How to Raise Successful People

Simple Lessons for Radical Results

By: Esther Wojcicki

Narrated by: Andrea Gallo

The godmother of Silicon Valley, legendary teacher, and mother of a super family shares her tried-and-tested methods for raising happy, healthy, successful children using trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness: TRICK.

Esther Wojcicki - "Woj" to her many friends and admirers - is famous for three things: teaching a high school class that has changed the lives of thousands of kids, inspiring Silicon Valley legends like Steve Jobs, and raising three daughters who have each become famously successful. What do these three accomplishments have in common? They're the result of TRICK, Woj's secret to raising successful people: trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness. Simple lessons, but the results are radical.

Wojcicki's methods are the opposite of helicopter parenting. As we face an epidemic of parental anxiety, Woj is here to say: relax. Talk to infants as if they are adults. Allow teenagers to pick projects that relate to the real world and their own passions, and let them figure out how to complete them. Above all, let your child lead.

How to Raise Successful People offers essential lessons for raising, educating, and managing people to their highest potential. Change your parenting, change the world.

©2019 Esther Wojcicki (P)2019 Recorded Books

amazing !!!!

read this book and you will feel like that everything is possible. one of the most powerful book that I ever read

The first quarter of the book is GREAT, but then…

The last 3/4ths are just tiring anecdotes about how successful her kids are/the people around her, I totally get being proud of your kids. But reading between the lines, it’s seems like much of the success of her kids has to do with the fact that she was a model and her husband has a PhD and is a renounced physicist. So duh, your kids aren’t out there fugly and dumb, running and gunning the streets because of this. They have the advantage of genetics on their side. Second, she raised them in an up and coming tech bubble in a fantastic school system. So she was able to expose them to movers and shakers of the world. She name dropped Maye Musk as a friend and a bunch of other big tech people. So yes, if you raise your kid in that environment, chances are they will meet and mingle with these people and their lives will go a certain way.
Listening as a child of immigrants who grew up in poverty in the US in terrible neighborhoods where my friends were joining gangs and getting arrested by 5th grade… I felt like she was a little privileged in her thinking.

I do however think that her principles of raising kids independent, instilling grit, and fostering trust and respect are fantastic rules to live by. I just wish she would acknowledge that the environment she put her kids in also wildly influenced their paths.

I’m reading this book as I am a mother to a 17 month old boy and soon to be mom to a newborn baby girl. I’m trying to read up and learn how to raise them to become productive members of society in a healthy loving environment (something I did not get myself). So I did find some of those tips on focusing on character traits important (I’ve read this in another parenting book as well). I do however know full and we’ll how important environment is to shaping a child’s world view and perception of themselves. For example almost all kids who go to private school end up going to college.


Reading between the lines, I gather you need to use her “TRICK” method while also putting your kids in the best environment possible and have them mingle with the movers and the shakers of the world. Get to the best neighborhood in the best school district possible and make friends with rich people and captains of industry… easier said than done, but if your husband is a renowned physicist and you are a model, you might have a decent chance.

Take the anecdotes with a grain of salt but internalize the Trust, Resilience, Independence, Confidence, Kindness part.

Loved this book and listened to it multiple times.

Love love love this book! If people apply these principles, (what they CAN apply to in their specific lives because every household is different) it will help raise better people. The helicopter and tiger parenting is ruining the future generation. People whom I know who didn’t like this book are the ones who read this book, looking for a secret recipe for raising successful kids! Sorry, there is no such recipe. It’s a lot of TRIC, life long TRIC.

A must read!

Excellent book for parents, educators, grandparents..
Thank you for sharing your parenting and educational experiences!

Required reading for parents

Spells out in specific ways how to approach parenting while respecting your child, as well as making the parenting journey easier and more practical for you, the parent.

Practical

Great practical teaching and incredibly basic which makes the book all the more enjoyable and inspiring.

Very inspiring

Very easy-to-hear book with pretty interesting point of views. Also has practical advises and to-do ideas. Fully recommendable.

some good points

The author makes some good points about how to raise kids and fix societal problems. However be aware that the author pushes socialist ideas like empathy (feel sorry for people and helping them because you want to engage in altruistic charity) rather than a rational approach based on enlightened self-interest. Also not sure if it's a good idea to teach kids to trust people in a world where they will eventually discover most people aren't trustworthy.

10% parenting tips, 90% look how great I am

struggled with the constant "look how great my girls are and how great I am". I expected and was looking forward to some of that, especially at the beginning, but it just never ends. also missing is virtually any mention of Stan, her husband. Throughout the book is I, I, I. The author states that Stan was busy, but to read the book he was never there. I liked her "trick" concept and her approach. I could have done without all the other stuff.

Largely beneficial read

As with most of the books on the subject, there were parts that I liked and benefited from and there were segways where I disagreed. However, this book is based on the overriding foundational principle of TRICK (more described in the book) which I found very convincing and making sense. Definitely recommending for soon to be parents.