Compassionate achievers—successful people who are other-focused and have stronger internal (i.e., looking for meaning in work) rather than instrumental (i.e., looking for money in work) motives—reach higher levels of success than self-centered achievers. Internal or intrinsic values “are those we uphold regardless of the benefits or costs” and instrumental values are those we support because they directly benefit us. Compassionate achievers are people who follow intrinsic values that have positive instrumental consequences; the consequences, however, are not part of their motives. A recent study of over 11,000 West Point cadets concluded: “Helping people focus on the meaning and impact of their work, rather than on, say, the financial returns it will bring, may be the best way to improve not only the quality of their work but also—counterintuitive though it may seem—their financial success.” Learning to be a compassionate achiever increases a person’s success not only at school and home but work.
A Wall Street Journal article outlining tips on “How to Get Ahead ” provided this general advice: “Top executives are attracted to people who lift their heads up from their desks and understand the impact their assignments might have on other departments—not just their own teams.” Employees that help each other are the engines of successful companies and top execs know it. Understanding what others need or need to avoid and then acting on that understanding is at the heart of what compassion is and what a compassionate achiever does. How do you foster compassionate workplaces and achievers? Shawn Achor—author of The Happiness Advantage: the Seven Principles of Positive Psychology that Fuel Success and Performance at Work—provides one way with his idea of social investment.
Social investment (building and strengthening the relationships of our social support network) in the people around us is one of Achor’s seven principles for fueling success and performance at work. Success is dependent on the quality of our connections to the people around us and compassion improves the quality. Achor talks about how positive social connections release a specific hormone — oxytocin — that increases our focus and attention while reducing anxiety. The more employees socially invest, the more oxytocin there is around the office. And the more oxytocin, the greater chance for success. In a section of Achor’s book called “Glue Guys,” he writes “The people who actively invest in their relationships are the heart and soul of a thriving organization.” Glue guys, as the Wall Street Journal describes, is baseball speak for players who “quietly [hold] winning teams together…Statisticians don’t buy that they exist, but psychologists do. And players and managers swear by them…They’re the reliable guys…players who are greater than their statistics indicate…If you have some outstanding role models who deal with pressure effectively, that glue is going to spill out of the bottle and help everyone.” Social investment is about spreading the glue so that success will stick.
So how do you invest? You can become a giver. Givers, according to Adam Grant (professor at The Wharton School and author of Give and Take), are people who “are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them” as opposed to takers who are exclusively self-focused. Grant warns, however, against becoming a selfless giver who becomes a doormat to others. Rather his type of giver is someone who balances the concerns of others with concern for themselves. A giver helps others without selflessly sacrificing their own interests; it is otherish as Grant likes to say. He cites Tania Singer’s neuroscience work on compassion to highlight the difference between who his givers are and those who empathize to a fault. Model givers not only help people network together and address otherish needs, but they ask thoughtful questions and patiently listen to colleagues and employees. An added benefit of being an otherish-giver is that it helps with self-compassion (concern for oneself) and that facilitates creativity. An office with more creative people is an office where innovation is constantly generated. Is it any wonder that top executives are attracted to employees who lift their heads off their desks to understand how their work affects others? Compassion brings meaning to work and, therefore, success to individuals, departments and companies. When employees find meaning in their work, they are three times as likely to stay with their company, they “report 1.7 times higher job satisfaction and are 1.4 times more engaged at work.” Compassion adds to the bottom line without even trying, something compassionate achievers intrinsically know.
ARTICLES & BOOKS:
Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work (New York: Crown Business, 2010).
Jessica Amortegui, Why Finding Meaning at Work is More Important than Feeling Happy, FastCompany (June 26, 2014)
Darren Everson, “Baseball’s Winning Glue Guys,” The Wall Street Journal (July 16, 2009).
Adam Grant, Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success (New York: Penguin Group, 2013).
Melissa Korn and Anita Hofschneider, How to Get Ahead As a Middle Manager: Try These Tips: The Wall Street Journal (August 8, 2013): B5.
Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz, The Secret of Effective Motivation: The New York Times (July 4, 2014): SR9.
Darya L. Zabelina and Michael D. Robinson, Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself: Self-Compassion Facilitates Creative Originality Among Self-Judgmental Individuals: Creativity Research Journal 22, no.3 (2010): 288-293.
Emotion is an integral part of a person’s rationality and vision—literally—of reality. From studies on people who lost a part of their brain’s frontal cortex to researchers at the University of Toronto testing how emotion influences vision, neuroscientists are demonstrating that emotion affects every aspect of cognition. Indeed, without emotion human beings find it difficult to be rational.
Historically, from Plato to Descartes to most modern economists, it has been assumed and argued that logical decision-making excludes emotions and feelings. The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio upends that historical assumption. Damasio’s research on people with brain damage to their frontal cortex clearly demonstrates that emotion plays an important role in logical reasoning. In the preface to his seminal work, Descartes’ Error, Damasio writes::
…the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process…When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions…[I] see emotion as at least assisting reason and at best holding dialogue with it…I view emotion as delivering cognitive information, directly and via feelings…the brain systems that are jointly engaged in emotion and decision-making are generally involved in the management of social cognition and behavior.
Logical decisions are made when emotions are a part of the reasoning process. If emotions are taken out of the reasoning process, as occurred in Damasio’s patients, irrational behavior increases. One of my favorite television and movie characters, Commander Spock of Star Trek, is now tarnished after reading Damasio’s various studies. For how would Spock respond to Damasio’s finding that “Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior”?
A person’s emotions or mood are such integral parts of cognition that they sometimes play the role of gatekeeper for how and to what extent each one of us sees reality. Our vision is literally affected by our emotions. Positive and negative moods, according to a 2009 neuroscience study, affect the way we see the world around us by either broadening (positive) or narrowing (negative) our peripheral vision respectively. The study clearly demonstrates that our moods modulate the activity of the visual cortex “with positive affect broadening and negative affect narrowing the distribution, or scope, of one’s field of view (FOV).” Our feelings about (rather than for) people even determine if we see them as attractive or not. The more honest we believe someone to be, for example (and reported by Robert Sapolsky), the more likable they are to us “and the more likable, the more physically attractive” we see them to be (and vice versa). The reason, according to neuroscience, is that we do not ‘see’ with our eyes; rather, we see with our brains. Because it is our brains that see and not the eyes, emotions and opinions define our vision of reality.
Shouldn’t we be trying to create more positive environments at home, school and work, simply based on neuroscience, if we are interested in attaining our goals? If positive values such as compassion and trustworthiness increase your awareness of the world around you and your likability, wouldn’t that also increase your probability of achieving success? It appears as though the color of success is rose; for the argument of wearing the proverbial rose-tinted glasses just became stronger.
ARTICLE & BOOK:
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Group, Inc., 2005).
Robert Sapolsky, “Pretty Smart? Why We Equate Beauty with Truth,” The Wall Street Journal (January 17, 2014).
Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 22 (June 3, 2009).
9/11 is a day when memories of patriotism and compassion come to life. The world witnessed not only the compassion of first responders rushing into burning buildings to save lives but the patriotism of young men and women volunteering to enter the armed services. It was a day where two values that are sometimes contradictory to one another became blended to such an extent that their combination created a moment in history where the world, however briefly, became one; an iconic symbol of that moment was France’s Le Monde headline that read “We are All Americans.”
On this day of remembrance and in honor of all those who have fallen in pursuit of their patriotism and compassion, I am making a clarion call for bringing compassion into patriotism. The mixture of patriotism and compassion creates a sum far greater than its two parts; for compassion eliminates the negative factor of patriotism (exclusiveness) while multiplying its positive factor (inclusiveness). The combination (a new form of being a ‘compatriot’) unites rather than divides.
Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, has written a well-known and in-depth essay about the inclusiveness and exclusiveness of patriotism. She writes: “Patriotism is Janus-faced. It faces outward, calling the self, at times, to duties toward others, to the need to sacrifice for a common good. And yet, just as clearly, it also faces inward, inviting those who consider themselves ‘good’ or ‘true’ Americans to distinguish themselves from outsiders and subversives, and then excluding those outsiders. Just as dangerous, it serves to define the nation against its foreign rivals and foes, whipping up warlike sentiments against them.”
The difference of simple patriotism versus patriotism with compassion is the difference between ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq & Syria) and ISS (The International Space Station). While ISIS excludes to horrific extremes, ISS is about taking inclusiveness to new heights. Where members of ISIS consider themselves patriots of a particular cause without compassion (extreme exclusiveness), astronauts of ISS represent a patriotism that transcends geographic borders and single-minded causes; they represent all humanity (expansive inclusiveness). Compassion, in essence, mitigates the weakness of patriotism (its exclusiveness of facing inward) by enlarging its strength (its inclusiveness of facing outward).
The evolutionary history of human beings is an inevitable walk toward an inclusive patriotism where compassion for all human beings is the norm rather than the exception. We keep taking steps toward making such a norm a reality but some who feel as though it is a purely “Utopian dream” and antithetical to their beliefs such as ISIS are only delaying and not stopping the rise of humanistic patriotism. 
Deems Taylor (seen here), a composer and essayist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and commonly referred to as “the Dean of American music,” addressed the idea of the broadening of patriotism in 1917 (near the end of World War I) when he wrote the following words in the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine:
“It is all a matter of what we mean by patriotism. We are all patriotic, but not always for the same thing. We have stopped thinking first about our state, or our town, or our neighborhood, and are putting the United States first. If we would only do that a little oftener we wouldn’t have to insist that this is the finest country in the world; other people would tell us so. Patriotism is a loyalty to something bigger than our immediate interests, and the history of the world is the history of the broadening of patriotism, the widening of the field of men’s loyalties. Cavemen were loyal to their families. Then they came out of their caves and formed tribes, and were loyal to those. The tribes settled down in villages, and the members of one village would defend it to the death against members of another. The villages became clans, and men were loyal to those. The clans united and became little kingdoms, or states, or duchies. Late in the Middle Ages the little kingdoms and duchies became fused into bigger ones, and men found that they belonged to nations. The great war came, and the nations of Europe split into great camps. Half the men in Europe were loyal to one side and half to the other. Now we are talking of a League of Peace after the war, in which whole nations will be patriots. For they will be loyal to something bigger than they are. Some day, I think, some day very far in the future, we are going to be world patriots; we are going to be loyal to the human race. But that, of course, is what people call a Utopian dream.”
My clarion call is really a call to modernize the definition of compatriot from one focused on being a citizen of a country (exclusive) to another that recognizes each person as a citizen of the world (inclusive). It is similar to President John F. Kennedy’s famous call in his 1961 inaugural address where he stated “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man” (we seem to forget that second line more than we remember it). Are we not more than citizens of a state but aren’t we also citizens of the world?
The world’s reaction to 9/11—as highlighted by Le Monde—showed that we have compatriots in every corner of the globe. The definition of compatriot should not be limited to just the people who share a country but it should include all who share in humanity. We are all compatriots of this world, shouldn’t we all be patriots of the human race? On this day, where so many sacrificed for the common good, let’s not ever weaken our patriotism by turning inward with hate and exclusion; rather, let’s honor our fallen heroes by strengthening our patriotism by looking outward with compassion and inclusion. Let’s honor those who sacrificed and continue to sacrifice for the common good by not limiting who can be part of the common good.
ARTICLE & BOOK:
Martha C. Nussbaum, “Teaching Patriotism: Love and Critical Freedom,” Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper No. 357 (The Law School at The University of Chicago, July 2011).
James A. Pegolotti, Deems Taylor: Selected Writings (New York, NY, Routledge, 2007).
Everyone’s heard the saying that “nice guys finish last” but reality and evolutionary science show that compassionate people finish on top…together. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man written 140 years ago to current neuroscience research showing that our brain’s structure is hardwired to be kind, generous and social rather than mean, selfish and asocial, the evidentiary support for compassion as the strongest instinct for evolutionary success in both the animal and business worlds as well as for creating vibrant academic and civic communities is wide and deep. Any doubt or skepticism for the idea does not come from science but from our popular culture; we commercialize “survival of the fittest” when science and reality show that it is really “survival of the kindest” that leads to more durable success.
We popularize, propagate and celebrate independent achievement above all other values and the cost of such exclusiveness has been hinted upon in newspaper headlines and academic studies over the last five years. “Almost 80 percent of [middle and high school] students,” according to a 2014 study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, “ranked achievement or happiness over caring for others.” The authors of the report highlight a “rhetoric/reality gap”—a mismatch between what parents and teachers say is important and what our children and students see us do—as the “root” cause of the student rankings. Another study from 2009 in a journal of business and economics reached the following conclusion after surveying the values of business students: “This evidence suggests that business school curricula that focus on acting ethically because it is the right thing to do may be ineffective. Our results indicate it may be important to openly discuss ethical behavior in a cost-benefit framework with the costs and benefits clearly defined.” The authors’ conclusion offers clear insight into the ideological undercurrent of the 2008 economic tsunami that swept over all of us.
The headlines show why we need to strive to be more than just achievers and why we need to weave compassion into learning environments at all levels of education. “Any healthy civil society,” as the Harvard Graduate School of Education report states, “also depends on adults who are committed to their communities and who, at pivotal times, will put the common good before their own. We don’t seem to be preparing large numbers of youth to create this society.” Do we really want a society of self-centered and self-absorbed achievers who answer ethical questions on a broad range of issues from a personal cost-benefit analysis? The idea that there has to be a choice between achievement and caring for others is a false dilemma. There is a better model for success that strengthens society as it strengthens the individual. We can prepare our children, students and employees to be compassionate achievers.
A compassionate achiever is someone who can apply their knowledge and skills to problems and opportunities in ways that strengthen themselves as well as others. A compassionate achiever is really a successful learner who thinks beyond him- or her-self; for learning is the process of acquiring knowledge and skills so that they can be applied with efficiency and effectiveness to problems and opportunities. The issue with education is that it has become a process of gathering and knowing facts to be recalled…period. While gathering and knowing facts is important, we should not be treating it as the ‘landing zone’ of education (via standardized tests). Rather, knowing facts should be the ‘launching pad’ for learning.
The ‘launching pad’ for learning perspective is used to achieve success in everything from business to sports. Knowing the fundamentals in sports, for example, is important but learning how to apply them on the court/field is ‘everything’ when it comes to success. Although a basketball team might have three of the best players in basketball, it doesn’t mean that they will “win it all.” While the 2013 Miami Heat arguably had three of the best basketball players on their roster, the San Antonio Spurs beat them in the 2014 National Basketball Association’s Championship because the Spurs were better at applying the fundamentals as a team rather than simply as individuals. The Spurs had a better understanding and sense about where and what each of their teammates would be and do in a given situation than the Heat. The soccer legend Pele has been saying for decades that such an understanding is the key to success. Success is not a solo/asocial endeavor but a connected/social experience (neuroscience has shown that this is also how the brain successfully learns). Alexander Graham Bell, known for his inventive genius and deep compassion, knew this when he said “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.” Compassionate achievers not only learn this early and continually but they live it daily and consciously and that is why they finish on top…together.
COMPASSIONATE SCHOOLS CONFERENCE:ARTICLES & BOOKS:
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2014)
Steven R. Cox, Kathy Parkison and Dianne M. Roden, “A Case for Teaching Business Ethics in a Cost-Benefits Framework: Are Business Students More Discriminating in Their Decision Making?: Mountain Plains Journal of Business and Economics Vol. 10 (2009)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
Matthew Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013)
Rick Weissbound, Stephanie Jones, Trisha Ross Anderson, Jennifer Kahn and Mark Russell, “The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults are Sending about Values,” Making Caring Common Project (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2014)
Intellectual and emotional success comes from nature interacting with nurture. Understanding how nature interacts with nurture should be the cornerstone for building intellectual and social development of all children. The traditional debate of nature versus nurture is a red herring that inhibits the making of constructive policies that strengthen our communities.
Researchers who focus upon the gene known as DRD4 (a dopamine processing gene) show that there is a reciprocal relationship between a person’s biological makeup (nature) and his or her environmental surroundings (nurture). DRD4 researchers label children with the “long variant” (low production of dopamine) of the gene as “orchids” and others as “dandelions.” While dandelion children can adapt and develop in any type of cultural and socio-economic environment, orchid children are “context-sensitive,” according to an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Bruce J. Ellis and W. Thomas Boyce, in that their “survival and flourishing is intimately tied, like that of the orchid, to the nurturant or neglectful character of the environment.” 
Various peer-reviewed studies clearly demonstrate that negative and uncompassionate home and school environments hurt the social-emotional and intellectual development of orchid children but have minimal to no effect on dandelions. However, the studies also show an amazing effect that compassionate and positive (compasitive) homes and schools have on both orchids and dandelions: while both orchids and dandelions succeed in a compasitive environment, the orchids thrive to such an extent that they surpass the dandelion children in social-emotional and intellectual learning. In other words, compassionate and positive home and classroom environments help all children succeed and they turn a potential learning deficit into an asset. Research in the field of child development not only shows that the nature versus nurture debate is not useful but that a combination of nature with nurture can unlock hidden potential in every child.
Reading recent articles in The New York Times and The Economist about the establishment of curfews in American cities as well as the spread of “bratophobia” in various parts of the country where children are being “barred” from bars and restaurants immediately brought to mind the studies of DRD4 researchers. The articles remind me of the American tendency to react rather than prevent problems from arising. DRD4 research, in contrast, highlights the role that science can play in helping us to create policies that avoid problems. While we tend to think that some children are naturally “brats” and others are naturally “good,” DRD4 studies clearly show that we can create conditions where all children flourish. Imagine, for example, classrooms where learning happens in a compasitive environment rather than classrooms as testing centers where darkened ovals are considered the measure of an education. Should we be focused on developing policies that exclude or include children? Which is better for strengthening our communities?
ARTICLES:
The bratophobia and curfew articles are:
For popular press coverage of orchid and dandelion children, please see:
“Give and Take” by Adam Grant is a must read for anyone interested in understanding the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of achievement and success in our highly interconnected world. Although many parts of Grant’s business oriented book are applicable to education, the discussion about “the strength of weak ties” (p. 47-49) is especially important because the success of our students partially depends upon how well our schools and classrooms nurture “the strength of weak ties.”
Where Grant defines strong ties as “close friends and colleagues” that we trust, weak ties consist of “our acquaintances, the people we know casually.” Mark Granovetter, a Stanford sociologist studying the success and failure of people attempting to change jobs, was the first to observe that weak ties were more likely than strong ties to yield new opportunities. “Strong ties provide bonds,” according to Grant, “but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information.” Weak ties are what children have mostly experienced in our country’s classrooms and schools but the “bridges” are slowly being deconstructed by the mechanization of education.
Grant’s book is centrally about how society’s “givers” as opposed to “takers” succeed more in the long run because the former can connect and “reconnect” to strong and weak ties. (Grant defines “givers” and “takers” along with “matchers” on pages 4-5 with this synopsis: “Whereas takers tend to be self-focused, evaluating what other people can offer them, givers are other-focused, paying more attention to what other people need from them.”) Grant provides a couple of reasons why givers rather than takers can reconnect to strong and weak ties. In addition to the karmic idea that “what goes around comes around,” he focuses upon the skills of his model giver—Adam Rifkin—by stating that “His secret was deceptively simple: he asked thoughtful questions and listened with remarkable patience.” Isn’t that what our classrooms should be about? In order to strengthen and reconstruct the “bridges” of weak ties in our schools we need to promote classrooms filled with thoughtful questioning and listening rather than standardized testing.
Because of our unmitigated focus on standardized testing, we have forgotten the importance of taking time to thoughtfully question. Striving to attain a bureaucratically derived standardized test score has become more important than learning how to ask the right questions. The skill of taking tests is useful for succeeding at one day exams such as the SATs and GREs but the skill of developing thoughtful questions is useful for everyday success throughout our working and personal lives. If we want our children to be able to provide answers in school, work and life, we must help them learn how to ask the right questions. In the words of E.E. Cummings: “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.”
In a society where listening to react has replaced listening to understand (i.e., watch any of the cable news networks and the growing polarization of our political system), the ability to “listen with remarkable patience” is truly remarkable. Our children grow up in the culture that we construct: in and out of school. They are the reflections of what we model and teach them. When we emphasize that the purpose of school is to recite one right answer (i.e., standardized tests), are we teaching them to patiently listen for the possibility that there may be a variety of answers for a wide range of problems? Listening to different perspectives is crucial for strengthening weak ties and we are teaching it right out of them. We need to heed the Native American proverb “Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.”
A 27 April 2014 article in the New York Times highlighted the importance of strengthening weak ties for our society, as a whole, when it summarized the results of a research project stating “Even the bit players in our lives may influence our day-to-day well being.” The authors of the article contend that a simple “fleeting glance” has shown to increase a person’s well being. “The social norm of avoiding eye contact seems harmless,” according to the authors of “Hello Stranger,” “but it might not be.” In schools, over the last decade, our children have learned more about how to fill in bubbles and less about how to learn together; more about darkening ovals and less about understanding each other. Stephen Hinshaw and Richard Scheffler, in The ADHD Explosion argue that it isn’t a coincidence that there has been a 41% increase in ADHD diagnoses of school children over the last decade; that is an estimated 6.4 million children with over two-thirds of them receiving prescription drugs.
Grant’s book came to mind again yesterday when I finished reading T.M. Luhrmann’s New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Our Flinching State of Mind.” Luhrmann writes that we cannot “stop the slight flinching expectation of the possibility of carnage we feel as we walk into a school or office building” because of (1) the way the media portrays incidents such as the Isla Vista rampage as events that will inevitably reoccur and (2) the belief that in society “now everybody is alone.” Grant’s “givers” clearly show that we are not alone and that when we are networked together, we can achieve “beautiful” solutions to seemingly daunting problems. Let’s put away the smartphones and URLs a little more often than we do and connect eye-to-eye via IRL (in real life) in an effort to strengthen weak ties. The strength of weak ties is important not only for building a healthy “state of mind” throughout American civil society but for teaching our children to thoughtfully question and listen to understand.
ARTICLES:
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