic advice promising “7 steps to becoming successful” are ubiquitous. But an empirically-based process for making wise decisions on your own is what’s truly needed. 

Our book bridges this gap by providing an empirically-based decision-making framework and shared language to navigate the inflection points in life. 

We’ve culled together the science and knowledge we’ve gained through our collective experiences as educators, mentors, practitioners, and parents. 

We are super excited that the book is due to come out next summer (2022). 

Now that the book is in the hands of our brilliant editor at St. Martin’s Press (big shout out to Elizabeth Beier for helping us translate our science and practice into words written with each of you in mind), we are focusing our energy into relaunching this new and improved resource: 

The “How To Navigate Life” Newsletter. 

This newsletter will be written and curated by both of us (Belle and Tim). We’ll take every opportunity to share with you all the research and insights that we weren’t able to fit into our book.  We’ve unearthed fascinating (and sometimes even counter-intuitive) research across disciplines (e.g., social psychology, evolutionary biology, economics, you name it) that can help us navigate this crazy world with grace and wisdom.

Each week you will get three nuggets of wisdom, ranging from scientific journal articles to popular press pieces, podcasts to tv shows. Get ready for weekly editions chock full of empirically-based insights and strategies for navigating big and small moments in the journey that is life. We’ll choose resources that will help guide you in making the kind of decisions that can steer you in a new direction, altering the course of at least one aspect of your life, like going from high school to college, college to new career, new career to long-term meaningful pursuits, and all the little spaces in between.

We don’t have all the answers, but we’ll work hard to curate carefully vetted research and resources from a wealth of experts and scholars, you will love learning from. 

This newsletter is just our first step in creating an intergenerational, diverse community of students, parents, educators, psychologists/counselors, and other mentors who have priceless wisdom (and challenges) to share as they navigate life the best they can. If you know of someone who could benefit or is interested in contributing to a community like this, please share the newsletter by clicking the button below.

Be on the lookout for our first posting later this week.

We can’t wait to journey with you!