Square Peg Quotes

“Failing well—that is, staying calm through adversity and recognizing what can be learned from mistakes—is a foundation of success in a variety of fields.”
― Todd Rose, Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers

“Diagnoses—labels—also help connect people with resources that may often be useful. My caveats are reserved for those all-too-common situations in which parents, teachers, and medical professionals are quick to label someone as “disordered” (whatever that means) when the real problem is a mismatch between a child and a given environment.”
― Todd Rose, Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers

“I’d “own” my screw-ups and crimes, for the simple reason that other people’s annoyance and even contempt was much better than their pity and rejection. Playing the outlaw at least made me feel I had some control.”
― Todd Rose, Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers

“Kurt Fischer, my mentor and colleague at Harvard, where he is the director of Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, and Education program, goes so far as to say that today’s schools essentially fail about 80 percent of students. Sure, kids get through. Yet simply surviving is not a high enough bar for our educational system—not by a long shot. Worse still, our schools are often downright damaging in the long term for children who by temperament are prone to question authority—the kinds of kids who can’t help but think differently, who like to take risks, and who represent America’s best hope to innovate its way to a better future. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on changing an obviously broken educational context, we have to date largely put the blame on our hardworking teachers—and perhaps even more so on our children, millions of whom are themselves treated as broken because our system cannot deal with natural learning variability.”
― Todd Rose, Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers

“I made my decision as an informed adult—so deliberately informed that I ended up taking a whole course in pharmacology at Harvard, where I wrote my term paper on the neural mechanisms of stimulants and their impact on cognition and behavior (and, incidentally, it’s so boring you would need stimulants to read it).”
― Todd Rose, Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers

“I’ve had many occasions since that time to appreciate this timely advice. For me, the hardest part of learning always boils down to figuring out why I should care. Other people’s expectations matter to me, but they rarely clinch the deal. I need to build up my own reasons to engage. But once I jump over that hurdle, I’m good to go. I”
― Todd Rose, Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers

“Evaluate the demands in your child’s life (at home and at school)—and find at least one “cognitive unicycle” that may be sabotaging him or her. Then, if you can, get rid of it.”
― Todd Rose, Square Peg: My Story and What It Means for Raising Innovators, Visionaries, and Out-Of-The-Box Thinkers