arrange • compose • conduct
Great leaders aren’t born. To become a great leader requires practice, repeated failure, study, and, yes, training. Just like great teaching, leading is not something you just wake up being able to do. I’m wrapping up my third of five days of intensive leadership training today. Twenty years into a […]
There is a time before you’re good at anything when you’re trying it for the first time. Here’s a word for the feeling that goes with it. Trying something new – putting yourself out there – is scary and exciting. Our family has adopted the Glennon Doyle portmanteau of scited […]
How do you execute needed change most effectively? I’m embarking on the Aces Retreat this weekend. We’ve had some form of retreat every year since 2008 (except for 2020) and have been going to the current location every year since 2018. The challenge is always to balance traditions – things […]
This year, I’ve gotten more insistent to my students who are involved in multiple extracurriculars: I ask me to send them their sports or other schedule and a plan for equitable balance. The secret is, I often can and do look at their schedules myself. (They’re all online!) But I […]
It’s not because they can’t…and it reflects a philosophy about teaching. My middle- and high-school aged kids get a lunch packed, complete with a daily note, as they walk out the door. I’ve made sandwiches on homemade bread, packed their bags with a balanced meal, and put it out for […]
Don’t pursue the career where you have the strongest skill. The most successful among us have a constellation of skills in the same skill area. A constellation is just a grouping of stars that suggest a shape because they’re clustered together in the sky. Likewise, successful people have multiple skills […]
The battles worth fighting can take a lifetime to complete. That means you’re going to be fighting the same battles the entire time, over and over again. Battles of advocacy, battles for emotional well-being, righteous battles, battles against complacency. None of these are easily solved in a month, a year, […]
There are no hacks for the hard work. You can make easy work faster with a shortcut hack. You can make complex work less complex by streamlining it via a hack. None of those are the hard work of your job. The hard work is creative, or it’s interpersonal, or […]
How do you reconcile your knowledge of how long a project will take with others’ estimates? For me, it’s knowing you’re going to need one extra day – and secretly building it in. The more projects you work on, the more you are able to plan effectively, and a big […]
Should you “speed run” your teaching? If not, what’s the alternative? I asked my kids, what is the opposite of a “speed run” – the method of playing a game as fast as possible. (For example, the record speed run for Super Mario Bros. is under 5 minutes.) But some […]