Dear fellow student,
Are you having trouble deciding what you're going to do for the rest of your
life and more specifically what you're going to do after you graduate from
school?
Do feel overextended and find yourself perpetually behind?
Do you simply want to take your life to the next level?
Competition to get into the 'best' jobs and schools has never been fiercer
among students. Internal pressure and external expectations have forced
students to deal with significantly more stress just to keep up with the
pack. For example, have you ever had to begin a new week already worn out
from last week's work and the consequences of your procrastination, knowing
you'll have to sacrifice sleep or free time just to keep up with a heavy
workload you're not passionate about?
Students emerging from adolescence into adulthood are given more freedom
than they've ever had and are responsible for making many formative life
decisions. Decisions made during this period of life set an individual on a
path towards a life of success or a life of distress.
Reviewer: Andrew Parodi
(Gervais, Oregon United States)
Michael Simmons' THE STUDENT SUCCESS MANIFESTO is exactly what I needed
right now. It reveals that success later in life does not depend on your
performance in school, that many of the wealthiest and most successful
businessmen and women did not do well in school. Further, there are
different standards of success. Maybe your idea of success is different from
that of the next person. What I appreciated the most, however, is Mr.
Simmons' revelation that we are our own teachers - each individual is his
own best teacher. That puts a hole in the notion that success in later life
is gauged by how well you performed on your SAT test.
I also appreciated the multi-cultural aspect to Mr. Simmons' work: within
the first few pages of the book he references a tribal ritual in Africa.
This is not typical in books about success. Only a few pages later he
references the scholastic performance of inner city African American
students, noting that according to statistics African American students do
not perform well in school - but that doesn't mean they aren't smart! This
point resonated deeply with me because I graduated from Jefferson High
School in Portland, Oregon, which is the high school with the highest
percentage of African American students in the entire state - something like
70-80%. I can honestly say that in many ways I received more education from
the African American student body than I did from the teachers at Jefferson
High School. School, in my opinion, and I believe in the opinion Mr. Simmons
expresses, tends to teach you how to follow rules, and then you graduate and
realize that life itself does not follow any rules. And, by the way, school
didn't teach you anything about life! On the other hand, many students at
Jefferson who were African American did teach me a lot about life, and one
of the few teachers at my high school who actually taught me about life was
the teacher of the class on African American History, a class I was not
required to take, but elected to take on my own. (And it was actually one of
the only classes where I felt the teacher actually cared about his
students.)
THE STUDENT SUCCESS MANIFESTO is exactly what I needed right now because
lately I have been battling with regret. In a little less than a year I will
turn 30, and I often regret that I did not do well in school, that I didn't
study harder and didn't take the whole process more seriously. But as Mr.
Simmons points out, your school performance does not really guarantee
anything after school. And there are different meanings for the word
"success." One type of success is happiness, and I'm relatively happy with
my life.
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