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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Yeager
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April 24 - July 16, 2025
Why does our ability to positively influence the trajectories of the young suddenly disappear the moment puberty strikes?
the mentor’s dilemma. This refers to the fact that it’s very hard to simultaneously criticize someone’s work and motivate them because criticism can crush a young person’s confidence.
When you hold young people to high standards and make it clear that you believe they can meet those standards, you are respecting them because you are taking them seriously. Young people rise to meet the challenge because being respected is motivating. Further, you lift up all students and see greater equity.
These practices get at the heart of what it means to be a young person, struggling to carve out a place in the adult world.
he provides critical feedback because he thinks they can improve and that he was taking them and their potential seriously.
We say one thing, they hear another, and we fight over that misinterpretation, fueling one of the most common forms of conflict between the generations.
Status and respect are to a young person what food and sleep are to a baby—core needs that, when satisfied, can unlock better motivation and behavior.
How can leaders go from a onetime note to a whole relationship—or even a whole culture—characterized by high standards and high support?
After Battier took a shot that Chip knew wasn’t great, he didn’t yell, Stop, what are you doing? Do it this way! Instead he asked, “How did that feel?”
when reporting for this book, I repeatedly saw that expert managers, educators, and parents tended to have independent, resilient, proactive young people who didn’t need constant redirection to stay on task. That saved the adults’ time (and frustration) in the long run.
Our society tends to think that there are only two ways to interact with young people: tough or soft, mean or nice, authoritarian or permissive. We don’t realize that you can have a bit of both: you can have high standards and high support, like the wise-feedback note.
As a society, we want to target those age groups to prevent extreme events like suicide or school violence, but the most common programs either backfire or prove useless.
the neurobiological-incompetence model. According to this model, a young person is a flawed and deficient thinker who can’t comprehend the future consequences of their actions.
Consider that some early-maturing youth might be biologically prepared to reproduce by age thirteen, but they might not get a well-paying, full-time job until they are twenty-six, twice the age of biological maturity. That’s a long time to be waiting to be afforded status and respect, and it can raise serious questions in a young person’s mind about their social standing.
the Vegemite Principle, which states that some things are so indescribably unpleasant that they must be experienced to be understood.
First: ask, don’t tell.
Second: find ways to honor the young person’s status—for example, point out their competence and expertise—rather than simply appealing to your own authority.
Third: validate whatever negative experiences young people may have
Fourth: presume agency.
We can encourage healthy autonomy if we can satisfy their needs for status and respect through what we say and how we say it.
Some managers tend to think, If she was a high performer, she wouldn’t need any support. I call this an enforcer mindset. In this mindset a manager focuses solely on enforcing a high standard, not on supporting a young person’s potential to meet that standard. Other managers tend to think, If she’s going to be so sensitive, then it means she can’t handle the pressure. I call this a protector mindset. In this mindset a manager focuses on protecting the young person from distress by lowering their expectations.
contribution to the literature was to solve these three issues. Here’s why the mentor mindset works in education, parenting, and management. It offers a way of resolving the adolescent predicament. Consider that young people don’t acquire their social standings by having status given to them. They get them by earning prestige—a unique kind of respect that only comes from having demonstrated their worth and value to socially powerful others, be they peers or leaders.
In my early twenties, before I became a scientist, I lived and worked in an orphanage in Talagante, Chile, called the Hogar de Niños San Jose. I ran day care and educational programs for kids aged two to eighteen, working twelve-to-fifteen-hour days. In my mind, I was there to love and support the kids, not discipline them. I thought, They’ve been through so much, they don’t need me there getting them in trouble or telling them what to do. For example, one morning we took out every toy and created a massive obstacle course. For an hour it was joyous chaos. When it was time for lunch, nobody
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I suspect that many people fall into the enforcer and protector mindsets with the best of intentions. We love our children, and so we are tough on them—or we go easy on them.
Our fear of young people’s unpredictable volatility silences us, which leads to even more misunderstandings and therefore more shouting. This cycle seems destined to repeat itself, making our lives worse and worse with each revolution.
When every day turns out to be the opposite of how they imagined their lives as educators, they eventually start wondering whether they’re in the wrong profession.
When each successive generation grows up, we look down on the next generation, as though we have forgotten what it feels like to be young. Then we call the next generation immature. When most adults think about their own youthful indiscretions, they do so with a wink and a laugh. But when they think about today’s generation doing something similar, they ring the alarm bell about the decline in morality in “kids these days.”
The changes in attitudes about young people from era to era have shown us that the neurobiological-incompetence model—and the predicament it creates—is not a fixed reality. It’s a tool used by society when adults need to regain control. Luckily, we can choose another way to view young people and find new solutions to bridge the generational divide.
The barrier of mistrust helps explain the frustrating generational divide. It’s a war over meaning. Mistrust makes young people subtly read between the lines of each comment their elders make, trying to interpret the hidden implications of our words, to determine if we are disrespecting them or not. Young people focus more on the unsaid part than the said part. For instance, when a teenager’s mother asks, “Did you brush your teeth?” the child interprets it as, “I think you’re so incompetent that you won’t even remember something so simple as brushing your teeth”—even though the mother never
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There persists a disconnect between what higher-power adults intend to communicate when we speak and what young people hear us say. On the adults’ side, we think we’re doing everything for them while they don’t appreciate it. On their side, they think we’re disrespecting them and looking down on them. Young people reject adults’ advice, and adults cite moral decline among the young as the reason why.
Young people often act like Carr’s participants who thought that prejudice was fixed. They seem determined to label older adults, based on very little information, as sexist, racist, homophobic, and hateful. Of course, they sometimes have a good reason for this. Young people in an adolescent predicament are often in a perpetual state of status threat detection, coming from the barrier of mistrust. Their sensitivity causes many young people to quickly sort the world into harmful/bad/unsafe people versus helpful/good/safe people to avoid further hurt. This barrier of mistrust can worsen the very
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Encircle’s staff helps kids and parents understand that the source of their conflict usually stems from the meaning of something that was left unsaid, and rarely from something explicitly said.
They didn’t realize they were wasting enormous amounts of talent by creating a motivational problem that didn’t have to exist.
For the last four decades, the lesson for any aspiring teacher has been clear. If you want to whip a ragtag group of minority youngsters into shape, you need to maintain exceptionally high standards, regardless of how you make them feel. This myth of the demanding leader valorizes the enforcer mindset.
our hunches about how to perform those roles based on our past experiences. Goffman’s thesis holds that the less expertise and direct experience we have in a role, the more we rely on stereotypes to define our scripts.
Inexperienced teachers like year-one Sergio who are working with low-income youth tend to perform Escalante, especially when they’re desperate. If I want to become a superstar teacher who gets the most out of kids, I need to copy what Hilary Swank did in Freedom Writers.
His school soon adopted a program called OnRamps, which offers college courses taught by public high school teachers across Texas. (It’s a more rigorous, more affordable, and more equitable competitor to the College Board’s AP program.)
Again and again, I saw that questioning, rather than telling, constituted a core mentor-mindset practice.
Socrates purports to show that we all have knowledge in us already, and with the right experiences—in this case, leading questions—we can build on our assets and become smarter.
most common sense is in fact common nonsense.
Asking parents the right questions can prevent child abuse.
Crum’s work has shown that our culture’s stress-is-debilitating belief is both untrue and unhelpful. It’s untrue because stress is often the natural by-product of us choosing to do something hard that’s important to us.
think, What is wrong with me that I am the kind of person who gets so stressed? We stress about being stressed.
How did Hawi’s professor reply? The professor maintained the high standard for the most meaningful part of the course—the final project—but supported Hawi by relieving her of most small assignments—the daily work. Said another way, the professor maintained intellectual rigor while offering logistical flexibility.
Our culture constantly bombards us with negative, stress-is-debilitating beliefs, and so people will fall back into that belief eventually. The challenge of overriding our culturally inherited belief system is called the transfer problem.
Thus, when we targeted overall beliefs about stressors and stress responses, the students transferred their synergistic mindsets to new situations far into the future.
That match between their personal beliefs and the ideas in the classroom culture doubled the benefits of the synergistic mindsets.
Temporal discounting refers to the fact that rewards/punishments in the future tend to have less value than rewards/punishments in the present. Would you rather have five dollars now or ten dollars in a year? Many people would rather have five dollars now.
We appeal to frivolous or pragmatic motives, such as immediate enjoyment or long-term self-interest, likely because of our society’s collective focus on their neurobiological incompetence.
In summary, our exposé aimed to shift the identity of a healthy eater. Instead of healthy eaters being lame nerds who do what adults tell them to do, they were independent-minded people who fight to make the world a fairer place.
