It’s hard to feel a sweeping sense of perspective when you’re stuck in traffic, or feeling buried by work, or overwhelmed by family demands. But those are exactly the moments when some words of wisdom from your elders — the people who’ve been there, like the ones below — can come in handy.

Each of the following insights comes from a conversation conducted during the Great Thanksgiving Listen, an annual initiative from TED Prize winner Dave Isay and his team at StoryCorps that asks people to interview an older family member or friend during the US holiday weekend. By participating, you could unlock new stories about your family or gain a different perspective on historical events, while ensuring your loved one’s story is preserved in the StoryCorps Archive at the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center. And you might just hear a piece of useful advice that will get you through a difficult moment. You can even create custom videos and sharable quote images from your interviews here.

If you’re an educator, get inspired by 5 creative storytelling projects led by teachers here, and learn more about how to participate in StoryCorps here.

Below, enjoy these insights from older Americans on the key ingredients for a good life, and get inspired to do your own interview for this year’s Great Thanksgiving Listen.

Think of hard times like bad weather — they too will pass.

Arden Fleming, 15, calls her grandmother Agneta Vulliet her “biggest role model.” Vulliet, the daughter of French immigrants, grew up in New York City, and she says she first learned about independence when she went to boarding school. Vulliet left school before graduation to get married, and ended up getting her high school degree at night school — while raising two kids. She studied art in college, where a professor was impressed with her determination and recommended her for a scholarship. Toward the end of their interview, recorded in October 2017 in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Fleming asked her grandmother for advice.

“What I want you to know and keep in mind is that your 20s are very turbulent and that it does get better,” Vulliet says. “You want so much for yourself, you have such expectations, you have so many wishes to succeed, and there’s a lot of anxiety that goes with how all that will take shape. I never want you to get carried away with how hard it seems.” She adds, “Growing up is a lot like the weather. Every time you hit the big storms that seem like they’re going to snow you under, it will change and get better — and the sun will come out.”

Draw inspiration from all the people you meet.

Bill Janz traveled the world as a journalist, and wrote a column for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about ordinary people who’d shown remarkable courage. In a 2015 interview with his 14-year-old grandson, Jasper Kashou in Freedonia, Wisconsin, the now-retired Janz shared memorable stories from his days as a reporter — of almost falling off an elephant into tall grass where a tiger was hiding while in India, and of crawling on his belly to avoid sniper fire in Croatia during the Bosnian War.

But when Kashou asked him about the person who’d impacted him the most, Janz spoke of someone closer to home. “A boy named Eddy helped me see a little bit about what life is all about,” says Janz. Eddy was a 10-year-old he’d written about whose leg was amputated due to cancer. “No matter what happened to him, he never gave up,” he recalls. “I called Eddy once at home, and the phone rang and rang and rang. Finally, he picked up the phone. I said, ‘Eddy. I was just about to hang up. Where were you?’ And he said, ‘Bill, I was in another room. My crutches weren’t near, so I crawled to the phone.’” Janz often finds himself thinking about that conversation. “He was only a young man, but he was teaching an old man to never give up,” Janz said. “I sometimes tend to give up and go do something else, and [he helps me] remember not to do that.”

Love your work — for the salary and for the people.

Bennie Stewart, 80, got his first job at age 7 — he’d run errands for his neighbors and get paid in chicken eggs. In a 2015 interview with grandaughter Vanyce Grant, 17, in Chicago, he talked through his many jobs. Stewart chopped cotton for $3 a day in 115 degree heat; bused dishes; cleaned buildings as a janitor; sold insurance; and eventually found his passion as a social worker and, later, as a pastor.

Grant asked his grandfather about what led him to these different occupations. “I love talking to people,” Stewart says. “I’ve been told I have the gift of gab, so I can talk and I can grasp things real fast. I always took pride in being able to listen to instructions and pick them up quick.” What lessons did he learn from his work experience? “It taught me that I can have something of my own and provide for my family and get some of the things in life that I couldn’t,” he says.

These themes echo those in an interview that Torri Noakes, 16, recorded with her grandmother Evelyn Trouser, 59, in 2016 in Flint, Michigan. Trouser worked in auto factories, first on the line and then as a welder. “My advice to everybody in my family: learn to take care of yourself. Don’t depend on anyone to provide you with anything,” Trouser says. She refuted any notion that her jobs were dreary. “I used to love going to work,” she said. “It’s the people you’re with that makes a job fun or not. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the people you’re with that make things different.”

Find mentors who can guide you and challenge you.

Allen Ebert, 73, reminisced about his working days in an interview with grandson Isaiah Ebert, 15, also recorded in 2016 in Flint. Ebert first worked as a welder in an auto factory when he was young and said the experience helped him once he entered medical school. “If you understand how something works, when it breaks you know what to look for and how to fix it,” he said. “Even the body is mechanical.”

When Ebert spoke about his experiences as a doctor, he impressed one thing upon his grandson: look for mentors. “The stuff you’re doing right now in school, you’re learning from people who know something you don’t know. Continue that throughout your life,” he says.

To find mentors, you should look beyond your bosses and teachers. “Just develop relationships with people whom you can observe, even from a distance, and see how they accomplish things,” Ebert says. “The way I look at it: in life, we probably make 95 percent good decisions and about 5 percent messed-up decisions. A large part of our lives as adults is fixing the mess of those few wrong decisions, and you can minimize them by just having people in your life who will challenge you and make you think twice, who will say, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound right to me.’”

Make the most of less.

According to StoryCorps, many people use the Great Thanksgiving Listen as a time to ask about family recipes. Along with step-by-step instructions, they receive a slice of family history, as well as life advice.

Some of the stories highlight one of the secrets to a life well-lived: learning to make the most of what you have. Kiefer Inson, 28, talked to his grandmother Patricia Smith, 80, about her classic tuna noodle casserole made with canned tuna. “When I was 18, I was married and had a child and did not have an outside job, so I’d go to the library, bring home cookbooks, and try the recipes,” Smith says. “Back then, we were on a very limited budget. A pound of fish cost 69 cents, so I learned to cook a lot of things with that.” Jaxton Bloemhard, 16, interviewed his mother, Bethany Bloemhard, 38, about Ukranian pierogies. She told him how her own grandmother would make hundreds at a time. “She’d tell stories about how they kept the Ukranian people alive,” says Bethany Bloemhard. “The Ukrainians grew potatoes like nobody’s business, and as long as you had flour, water and some oil, you could make the dough.”

Other stories point to the need to keep trying until you succeed. June Maggard, 87, spoke to her granddaughter Emily Sprouse, 33, about the recipe book that she’s kept for 30 years. “People say they can’t make bread or biscuits, or anything really, but you just have to learn the feel,” Maggard says. “That comes by doing.”

Learn more about participating in the Great Thanksgiving Listen. 

Featured art credit: Rémi Cans/TED-Ed, from the TED-Ed Lesson: “Meet the tardigrade, the toughest animal on earth.” 

Author bio: Kate Torgovnick May is a writer. This piece was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas article.

Kirill Yeretsky

Stories are powerful. Stories shape our ideas about what’s possible. What stories will your students choose to tell about the world? To expand your classroom toolkit of storytelling resources, try these 5 TED-Ed Innovation Project ideas with your students:

1. Listen to the voices of history.

Every human being sees world events from a unique vantage point. In Texas, TED-Ed Innovative Educator Lamar Schrader helped his students to connect with the living voices of history through a storytelling partnership with local elders. “Knowing what things my elder went through gave me a new way to look at various world events,” writes one of Lamar’s students. “I learned a lot about the Dust Bowl and the era of the Great Depression,” writes another student participant.

“Any chance to look at the world through another person’s eyes is an amazing opportunity.” — high school student, Texas

To bring this project to life, Lamar invited students to build a relationship with a senior citizen in the Lake Travis community, and to conduct a progressive series of 4-5 interviews with this person about their heroes, hard times, and high points. The final interview was recorded using the StoryCorps app and then uploaded to the Library of Congress for preservation. “As a scaffolding step in the process, students were assigned The Great Thanksgiving Listen, a similar project which allowed them to interview a grandparent over the Thanksgiving break. This allowed them the ability to practice asking and listening to a family member they were comfortable with, and also gave them practice using the StoryCorps app,” says Lamar. Other interview questions were inspired by the Legacy Project. In addition, “students were challenged to write two reflection papers that not only summarized stories from their elder partner, but also explored what lessons they had learned in the process. They were required to share these written thoughts with their elder partner as well, for their approval and to express gratitude for sharing.” Ready to try this with your students? Here’s a tip from Lamar: “Start by building a working relationship with the directors of senior living facilities in your community. Ask for their help and for their willingness to work with students, which will require patience, grace, and coaching.”

2. Create a school legacy project.

Do you know the history of your school? In Argentina, TED-Ed Innovative Educator Yau-Jau Ku decided to document the rich heritage of his 80-year-old international school, Asociación Escuelas Lincoln. To record memories of the school, students used the StoryCorps app to interview alumni. “The main objective was to see if this particular project could capture the elusive ‘special sauce’ identified by so many within the Lincoln community,” he says. The final result? A multimedia school portrait that incorporates photos, documents, and audio clips about the school’s past, present, and future. The coolest part of this project is listening to the recorded audio clips with students, says Ku.

“The ability to go back and listen makes this a living museum.” —Yau-Jau Ku, educator, Argentina

3. Bring storytelling events outside.

Education doesn’t stop at the classroom door. In Serbia, TED-Ed Innovative Educator Bojana Golubovic encouraged students and teachers to share their ideas with the community through live storytelling, digital storytelling, and creative writing on given issues. Her goal? To help students develop their creativity, communication, critical thinking, and collaboration skills. One tip: Aim for “big thoughts, small steps. No matter how many problems are there to be solved in the world, the only way they could be solved is by solving the problems in your surrounding,” she says.

4. Make a video tour of local landmarks.

“Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don’t.” — science educator Bill Nye. In Korea, TED-Ed Innovative Educator Sunkyong Choi demonstrated the truth of this idea with a video storytelling project. In this project, students take the viewer on a walking tour of local landmarks, sharing personal stories along the way. Each video is narrated in English, with English subtitles. The end result is an engaging introduction to what students care about in their school and community. The idea itself is easy to replicate elsewhere. One tip: if you’re not quite ready to have your students create a video tour of their school and local landmarks, try starting with a community map project.

Aim for “big thoughts, small steps.” —Bojana Golubovic, educator, Serbia

5. Build a culture in which everyone’s story matters.

Storytelling can be a powerful tool for change. In Minnesota, TED-Ed Innovative Educator Susan Herder led a video storytelling project to create a more inclusive school culture. After interviewing a diverse group of staff, students, and teachers, students created a narrative of their school that defines diversity as a school strength. Ready to try a similar video storytelling project in your school? Here’s a tip from Susan: “Provide students with multiple ways to record their interviews. This places an emphasis on the information they gather, instead of creating the perfect video,” she says. “The message is what is important.”

This article is part of the TED-Ed Innovation Project series, which highlights 25+ TED-Ed Innovation Projects designed by educators, for educators, with the support and guidance of the TED-Ed Innovative Educator program. You are welcome to share, duplicate and modify projects under this Creative Commons license to meet the needs of students and teachers. 

Art for this piece was created by Kirill Yeretsky for the Great Thanksgiving Listen from StoryCorps

Sometime between the first bite of turkey and the last slice of pie, it’ll happen: a lull in the dinner conversation. What will you do next? If you’re breaking bread with acquaintances, you might turn small talk into smart conversation or choose to talk about politics constructively. But if you’re with family and friends and want to deepen the ties that bind, then try asking one of the following 10 questions around the table, as recommended by StoryCorps founder (and 2015 TED Prize winner) Dave Isay:

What are you grateful for?

What are you proudest of?

What’s been the happiest moment of your life so far?

What’s been the hardest moment of your life, and how did you get through it?

What are the most important lessons you’ve learned in life?

How would you describe yourself as a child? Were you happy?

Who has been kindest to you?

How do you want to be remembered?

If your great great grandchildren could listen to this years from now: is there any wisdom you’d want to pass on to them? What would you want them to know?

If you could honor one person in your life — living or dead — by listening to their story, who would that be, what would you ask them and why?

Need some inspiration first? Below, check out 3 stories of gratitude and thanksgiving, chosen by Dave Isay. For more stories from the heart, listen to these 7 unforgettable StoryCorps tales and read Ties That Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps.

“I put an ad in the local paper and offered to cook Thanksgiving dinner for twelve people.”
“Scott Macaulay remembers how, 25 years ago, he started an annual holiday dinner for strangers who have nowhere else to go.” Listen to his story.

“If we left, they wouldn’t have nobody.”
“In 2013, Maurice Rowland was working as a cook at Valley Springs Manor, an assisted living home for elderly residents in California. He got his friend Miguel Alvarez a job there as a janitor last fall. But in October of that year the company that managed the home suddenly shut it down, leaving many of the elderly residents with nowhere to go. The staff stopped being paid so they all left, except for Maurice and Miguel. At StoryCorps they remembered caring for abandoned residents until the fire department and sheriff took over three days later.” Listen to their story. 

“A good man”
“Bryan Wilmoth and his seven younger siblings were raised in a strict, religious home. At StoryCorps, Bryan talks with his brother Mike about what it was like to reconnect years after their dad kicked Bryan out for being gay.” Watch the animated story.

The article above was adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas.ted.com article. Image credit: iStock

You don’t “find your calling,” you fight for it — and other lessons from people who found their passion (sometimes late in life).

Whether it was during a career aptitude test or in a heart-to-heart chat, chances are someone has talked to you about how to “find your calling.” It’s one of those phrases people toss about. But StoryCorps founder Dave Isay takes issue with it … specifically, the verb. “Finding your calling — it’s not passive,” he says. “When people have found their calling, they’ve made tough decisions and sacrifices in order to do the work they were meant to do.” In other words, you don’t just “find” your calling — you have to fight for it. And it’s worth the fight. “People who’ve found their calling have a fire about them,” says Isay, the winner of the 2015 TED Prize. “They’re the people who are dying to get up in the morning and go do their work.” Over a decade of listening to StoryCorps interviews, Isay noticed that people often share the story of how they discovered their calling — and now, he’s collected dozens of great stories on the subject into a new book, Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work. Below, he shares 7 takeaways from the hard-won fight to find the work you love.

1. Your calling is at the intersection of a Venn diagram of three things: doing something you’re good at, feeling appreciated, and believing your work is making people’s lives better. “When those three things line up, it’s like lightning,” Isay says. He doesn’t suggest that a person has to be a surgeon saving lives to feel like they have a calling; think of the diner waitress who talks to customers and makes them feel loved. How do you find this overlap? “You have to shut out all the chatter of what your friends are telling you to do, what your parents are telling you to do, what society is telling you to do,” Isay says, “and just go to that quiet place inside you that knows the truth.”

2. Your calling often comes out of difficult experiences. What lurks in that quiet place will be a defining experience — quite possibly a painful one. Isay points to an interview in Callings with 24-year-old teacher Ayodeji Ogunniyi. “He was studying to be a doctor when his father was murdered. He realized that what he was really meant to do was be a teacher,” says Isay. “He says that every time he walks into a classroom, his father is walking in with him.” This theme of people turning their hardest experiences into a new path runs throughout the book. “Having an experience that really shakes you and reminds you of your mortality can be a very clarifying event in people’s lives. Oftentimes, it leads to changes,” he says. “We spend a lot of time working, so it can really change your priorities in terms of work life.”

3. Calling often takes courage and ruffles feathers. Elsewhere in Callings, we hear about Wendell Scott, who became the first African-American NASCAR driver in 1952, and kept on driving despite threats against his life. From scientist Dorothy Warburton who dealt with extreme sexism as she conducted research to break the stigma around miscarriage. From Burnell Cotlon, who opened the first grocery store in the Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina because he wasn’t about to let his old neighborhood’s spirit fade. Calling, says Isay, very often starts with taking a stand against a status quo that simply isn’t acceptable, and then dedicating your work to changing it: “It’s work ignited by hope, love, or defiance — and stoked by purpose and persistence.”

4. Other people often nudge you toward your calling. Sharon Long had worked odd jobs most of her life. As Isay tells it, “Her daughter was going to college, and as the bursar was helping them with financial aid forms, she said quietly to herself, ‘I wish I could’ve gone to college.’ The bursar responded, ‘It’s not too late.’” Sharon enrolled in an art program, and on her advisor’s suggestion, took forensic anthropology as her science. “The advisor suggested it for no other reason than he thought it was the easiest science course for the science requirement,” says Isay. “But the minute she sat in that class, it was boom — this is what she was meant to do.” Isay tells this story to illustrate how calling, while very personal, is also relational. “People bump you this way and that way,” he says, often without realizing it. “When people find their callings, they want to honor those people who helped them get there.”

5. What comes after identifying your calling is what really matters. The old ‘finding your calling’ phraseology makes it sound like a calling is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow — you find it, and the story’s over. But Isay stresses that your calling is an ongoing process. “Understanding what your calling is — that’s very different than the blood, sweat and tears of actually doing it,” he says. Pursuing a calling may require going back to school or apprenticing; it may require starting a business. Often, notes Isay, it leads a person into a line of work that’s in service of others. “This book is basically a love letter to nurses, teachers, social workers — the people who don’t often get celebrated for the work they do,” he says.

6. Age is irrelevant. Isay found his calling when he was 21 and interviewed a man who’d been part of the Stonewall riots. “The minute I hit record, I knew that being a journalist and interviewing people was what I was going to do for the rest of my life,” he says. “I feel very lucky that lightning struck when I was very young.” But collecting stories for the book reminded him that a calling can be discovered at any age. The book includes an interview with someone who knew they wanted to be an NBA referee at age 15, and another who worked as an accountant for 30 years before discovering his passion for slicing lox. “Doing the work you’re meant to do is one of the most satisfying, remarkable experiences that a person can have,” says Isay, “so never give up.”

7. Calling often doesn’t come with a big paycheck. Another trend Isay sees in stories of people who find their calling: they often involve leaving a high-paying job for one that’s lower-paying but more satisfying. “The message we send to young people is that you want to do as little work as you can to make as much money as you can — that’s the dream,” says Isay. “But the wisdom in the StoryCorps archive is that there’s another, much more rewarding dream of taking risks and working very hard to live with integrity.” In the end, that’s the lesson he took away from writing this book. “There are no millionaires, no billionaires, no celebrities, nobody with a big Twitter following,” he says. “Just stories that can teach us a lot about lives fully lived.”

This article first appeared on Ideas.ted.com. To learn more about StoryCorps and the TED Prize, watch this TED-Ed Original video.

Featured image: Emily Pidgeon/TED

TED-Ed Innovation Projects are designed by educators, for educators, with the support and guidance of the TED-Ed Innovative Educator program. You are welcome to duplicate or modify this project to meet your school needs!

In this TED-Ed Innovation Project, educational technologist Jimmy Juliano shares his instructions for how to make a DIY recording booth:

1. Find a dedicated interview space. It doesn’t take much to DIY this at your school. I converted my office into a combination of lounge and walled-off sound station, but any private space will do the trick — heck, it could be a large closet in a classroom. Keep it simple and intimate.

2. Add a table and a couple of chairs. I bought an IKEA table and repurposed a few chairs from my library.  I also added a lamp, room dividers and art. The lounge is a comfortable and relaxing space for interview participants to learn about the process and gather their thoughts. The sound station is a private space for the audio recording to occur. Again, that’s all optional. All you really need is a small, quiet place to record audio.

3. Determine your goals. Are the audio files meant just for the interview participants, or do you want to put clips online? If you’re putting clips online, you’ll need a website and audio hosting. Depending on how you host audio files online, you may have to pay some web fees. I share all of the complete, raw interview files with interview participants through Google Drive, but I also cut out snippets to share with the world. For that, I use a free Weebly account and a paid SoundCloud account. (I upgraded to a paid SoundCloud account to obtain additional features, primarily to disable comments — I didn’t want to deal with any potential problems). All the hosting and sharing online can definitely be done for free with Google tools — I just loved the look and feel of embedded SoundCloud clips.

4. Decide what sound equipment to buy. I’m not an AV guy by nature, so I didn’t know exactly what to purchase. Happily, StoryCorps has a guide for replicating their process at a library, so I took their DIY manual and ran with it. A couple of cheap, USB mics plugged into a computer will work for recording just fine. If you’re looking for more optimum sound quality to capture that professional feel, you can purchase a digital recorder, SD card, and a couple high-quality, tabletop microphones for under $150.

5. Test, test, test! Make sure all of your equipment works. If it doesn’t, figure out why.

6. Name your recording studio. Once you’ve got the studio set up, give it a name! Here’s ours: mixtape1285.

7. Set up a registration process to schedule interview times. I tried a few different methods before landing upon Google Calendar Appointment Slots. It’s worked marvelously.

8. Ask a few student pairs to record interviews. Find your “go-to students” so that you can start building momentum and test the process. A StoryCorps interview may be a bit of an abstract concept, so ask participants who you know will enjoy the experience, and start from there. Here are some great interview questions to choose from.

9. Spread the word in school. Promote the studio as a resource for history class projects, connect with StoryCorps, send out emails, talk to your best teacher friends, run interview “theme” weeks, try it out in your TED-Ed Club  — anything at all to inspire students to hop into the studio and share their stories.

10. Share what you learn. Here are 3 specific things I’ve learned since opening the studio doors: Number one: the students love the space. There’s always a “wow” moment when they enter the studio. The lighting, room dividers, and audio setup really create a professional, yet intimate feel. Number two: the interviews always go longer than students anticipate. On average, students talk for about 20-25 minutes, and they are always shocked when I tell them it was that long. Many tell me that it feels like 10 minutes. Number three: every interview has featured some sort of a revelation. Interview pairs have been friends going into the experience, but there is always that moment where something new is learned about the other person. It’s powerful and touching.

Success can measured in many ways: the number of students who use the recording studio, the number of teachers who incorporate the interview model into their classrooms, and — of course — student and educator testimonials. So far, all of the direct feedback I’ve received has been positive. Here are some quotes from students and educators:

“One day students can look back on their interviews and conversations and remember a moment in time when they were in high school. I wish I had that.” — Joe De Rosa, Social Studies instructor and TEDxLFHS organizer

“I would definitely recommend it. It made me very nostalgic, and I really enjoyed reliving some great memories.” — student

“I really liked the feel of being in somewhat of a real recording studio.” — student

One of my biggest hopes is that this project builds empathy and fosters an environment where all of our stories matter. If you have questions about how to make this project work for your school, please reach out on Twitter to TED-Ed and me!

To learn more about the TED-Ed Innovative Educators program, click here.

Everyone has a story. What’s yours? What about your parents and teachers? Your elders and mentors? Now is a great time to add all of these stories to the largest living archive of human voices on the planet: StoryCorps

The first draft of history is happening all around you

What if Anne Frank hadn’t kept a diary? What if no one could listen to Martin Luther King’s Mountaintop speech? What if the camera hadn’t been rolling during the first moon landing? Actively listening to the voices of the past and the people who matter to us is important, and StoryCorps wants you to lend your voice to history, too. To learn how, watch this TED-Ed Animation below.

To start a conversation across generations, try a few questions like these suggested by StoryCorps.

For more lesson ideas, sign up for the TED-Ed weekly newsletter here >>