I read 3 books in July. Here is a blurb about each of the 3 books I read in July.

“Lessons from My Teachers” was written by Sarah Ruhl, a playwright, poet, teacher, and professor at the Yale School of Drama. This book expands the definition of “teacher” beyond traditional academics to include parents, children, mentors, etc. Here are some lessons that stood out to me.

Is all of school a way of saying goodbye to your parents to make room for other teachers in life? Is the beginning of school a way of saying your parents can’t teach you everything, and you need independence of mind to go on your way through the world?

• You never know where rejection might lead. Sometimes a rejection leads you to your next collaborator or friend.
• Piano/band teacher – taught us we were worth teaching, how to practice, how to sit up straight, how to show up every week, how much dull repetition it takes to make something beautiful, and how to make a mistake in the music and keeping playing and keep moving forward.
• You are the expert of your own story.
• The very young and very old remind us to be in the moment. They walk slowly and look around as they walk.
• Students sometimes make the best teachers.
• So many events, rituals, and practices that seemed essential pre-pandemic turn out now to be optional.
• We need to keep finding teachers over the course of our lifetime. Finding a teacher is also a process of letting oneself be taught – which is a kind of bravery.

One’s attitude toward almost any situation can make it an occasion for a teaching or a learning. What am I teaching right now? What am I learning right now?

Always be deeply interested in other people and the world.

The blue whale swims and swims, and when she wants to eat, she simply opens her enormous mouth and water and garbage and krill flow in. That big blue whale has an automatic sieve system to sort out what’s food and what’s waste. Be like a blue whale. Listen to all criticism, but filter out what doesn’t serve you.

One of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.

4 out of 5 stars

“Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – And What We Can Do About It” was written by Jennifer Breheny Wallace, an award-winning journalist and a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Jennifer spent three years traveling across the U.S. interviewing parents and students. What she found is sobering: our culture’s obsession with optimizing performance has contributed to rising rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among young people. Here are some main takeaways.

At the heart of toxic achievement culture is a painful message kids are absorbing – that their worth depends on what they produce: their GPA, the number of social media followers they have, college admissions, and resume-building activities. They have become proxies for their identity, and many students feel they only matter when they succeed.

Parents, often with the best intentions, unintentionally reinforce this mindset. Wallace describes how families “weave individualized safety nets,” making constant day-to-day decisions aimed at maximizing achievement and preventing anything that might derail future success. In a hypercompetitive world, it’s easy to believe that a “good” college is the gateway to a good life.

Wallace argues that the antidote to toxic achievement culture is mattering – the belief that you are valued for who you are at your core, not for your output.

• Ways parents can show kids they matter
  • respond in a warm and sensitive way
  • explicitly tell kids how much they matter to you
  • express unconditional acceptance – even after a failure
  • show warmth through affection
  • engage in mutual activities
  • teach kids how to ask for help when they need it and model these skills yourself
  • make chores mandatory without an allowance – giving kids real responsibilities builds resilience by showing that their existence and actions genuinely impact others
  • make volunteering mandatory and widen their circle of concern and caring
  • Avoid engaging in harsh criticism, invalidating emotions, and comparing kids negatively to others.

As parents, we sometimes think our role is to help fuel and support our kids’ ambition. In a hypercompetitive culture, kids sometimes need the opposite. They need adults to prevent them from sacrificing their minds and bodies on the altar of achievement and to teach them how to build a life they won’t need substances to escape from.

Wallace also highlights what truly predicts long-term well-being for college graduates, and it’s not prestige. Students who reported the highest life satisfaction had deeply engaging college experiences, such as:

• taking a course with a professor who made learning exciting
• having a professor who cared about the student personally
• having a mentor who encouraged the student to pursue personal goals
• working on a meaningful project across semesteres
• participating in an internship
• being active in extracurricular activities

What stayed with me most from this book is Wallace’s reminder that beneath all the pressure, fear, and competition, parents ultimately want the same thing: for their children to live meaningful lives filled with connection, purpose, and joy. We want them to feel valued, and to help others feel valued too. We want them to live lives that truly matter.

This book was fascinating, eye-opening, and deeply relevant.

4 out of 5 stars

“The Truth in True Crime: What Investigating Death Teaches Us About the Meaning of Life” was written by J. Warner Wallace, a cold-case homicide detective. In this book, Wallace recounts true crime stories from his real-life experience and provides readers with applicable life-changing truths. This book can be considered a practical wisdom book and a Christian evidence book. Honestly, I didn’t really like the style of writing. It came across as didactic and pastoral, and every chapter aggressively pivoted into a sermon. This was a formulaic hybrid of true-crime and heavy-handed pastoral sermonizing. With that said, here are some lessons:

• Embrace friends who hold an objective view of virtue. Identify friends who care about all of you: spiritual well-being, physical well-being, emotional well-being, and ethical well-being.
• Your marriage preaches. Preach the right message. Your marriage is an image of Christ’s love for the church. Commit to communication.
• Constructing an identity based on shifting cultural trends rather than objective moral truth leaves individuals fragile and lost.
• Healthy guilt acts as an internal alarm signaling a need for grace and correction, whereas destructive shame isolates or distorts identity.

Your worship decides your destiny. Where do you spend your money? How do you spend your time? On what do you spend your talents and abilities? What captivates your thoughts and attention? What do you trust/on what do you rely? What do you publicly proclaim? How do you behave?

Trauma occurs when our perceptions of the world and our role in it (our “global” beliefs and goals) are disrupted, especially if we assumed nothing bad would ever happen to us. Traumatized people find themselves “reappraising the traumatic event to perceive it as more consistent with their pre-trauma global beliefs and goals . . . or revising their global beliefs and goals to accommodate their experience.”

• Resilient people aren’t permanently paralyzed by the stress of their trauma. Some rebound and continue moving forward. Some flourish, rebounding to levels far above where they were prior to the traumatic event.
• People who make sense of and find meaning in their suffering express better psychological and physical well-being and are less likely to be depressed, mentally ill, or experience PTSD. They are also less inclined to overdrink or become addicted to medication and less apt to commit suicide.

3 out of 5 stars

I look forward to reading, learning, and sharing more with you soon!