Jennifer Wallace, author of Never Enough and Mattering, on why 'mattering' is the key to achieving highly
“You are not your failures, but you are also not your successes. You are who you are deep inside and that never changes.”
Jennifer Breheny Wallace spent many years as a producer at CBS's 60 Minutes, part of a team that won a Robert F. Kennedy Award for excellence in journalism, before moving into print journalism when she had her children. The work that made her name in education began with an article for the The Washington Post in 2019, covering two national policy reports that named, for the first time, students at high achieving schools as a group at serious risk of negative health outcomes. Those students were found to be two to six times more likely to suffer from clinical levels of anxiety and depression than the average American teenager. That finding became Never Enough, an instant New York Times bestseller, and led her to the idea that now underpins all her work: mattering. Her latest book explores why feeling valued is as fundamental to us as food and water, and what happens when that need goes unmet.
🎙️ Episode highlights
Jenny explains what she found when she went looking for the young people who were thriving despite the pressure: they felt valued for who they were at their core, away from any achievement, and they knew they were depended on to add value to people other than themselves.
She reframes the achievement question that parents constantly ask her. It is not a question of either mattering or achievement, but both. The pathway to high achievement, she argues, is actually paved with mattering. When you know you matter, you are not afraid to reach for high goals or to fall down along the way.
Jenny makes the macroeconomic case for why achievement pressure has reached boiling point, arguing that parents are betting on early success as a life vest in a sea of economic uncertainty, and that the life vest is behaving too much like a leaded one.
She describes the schools getting this right, including a Jesuit school in Cleveland where the bell goes at two o'clock every day and boys put their heads on their desks to hear about a genuine need in the world.
Jenny argues that belonging, which educators talk about often and rightly, does not go far enough. You can belong to a classroom, a school or a team and still not feel that you matter to the people in it.
Her advice for educators is to shore up their own resilience first, because our students' resilience rests on ours.