With the economy perpetually in turmoil, uncertainty in the efficacy of government and divisive issues winding their way through the country, future leaders have a difficult job ahead of them in terms of repairing the nation.
To address the issue of this nation's future, CBS anchor Scott Pelley assembled a panel of the country's thought leaders to get their thoughts on the rising generation and what it would take to get the country moving in a positive direction.
'We've lost the American competitive spirit. If you look at how we're raising our kids today and the culture that we are creating, we are spending so much time trying to make children feel good about themselves, that we've lost sight of putting the time in that it takes to actually make them good at something.'
The panel consisted of professors, CEOs, founders of nonprofit and for-profit organizations and local government officials. While the end view was that the upcoming generation is bright and capable, a main concern was the environment in which these children are being raised where culturally there is not much incentive to improve.
'We've lost the American competitive spirit. If you look at how we're raising our kids today and the culture that we are creating, we are spending so much time trying to make children feel good about themselves, that we've lost sight of putting the time in that it takes to actually make them good at something,' Michelle Rhee, former Chancellor of the Washington D.C. public school system and CEO of StudentsFirst, a no-profit organization dedicated to improving education nationwide and keeping quality teachers in schools, said according to CBSNews.
Will Smith is one person to whom the rising generation can look. In several interviews Smith focused on the importance of working hard toward a goal and the possibilities that open once someone makes a decision and moves toward it at any cost.
Although prevailing view holds that people are either innately hard-working or innately lazy, the reality is many people fall somewhere in the middle — they have hard working intentions but lack execution. The good news is work ethic is something that can be learned, at least according to a recent article on lifehack.com that encourages people to view persistence and work ethic for what they are: skills to be learned one small step and one little success at a time. Real change can happen when work ethic is seen as a habit to be developed rather than an unattainable feat.