The Problem with Banning Social Media Is That It’s Social

This article reviews valuable (but not very surprising) data about the Australian social media ban. uses the evidence to explain why efforts like this won’t work—and what strategies have a better chance. This is an important read for educators, parents, and anyone else who is trying to figure out how to address social media concerns with young people. Spoiler alert, here are his recommendations (still read the full piece):

• Complying to social media restrictions without being pushed to the social periphery.

• Recruiting high‑status early movers.

• Providing alternative social infrastructure (sports, clubs, online and offline spaces) that fills the time and connection the platforms used to fill.

• Pairing all of this with friction at the device level (defaults, screen‑time controls, age‑gating at operating‑system level).

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better

Full transparency, I’m still reading this one. Nonetheless, I feel it’s worth sharing. ’s newest book explains “why limits are the key to stimulating creativity, innovation, collaboration, and personal contentment.” You’ve likely experienced this yourself without realizing it. I’m excited to put what I have learned so far into practice. For those of you looking for a tool you can use immediately, here’s a downloadable workbook from IDEO via ReMarkable that uses constraints to promote innovative thinking.

Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

Dr. Lenny Wiersma recommended this book, so I gave it a shot, and it did not disappoint. It’s a quick read that weaves research and case studies into an understandable argument. By the end, you walk away with a toolbox of practical skills to harness your inner voice and better manage your response to life’s challenges. Being skilled with the voice in your head will transform your daily experience.

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1. What irks you? A baby screaming when you wake? A dishwasher that needs unloading? A load of laundry to be folded? A dog barking at the door? Your partner asking you questions? The day of work ahead? The ant on the counter? The toy on the floor? The hangover? Back pain? Life has no sympathy for your objections to it, no recourse for injustice. Think of the tick looking for a warm, safe place. There is no safe harbor. There will always be a storm and the attitude with which we face it.

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2. There’s a reason momma keeps the cookies on the top shelf. Beware the vendors who want to live in your pocket, selling their yummy snacks or giving them away with fervor. They aren’t concerned with how your story ends. Whether it be food or tech or some other guilty pleasure, keep your sweet treats further than arm’s reach. Place them somewhere where the work you put in to retrieve them is always the more significant part of the journey. See how much sweeter life is then.

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3. If you have been wronged by someone, if they have caused you pain, slighted you, undervalued you, stabbed you in the back, fooled you, embarrassed you, shattered your world into a zillion unfixable pieces, then you are deceiving yourself. These things can only happen to a victim, and you are not that. You are a liver of life. You are suffering, and joy. The more experience you embrace, the stronger you become—if you have the will to expand beyond, and leave behind, your tiny shelter at the center of the universe.

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4. We drink alcohol because we cannot stand how we feel without it, because we believe something external will make us feel better, because we became convinced that what we are looking for is beyond our capacity, but there is a greater fear in that separation we need to face. In Buddhism, they say the difference between heaven and earth is a hair’s breadth of separation. Alcohol—and any other toxin that clouds the mind and is objectively detrimental to health—increases that separation.

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5. Try for a day, even an hour, to do one thing at a time. You take pride in your productivity and your hustle, yet you avoid the more challenging feat. Amidst the ceaseless barrage of colored dots on screens, the mad shouting of lost souls, and the impatient ticking of machines, it is only this—your pure, undivided attention—that makes you human. One thing at a time. This is how you save your life.

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6. “A wicked child is the most beautiful thing in the world” (from Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson). What makes a wicked child ugly? Is it that she does not understand how our rules apply to her? Is it that he does not submit to the embrace of our authority? Or is it that we would prefer this child to share our desires, that in this child we hope to find the acceptance and belonging that we demand? A wicked child challenges the notion that we are in control. A wicked child shows us our true reflection and invites us to see life with them, if we could only reach out and hold that little hand.

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7. Is pornography not a form of sexual misconduct because it does not suit the legal jargon? Is the world sexual confusing? Or misconduct? Can we speak plainly? Or is it ethical to kill a woman for adultery because the law says you may do so? Were any number of atrocities in the course of history moral because of a shortsighted and timid law? You cannot live in the gray areas any more than you can live on the extreme precipices. A path is plain enough. Life is a journey toward clarity. If, like Lao Tzu says, you “have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear,” then these questions will not be so perplexing, and you may finally stop making excuses and start giving your best effort to discover the truth.

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8. Look! There is a man. His name is Quintin. Quintin is making a fool of himself. He has had too much to drink, and he is saying mean things that he thinks are funny. Judging by the eye rolls and the awkward laughter and the squirming, his audience wants to escape him—you among them. Yet, you hold your tongue. You let him charge along without a word of counsel. Does this man not deserve your help? Is it inconceivable that he too may be writhing in some unspoken pain? You might say, “Quintin, I believe you are intoxicated, and your jokes sound mean. I thought you ought to know about it, and I’d like to help if I can.” You could be smoother, but, regardless, would it hurt you? Would it hurt him? Does it hurt to reset a dislocated shoulder? Of course it does, and of course you should, unless, of course, you lack the skill or the courage.

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9. Arrogance. When you perseverate over the need to be right. When you imagine someone apologizing to you, or when you refuse to forgive a perceived betrayal. Arrogance is denial and delusion. You are arrogant, when you judge, when you grow impatient with incompetence, when you believe someone is wasting your time, when you believe the present circumstances do not meet your standards. You are arrogant more often than you would ever care to admit. Can you see it? Or have you censored the truth of the matter? You must discern the knot before you can begin untie it.

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10. You check your email, your stats, your likes, your follows. You hope for subscribers and followers and acceptance. You study the analytics. You comment. You play the game as they tell you to play it. You know the right thing to do: don’t check the messages, don’t pick up the device, don’t pull down on glass that can’t be pulled. And you do it all anyway, again and again, until you find yourself, once again, fuming. And still you go on like this. What earthquake will it take for you to realize the beauty of rejection? You don’t need any more permission than this to go forth and live your life. It’s true. You don’t belong to a fleeting digital maelstrom. You belong to the web of lost and hopeless wanderers. It is there you will find the liberation you seek.

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Is Claude Mythos “Terrifying”? | AI Reality Check

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work, including his podcast. After Anthropic announced, to the world’s horror, that its new AI model Claude Mythos was too dangerous to release to the public, Newport researched the issue and put together this 25-minute reality check (just over a week later). It’s fantastic. He reminds us to dig deeper, to practice healthy skepticism, to discover the truth through critical thinking. How many of us took the bait and formed our conclusions based on headlines alone? As someone who is interested in AI but has a hard time with the technical jargon, I know I did. I too went up to someone and asked, “Did you hear?!”

While there are lots of reasons to be concerned about AI, that does not absolve us from gathering and analyzing information to understand the issues we face as a society. This is one of my major concerns with AI and education. I worry that students won’t learn how to think critically and conduct research because AI can think for them. I asked Gemini, “Can you find expert analysis that gives me a real picture of whether or not I should be concerned about Anthropic’s Mythos?” This is better than nothing, but I didn’t get this podcast pushed to me.

This made me stop because it convinced me that we need to be mindful of how we curate our stream of information in the age of the algorithm. If we take the easy path to knowledge, we are destined for shallow thinking at best and mindless regurgitation at worst.

Men’s Health Isn’t Just Personal—It’s Structural

I’d rate my interest in the well-being of boys and men as above average, so I was excited to find a new voice in the work of . This made me stop because I think his argument is a really important one that is easily missed: paradigm shifts require system-level thinking.

This makes me think of a diagram from Making Learning Whole by David Perkins. It illustrates three responses to “trouble spots” of teaching.

The more I look at it, the illustration isn’t great. It seems like you will end up at “trouble spots” no matter what you do, but I digress. If a student fails a test, and our instinct is to blame the student—quick and easy and ineffective—then we teach the same and likely get a similar outcome. On the other hand, if a student fails a test and we try to find an explanation for that failure, perhaps a breakdown in the system (learning, practicing, studying, test-taking, review), we are less likely to end up experiencing the same trouble spots.

If you have no interest in learning more about how social systems are contributing to the “masculinity crisis” people are talking about, that’s fine. It’s not why I included this piece. Maybe Paul Gorski’s “Avoiding Racial Equity Detours” or Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Douglas Murray’s The War on the West speaks to you. Regardless of the system du jour, my point is the same. If we don’t like the outcomes—and if we want different ones—we can’t just blame the individual.

Build Mental Toughness & Perform Under Pressure

For those of you who are interested in fitness and human performance, I highly recommend Dr. Andy Galpin’s podcast Perform. His episode with Dr. Lenny Wiersma might be my favorite so far. They discuss sports psychology and performing in high-stakes situations.

Here are two highlights that really made me stop and think:

• Self-talk, especially done in the second or third person—weird, I know—is an accessible and effective way to coach yourself. When you are looking for guidance, imagine someone you really admire, someone who has given you valuable feedback in the past, and think of what that person would say to you. This voice sounds much different than “I,” and it is a lot more helpful.

• Emotional control is an impossible goal, while emotional regulation (the ability to respond to emotional situations effectively) and emotional co-regulation (the ability to regulate someone else’s emotions) are underrated skills for both player and coach. We have all seen an expert implode due to emotional dysregulation, and we have all been saved by a composed soul who has lowered our temperature. These are invaluable human assets that I don’t see AI replacing any time soon.

Whether you are interested in athletic performance or professional competency, this podcast offers powerful and practical tools.

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Thank you for reading! Please feel free to share this work if you think a friend would enjoy it. To receive more insights on principled leadership, performance, and the well-being of boys and men, subscribe to my Substack or visit nicholasnowak.com.

Cheers,

Nick

This article is dedicated to building social health for boys and men. While both men and women are increasingly lonely (particularly those from low income backgrounds), men are less likely to reach out for help. Men are in need of intimate male friendships, yet they sense a paradoxical obligation for self-reliance. As a society, we generally see all-female spaces as more positive than all-male spaces, which doesn’t help men who have an easier time connecting through group or shoulder-to-shoulder activities. For a slew of reasons, people generally spend less time fostering friendships as they get older, and social circles shrink for men as they age.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Men can give and get help with shared challenges, connecting with the guys who have their back. I propose the following pillars for supporting the social health of boys and men.

Celebrate being a boy

It’s OK to be boys, as in close friends who would do anything for one another. Resilient bonds are a staple of a positive masculine identity. We shouldn’t scoff at these relationships as “bromances.” We should celebrate them. More on the value of these friendships when we talk about connection.

It is important to begin with this structural pillar so that we build around a framework of affirmation.

We are trending in the right direction here (see the image below for Americans’ views of “masculine” men), but I’ll say it anyway: it’s OK to be a boy. Each boy born into this world is not complicit in some original sin. Boys are good.

The negative narrative about boys and men is misleading. says that it is mostly untrue that young men are turning “en masse to the right, adopting misogynistic outdated views about gender, masculinity and gender roles.” He explains how recent research (2025) indicates that young men rank “being wealthier than those around you,” “winning and being the best” and “being sexually active” as the lowest-ranking attributes for men. Also, a high share of young men describe caring for kids as manly.

We’ll look at the values people think we should place more emphasis on soon.

As we consider the rites of passage to manhood, let’s remember that boys also deserve joyful traditions that celebrate their identity as boys and their commitment to one another.

Optimism is a virtue

American optimism is sinking. A recent Gallup poll suggests that we are just about as low as the depths of the 2008 financial crisis.

While there are some compelling specimens to raise doubt about the future success of men, I urge us to avoid the generalization instinct. Most men are not touting their supremacy, hurling insults, or abusing their power over others. Men who do so will undoubtedly suffer with regards to their social health.

For the ordinary man, we should continue to emphasize growth and strengths, rather than foundering and deficits. We should be suspicious of anyone who requires fame, and we should honor wisdom over charm.

Optimism is simply confidence in the future, and the future is simple in the sense that it does not exist. We can best generate optimism by creating the conditions that are most likely to lead to future success. Focusing on conditions that cultivate peace of mind will chart a brighter path.

Connection is essential

Boys and men are less likely to reach out to a friend for support. Nonetheless, I believe this may be our best entry point for prompting men to connect and get the help they need. With mindful community building and a little nudging, friends will step up.

argues that men’s health outcomes are shaped by systems as much as choices. I agree that we should “leverage trusted spaces and relationships.” It’s in the third spaces—community/social organizations, athletic and recreational activities—where men often feel like they can be themselves.

At the same time, I think men don’t want to taint those feel-good spaces with their baggage. However, outside of family, it’s these spaces that offer the most connection. It’s these people who are best positioned to listen, relate, and help.

There is a lot of ground to be gained in the market of connection. The demand is high. I have this silly idea of starting a “garage hopping” movement where groups of men get together in garages and talk about challenges and whatnot. I’ll keep you posted.

(When I was a kid—I did not do this—garage hopping was the term for driving around and looking for an open garage that you could steal beer from. Apparently, it’s still a thing, though it would not be an approved activity in the next section.)

Ethical confidence is inspiring

When it comes to supporting men’s mental and social health, I think we’ll actually be more effective if we talk with boys and men about practicing ethical strength rather than self-care. From my experience as a teacher, I don’t see the mental health language landing with boys.

Boys want to feel respected and worthy, and I believe the yoking of self-confidence and ethical judgment can offer just that. Ethical confidence shifts the focus from what is wrong with you to who you want to be, a more purpose-driven narrative. While boys view mental health as something you have or lack, ethical confidence is a project that requires work.

I’m not suggesting we abandon mental health support or self-care. Rather, I encourage us to recognize the existing barriers to help-seeking behavior and brainstorm innovative ways to incentivize character development, which includes elevating mental health and peace of mind.

A 2025 Harvard study links “strong moral character” with reduced risk for depression, anxiety, and cardiovascular disease (a reduction of 21–51%). This is new data telling an ancient story.

We are still getting tangled in this search for a “healthier masculinity,” in the deconstruction and reconstruction of man. We aren’t going to cook up an enlightened state of masculinity with some academic breakthrough. It’s time to call off the hunt and reconnect with our human nature as caregivers:

Many threads from many traditions weaving the same pattern for thousands of years.

We don’t need a new playbook for men. In our efforts to reconstruct masculinity we have uprooted men and abandoned the wisdom of our ancestors for snake oil. It’s not my prerogative to play the missionary. Still, when it comes to developing an ethical framework that fosters connection and purpose, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Vulnerability is courageous

Speaking of ethical confidence, we ought to recognize vulnerability as an act of courage. By seeking help and being open with others, we strengthen our relationships and grow more resilient. Take a look at the male characteristics people think we don’t place enough value on:

Caring, open about emotions, soft-spoken, affectionate—these are the traits of a person who is willing to be vulnerable. If you are a man, and you feel pressure to subdue these qualities, the data is giving you permission to notice that pressure…and to let it dissipate amidst the dreamworld in which it was imagined.

As I’ve said before, the characteristics of vulnerability don’t come at the expense of confidence, assertiveness, risk-taking, or physical strength. They complement them.

Dads matter

A boy looks to his father’s example. Pew found that 66% of men say their father has been “highly influential in shaping their views about what it means to be a man.”

This is pretty striking. It confirms that helping men become good fathers is worth the investment. And the data would suggest that dads are indeed getting better. Men are more involved as parents. Instead of limiting the scope of their caregiving to financial contributions, they want to be present in their kids’ lives.

As I charge through my 30’s, I find myself talking with more and more friends about being a dad. It’s helpful to discuss the challenges of fatherhood with a buddy. These conversations keep us connected and feeling less isolated. They are reassuring and heartening, genuine and joyful.

Recommendations

With all that said, here are my closing recommendations:

• Where all-boys communities exist, ensure they include ceremonies and rituals that celebrate a boy’s growth into a caring young man.

• Place a high value on close male friendships.

• Avoid generalizing and catastrophizing the state of men. Instead of pouring gasoline on the flames of a “masculinity crisis,” create conditions for optimism and invite men to join a positive human project.

• Develop ethical confidence through a consistent practice rooted in ancestral wisdom.

• Make space for and encourage vulnerability.

• Facilitate conversations about fatherhood.

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Thank you for reading! Please feel free to share this work if you think a friend would enjoy it. To receive more insights on principled leadership, performance, and the well-being of boys and men, subscribe to my Substack or visit goodmenders.com.

Cheers,

Nick

What is this?

Work I came across that made me stop and think. If I find something I feel is worth sharing—no more than 3-5 sources—I’ll include it in these posts. Here’s the first edition. Let me know what you think, and feel free to send me any recommendations. I’m always looking for curated content that gets to the heart of the matter.

The Substack-ification of American Religion

“Why young men aren’t really going back to church, why liberals are sadder than conservatives, and how ‘Substack-ification’ is transforming the future of Christianity, media, and politics.”

interviews about the state of American religion. The general takeaway is that what we perceive to be a spiritual resurgence in America is an illusion. Whether it be for political or cultural reasons, people are claiming to “practice” spirituality, but the reality is that on the whole we are moving away from traditional spiritual institutions.

Here’s my favorite line from Burge:

You can’t just pick and choose. It’s like a three-legged stool. You need all three legs. If you pull one out, it falls apart. A lot of people are doing that with religion right now. They’re walking down the buffet line, picking one piece, putting it on their plate, and calling it a spiritual life. That doesn’t endure.

This interview made me stop and think about how we have (collectively) fallen for the buffet line in America. Sure, we all “get what we want,” but this comes at a cost:

• Slow-moving and congested lines.

• The first eat first. The last eat last. Never together.

• Cost and waste are both higher.

• Quality is generally lower.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good buffet as much as the next person, but this is food for thought. What is our spiritual practice? And does it sustain and connect us?

Leadership Trends That Will Dominate in 2026

• Human-Centered Leadership

• Purpose-Driven Cultures

• Agility and Change Management

• Continuous Upskilling

• Leadership at Every Level

Is it just me, or is it a little sad that these might be considered revolutionary ideas? I don’t disagree with the Center for Leadership Studies’ assessment that these will be important initiatives in 2026, and I included this short article in my roundup because these really should be standard practices.

We are living the consequences of disconnected leadership and digital lives lacking purpose. Our technology is changing at hyperspeed. We can’t keep up, and we aren’t willing to move slow. At the same time, we seem more willing to accept incivility as the status quo.

These predicted trends are noble goal posts. I only hope that “human-centered” does not translate to “more selfish.” As it stands, we seem to be abdicating our responsibility for easing the suffering of future generations.

Chromebook Remorse

I came across this article in The New York Times after writing A “Truth” Campaign Against Big Tech: How to Give Kids Agency and Purpose. I hope more schools like McPherson Middle School are brave enough to go back to the “old ways” while continuing to help students grow by offering them insightful experiences and valuable knowledge.

Supporting kids with tech use includes mindful guardrails. Lots of schools are afraid to deprive kids of their “tools,” especially given the flood of AI-based innovations that promise to improve learning. I’m not sure which way it will go, but I am convinced of this: humans, especially children, are not built to spend the majority of their day “connecting” with a screen. None of us will live to see the day when screen-based learning satisfies our hunger for meaning.

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Thank you for reading! Please feel free to share this work if you think a friend would enjoy it. To receive more insights on principled leadership, performance, and the well-being of boys and men, subscribe to my Substack or visit nicholasnowak.com.

Cheers,

Nick

The American Institute of Boys and Men recently published The Landscape of Pornography Use by Men in the United States. The report shared the following results:

• More than 80% (many estimates exceeding 90%) of adult men in the US report exposure to pornography in their lifetime, and 40-70% within the year.

• About half of men aged 25 and under report weekly viewing, and usage generally declines with age.

• One US study reported 95% of male university students view pornography at least weekly and 62% at least several times a week.

• Rates are highest among younger men, and the trend line is moving upward. The mean age of first exposure to pornography in the US is 12.

David Sasaki articulates the issue with precision:

“Pornography use is a near-universal feature of male development in the digital age, but the effects of that exposure are varied and insufficiently studied.”

That’s where we are at. While I appreciate the call for additional research, I’m not holding my breath to learn more about the impact of pornography. I have seen enough to be concerned with porn being a staple of male-development.

As a man, I don’t think we should settle for this dirty little secret. I assume most of the men in these studies would prefer to remain anonymous. To be clear, I’m not suggesting we ride in on our high horses and strike down the wrongdoers. There wouldn’t be many of us left standing.

What I am suggesting is that we call pornography what it is: sexual misconduct.

What percentage of men truly believe that using pornography is a demonstration of ethical conduct? How many men believe the industry makes the world a better place? How many think this is a skillful allocation of resources? We can pose lots of questions, and we can always finish by asking, “Is it the right thing to do?”

I’m going to bet the majority of men share a common, perhaps near-universal answer. My question for men is this: how do we close the gap between what we know to be right and what we believe will make us happy?

First, we need to understand our relationship with pornography. Why do we crave it? What is the motivation for this desire? How does using it—before, during, and after—make us feel?

Next, we need to believe that using pornography is indeed a form of sexual misconduct. We have to recognize that sexual craving is different from love. We have to acknowledge that using pornography is an expression of sexual activity, and this activity does not honor a long-term, loving commitment to another person. We must accept the fact that our use of pornography is a reflection of our sexual energy, how we care for it, and how we care for the sexuality of others.

Finally, we will need to decide if we are willing to make a vow to refrain from sexual misconduct. If we come to terms with pornography being a form of sexual misconduct, and if we gain the insight that our lives are better without it, this decision is a natural one.

Making a vow to refrain from sexual misconduct has become particularly muddied for young men. Because of the many instances of sexual misconduct perpetrated by religious and other institutional leaders, pornography can seem like a better “alternative.” I don’t buy this.

As a society, as institutions and traditions, secular and spiritual, we can be stronger. We can care more about our ethical consistency, not by becoming more judgmental, but by becoming more disciplined.

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Thank you for reading! Please feel free to share this work if you think a friend would enjoy it. To receive more insights on principled leadership, performance, and the well-being of boys and men, subscribe to my Substack or visit nicholasnowak.com.

Cheers,

Nick

I said if I ever opened a gym (2025), I’d put a version of this quote on the front door:

We need to be upset.... Don’t come to this center to feel better; that’s not what this place is about. What I want are lives that get bigger so that they can take care of more things, more people. (Charlotte Joko Beck, American Zen Teacher)

Still no gym, but I have reworked the philosophy of GoodMenders using Beck’s insight. I’m designing peak performance training and leadership development for boys and men to help them grow stronger.

I founded GoodMenders in 2020 to build moral masculinity, principled leadership, and better culture. Those are still important pillars for me, and this evolution reflects a sharpened focus based on my personal experience and skillset.

Here’s the updated mission:

Broken down further, it looks like this:

1. Build a foundation of principled leadership.

2. Establish a practice of ethical discipline.

3. Multiply that base by strength—in body, mind, and spirit.

4. Cultivate sustainable, measurable, inspiring, difference-making performance.

I’m excited to blend my professional experience in education and leadership with my knowledge as an athlete, coach, and NSCA Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist® (CSCS). I’ll be integrating scientific, evidence-based best practices for sport performance with ethical discipline and leadership training to help athletes, teams, and professionals grow stronger so that they can handle more.

Going on six years, GoodMenders maintains a commitment to helping boys and men find their way. I’ll continue to advocate for their well-being and success, encouraging them to have a positive impact on their communities.

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Principled Leadership

Below are a few highlighted points from an article I wrote two years ago defining principled leadership:

• Principled leadership is a philosophy of leading based on sound moral judgment and an alignment with the greater good.

• Leadership has become a commodity. Another badge of honor we can obtain if we read the right books, do the right training, spend enough money. Principled leadership is none of the above. It is a continuous practice.

• Principled leadership is not carved in stone. Even our principles grow with us.

Principled leadership is your foundation, and I believe everyone has the capacity for it. Leadership is a skill worth practicing. It’s the vehicle for influencing the lives of others. When it is paired with quality principles...well, you can run the logic on that one.

Not everyone is a leader, but everyone can be. The world needs good leaders who model courage, confidence, composure, concentration, and compassion (the Five C’s of principled leadership, a framework for consistency under pressure). I’m not blowing smoke here. With training, practice, and experience, everyone can learn to lead.

A commitment to principled leadership is the first step to high-impact performance.

Ethical Discipline

The framework continues with ethical discipline. Here, the compounding interest of countless, proper decisions pays dividends. As Robert Collier famously said, “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” Life will have its ups and downs, achievements and setbacks, but consistent, ethical discipline will keep you on the path. Though we will wander, whether high or low, we regress to the mean.

Ethical discipline is hard work. The idea of it sounds nice. However, when we are faced with friction, we often take the path of least resistance. Ethical discipline is not that. It is:

• Doing what is right, no matter the difficulty, and no matter our unwillingness to do it.

• Maintaining a consistent practice that generates positive growth.

• Always paying attention. Being mindful of distraction, concentrating on relevant experience, and differentiating between the two.

I believe ethical discipline is the most challenging variable in this equation to master—and the most important. It is the throughline of peak performance. Yet, all too often, we abandon the rigors of our code for the comfort of our desires. We take the extra drink, stream the next episode, check for notifications, skip the exercise. In essence, we lose our way as we submit to our insatiable hunger for a more pleasant experience.

We do not stumble upon our best and remain in a blissful state of supremacy for the rest of our lives. We should never stop practicing. We should never stop learning. The moment we think we are the best is the moment we stop growing. Ethical discipline is a commitment to growing stronger so that you can be of use.

It is with ethical discipline that we grow through pain. Charlotte Joko Beck says, “The discomfort and pain are not the cause of our problems. The cause is that we don’t know what to do about them.” By practicing moral conduct, we stop trying to escape our discomfort and start facing it. This is critical as we prepare to build strength.

Strength

We multiply the value of principled leadership and ethical discipline by developing physical, mental, and spiritual strength. Strength is good. There is nothing wrong with being strong. With strength, we are capable of carrying more weight, embracing more pain, and not collapsing under either. And, as principled leaders, we use our strength to help the team.

As an athlete and coach, I have always been enthusiastic about sport performance and fitness. For several months, I channeled that enthusiasm to become a CSCS. I loved learning how to use evidence-based practices to achieve peak performance. Through this journey, I studied the many factors that go into developing strength, and I adapted a four-step approach from the NSCA to guide future training:

1. Needs Analysis: identify context-specific training targets.

2. Program Design: design a program that will meet specific training needs for desired outcomes.

3. Practice and Training: execute the program to build strength and improve performance.

4. Testing and Evaluation: measure growth, evaluate progress, and adapt.

Like everything else we have covered, getting stronger is a practice and a progression. We go from off-season to in-season to post-season and back again. We build endurance to build strength to build power, and we rest along the way (for the right amount of time). We understand what kind of exercise to do, how to do it, when to do it, and why we do it. We learn how to stay focused on what matters, how to handle pressure, how to meet the moment. To perform well, we need to eat well, drink well, train well, and recover well.

It all adds up. The stronger you are, the higher the coefficient, the greater the growth. The more you grow, the more you can handle. And remember, if you don’t use it, you lose it, especially with age. The older you get, the more the world dumps on your shoulders, without notice. Don’t skip leg day.

Finally, a note on spiritual strength. The soul needs feeding. This is where people sometimes get tripped up and wonder, “How do I train my spirit?” Though fewer people participate in organized religion, many still consider themselves spiritual. The spirit has power over the mind and body. In Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, he discusses the importance of spirit while reflecting on his experience in the Nazi concentration camps:

Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful. (1946)

Most of us will never live through the same horrors as Frankl, and many will never discover spiritual freedom as he did. Because he did, he was able to choose his attitude despite his nightmare of a reality. He was able to love when he had every reason to hate. While the Nazis tried to break down his body and his mind, he continued to exercise his soul. He recognized that “the salvation of man is through love and in love.”

While the body, mind, and spirit are interconnected, spiritual strength transcends the limitations of the mind and body. If spiritual practice is a gap in your training regimen, you’re leaving much of your strength on the table.

I’d suggest figuring out what feeds your soul. Then, sow those seeds.

High-Impact Performance

Through this blend of training and practice, we cultivate sustainable, measurable, inspiring, difference-making performance, what I call high-impact performance. Not only do you perform well, but that performance adds value. People want you in the room. They grow stronger with you there, more confident and competent. You are someone they can count on, and you are someone who leads with compassion.

Albert Einstein said, “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” When principled and disciplined leaders who are strong in body, mind, and spirit consistently and unconditionally practice compassion, they lead with purpose. Purpose has a gravitational pull. Without it, we have the feeling of being lost in space.

In popular culture, we conflate peak performance with anger, but this is not a sustainable approach. The samurai were taught to never draw their sword in anger, as they knew this led to reckless violence—wasted energy. To have a high-impact, we cannot waste our energy. Instead, through sound moral judgment, awareness, and consistency, we direct our energy to be whatever we are in the moment, and to love that moment.

Whether it be a workout or the locker room or game day, a high-impact performer sees the job that needs doing and gets it done, with joy and without complaint. High-impact performers do not wish that the circumstances were less challenging (if they do—because they are human—they observe those thoughts but do not perseverate). They do not waste their energy hoping that life will be any different than it is. They just deal with it as it is. They can handle more.

Now, to address the question a lot of people might be asking: why does GoodMenders focus on training for guys? It’s not that I think men are more equipped to be high-impact performers (women are outperforming men in significant ways, particularly in education). It’s that I am more prepared—based on my experience working with boys and men in education, leadership development, and athletics—to help male athletes have a positive impact. This is a landscape I know well, and I’d be selling you snake oil if I said I specialize in everything.

While I feel a bit like answering “Why boys and men?”, I do believe that many male athletes are struggling—between school, work, family life, mental health, and connection—even if it doesn’t seem that way on the surface. I also believe they play important roles in their communities as influencers and leaders. This is a space I’m excited to step into because the potential for good is through the roof.

So that’s what I’m cooking up at the moment. I’m a father, husband, and educator trying to have a positive impact while maintaining a beginner’s mindset—always studying to learn and grow. I believe in the cultivation of confidence, belonging, humility, and vulnerability, and I am seeking the joy of doing meaningful work. This philosophy is the latest progression in that effort. From here, it grows.

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Building a stronger community starts with a single connection. If this framework resonated with you, please consider sharing it with a coach, teammate, or friend who is all about impact.

To stay updated on this work and to receive more insights on principled leadership and performance, subscribe to my Substack or visit goodmenders.com. I am grateful for your support!

Despite some encouraging momentum in the battle to reclaim childhood from screens, adults are still failing to convince kids to hop on the less-tech bandwagon. As a teacher, here’s my take on the situation (and from speaking with my colleagues, they share similar concerns). We know that lots of screen time and social media are crippling for young people, and we are trying to do something about it. The elders are telling the juniors that they need protection from their evil screens, and the youth aren’t buying it. They think we’re freaking out, overreacting, dramatizing. They also see us using all the tools we demonize. In short, we haven’t figured out how to reach them.

To their credit, young people actually are paying attention to the news. According to a 2025 Pew Research Center study, 48% of teens say social media harms people their age, up from 32% in 2022. Still, parents are significantly more concerned, with 55% being extremely or very concerned about teen mental health compared to 35% of teens. According to the study, 74% of teens say social media makes them feel more connected to their friends, and only 14% think social media negatively affects them personally. Meanwhile, social media is the top reason parents give when asked about what most negatively impacts teens (44% say social media has the biggest negative impact).

Adults and kids aren’t on the same page regarding a major health concern. At this juncture, we are faced with two possibilities.

1. Big Tech and their products have become too powerful. We are too late. There is no going back, and we will continue to grow more dependent on devices and less capable of functioning on our own. Screens win.

2. We have yet to outsmart Big Tech and their products. We know we have a societal affliction, and we just need to put our heads together and figure out the cure. The ultimate comeback story.

Ever an optimist, I’m going with option two, and an analogy to the battle against Big Tobacco gives me hope. It wasn’t so many moons ago that everyone knew cigarettes were bad for you, and they smoked them anyway. Young people were motivated to rebel against authority, but not the tobacco companies. Instead, they rebelled against the well-intentioned adults who told them to stop smoking. Eventually, the truth® campaign flipped the script and convinced the youth that companies were exploiting them (and killing them), and that same rebel spirit was directed toward manipulative corporations. Checkmate.

Aside: The tobacco industry has continued to shake its stubborn fist. Big Tech will be no different. That’s fine. As I like to tell my own kids, that’s just the way it goes.

Moral of the story: we are still at the stage where kids are rebelling against parents and teachers (uncool authority figures) telling them to get off their screens. They aren’t worried about the long-term health effects that we’re shouting about. They aren’t upset with the Big Tech villains.

To me, they mostly seem frustrated that we are treating them like incompetent fools rather than competent decision makers. And until we offer them some agency around this issue, which seems fair enough considering we don’t plan to drop our own phones down the well, we shouldn’t expect to have much, if any, success.

Apart from flipping the script on Big Tech companies, I think there are a few key messages for parents, educators, and youth advocates to rally behind.

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Collective Relevance

Rather than scolding kids for their dependency, adults need to convince young people that developing agency is relevant to their future success. This will likely take a collective effort from people who are far more successful and influential than me. Unfortunately, many of the cultural icons kids look up to incentivize hyper connectivity. We need people with social capital in business and athletics, not just academia, to advocate for moderate screen time and social media use. Until that happens en masse, parents and teachers will have to do their best.

Jonathan Haidt has already made the argument for a collective approach in The Anxious Generation (and we’ve seen a promising response). Without a collective effort, we will fail. If we only offer case-sensitive solutions to deal with the heavy users, we will die by a thousand cuts.

There should be a clear understanding between schools, families, and students prior to communal participation. Families should not be surprised by their kid’s access to technology and the internet after they join a community. I think this should hold true for all youth organizations—sports, camps, etc.

There should be a common message about the relevance of modest screen time for developing agency:

Less dependence on screens and media leads to greater personal agency and the likelihood of achieving one’s goals.

Adults need to frame this message positively, not with threats nor scare tactics. This might look like a coaching staff forbidding their players to take out phones during practice times (collective effort) while emphasizing the need for optimal focus to improve performance (relevance). A negative approach would be having an unclear phone policy and then chirping at a player who checks Instagram between drills: “And you wonder why you’re on the bench?”

This all sounds easy peasy as I write it. The truth is that achieving collective relevance will be difficult. Getting kids to believe that putting their devices away is relevant to their well-being and success will suck.

No Pain, No Gain

Any serious effort to limit screen time will come with challenges, and adults will need to embrace them. Kids will be bored. They will act out. They will get into real-life mischief instead of online mischief. When you remove the pacifier, they will scream, and parents and educators will bear the brunt of their outcry. All that said, just as you shouldn’t treat a crying baby with anger and judgment, we will need to approach kids with compassion and empathy.

This, I have found, is where the rubber doesn’t meet the road. We love the idea of unplugging our kids until we have to entertain them all day and keep them out of trouble. It is easier to cook dinner while your kids watch Encanto for the fifth time than it is to cook dinner while they scream at you and play another round of Destroy the House. But when you say no to watching Encanto for the sixth time, there will be blood.

And so we build the walls of our cells.

There’s really no way around this one. Being tech dependent is a bit like sitting comfortably in the eye of a hurricane. To leave the shelter of the digital bubble is to risk extreme discomfort—excommunication from the world. Between freedom and imprisonment, there is a violent storm to endure. What allows us to take the plunge toward freedom, to endure the storm, is agency.

Agency, the vehicle to freedom, is the best incentive we have to lose our attachment to our devices. We cannot have real agency when our phones and tablets and laptops steal our focus, when they tap into our wiring and influence our thoughts, which influence our feelings and actions, which define the brief experience we call life.

Here’s where we are really up against it. Young people (and, let’s face it, people of all ages) enjoy the experience that their devices construct. The strategy then is not to lecture kids about the relevance of agency. The strategy is to create conditions for agency so they can experience its relevance.

Insight Through Experience

As a kid, I was fortunate to go to summer camp. There, I gained the insight that I enjoyed life more without a screen. I didn’t have classes with someone lecturing me about digital citizenship. Digital what? No thanks. Instead, I got dropped off at the lake without screens and had the time of my life. I had proof, real-life experience, that hanging out in the woods with my friends, unplugged, was way more fun than any alternative.

You can’t force a kid to practice digital wellness (take it from someone who has tried to teach it), or whatever you want to call it. Kids do what they enjoy. Without an enjoyable alternative to their screens, they will choose the screens every time. Adults are the same. People working with kids must understand this. You can tell me I should cut my right hand off until you’re blue in the face. I won’t do it. I’m convinced that life with my right hand is more enjoyable than life without it.

As adults, we are responsible for creating conditions for young people to gain the insight, through direct experience, that they are better off spending less time plugged into their devices and more time practicing agency.

Summer camps do a pretty good job with this—if they don’t allow campers to bring their personal electronics. Schools are trying, and parents can do their best, but I suspect other third spaces—physical locations outside of the home (first place) or workplace/school (second place) that facilitate social interaction, community building, and social support—will have a greater impact. I’d recommend parents identify good ones and get their kids involved early.

The Path to Purpose

It won’t be social media bans or digital citizenship courses or even phone-free schools that reverse the “great rewiring” of the youth. It will be the collective understanding that developing agency and detaching from screens offers a better experience that is purpose relevant. We all have a purpose that motivates us. You cannot tell someone what their purpose is. It is discovered. As adults working with young people, the best we can do is to nudge and encourage that discovery as skillfully as possible.

To finish up, I’ll resurface four paraphrased tips from David Yeager’s 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People (2024):

1. Ask, don’t tell. Respect young people by treating them as adultlike. Adults are asked; children are told.

2. Find ways to honor the young person’s status — for example, point out their competence and expertise — rather than pointing out your own authority. Avoid an I-know-better-than-you attitude.

3. Validate whatever negative experiences young people may have had. Treat their feelings as real and legitimate. Then look for a way forward.

4. Presume agency. Acknowledge that the young person can make up their own mind, and then make it clear that you are rooting for them to make a good choice. Also, explain how their actions have broader consequences in the world.

When adults use a “mentor mindset” (high expectations, high support) rather than an “enforcer mindset” (high expectations, low support) (Yeager, 2024), they will be far more likely to help kids find a genuine path to purpose.

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This post originally appeared on Medium with The Good Men Project.

Every so often, an idea clicks into place like a puzzle coming together. It’s nice when it happens (e.g., the concept of sustaining alignment instead of juggling the unworkable “work-life balance”). This idea doesn’t have so many puzzle pieces. No complaints from me on that score.

Initially, I was thinking about a progression of skills for boys to practice in an effort to develop a positive masculine identity, and the Five C’s—courage, confidence, composure, consciousness, and compassion—clicked. I still teach the skills to boys, and, the more I have thought about them, the more I believe the Five C’s are essential for principled leadership.

This framework has evolved since I originally introduced it in 2024. Since then, I have replaced consciousness with concentration, and I have revised the language to reflect my current thinking. I also updated the visuals, including a beautiful sketch on a piece of construction paper I stole from my kids’ craft closet because I was displeased with the AI slop. We’ll discuss the benefits of deliberate training with these five skills, as well as the downward slide—and eventual spiral—that occurs when selfishness, distraction, volatility, timidness, and panic rule the day.

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Courage

We begin with courage.

As Maya Angelou said, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” Every person has the capacity for courage: the will to act, despite the fear that those actions will bring painful consequences.

How does one practice the skill of courage? By doing scary things. Once done, and you realize, like Sanka Coffie, that you aren’t dead yet, things are less scary.

Confidence

Confidence follows courage. When people are confident, they shed self-doubt. They are honest and vulnerable. They find their voice and use their full potential to make a positive impact.

Leaders should be confident, not arrogant.

Confidence is believing you belong, that you are a part of the greater good. Arrogance is believing you are better than everyone else, that you are above and thus entitled to good fortune.

How does confidence become a skill? Reps. Countless, mindful reps. While courage deals with the unknown, confidence, built upon many successful reps, is a result of knowing.

Composure

Confidence leads to composure. Leaders who develop composure will be more effective critical thinkers and problem solvers. Without the ability to practice composure and self-discipline, selfish and non-critical thinking will follow.

The discomposed leader is doomed to an endless game of Whac-A-Mole.

There are lots of ways to practice the skill of composure (mindfulness, meditation, journaling, yoga, etc.). Whatever training you choose to invest in, it could make all the difference when the world goads you with some irresistible bait.

And here I feel obligated to include a link to Zidane’s infamous headbutt, a timeless cautionary tale of what happens when we take the bait.

Concentration

The skill of composure allows for concentration. Awareness is the first step to doing good in the world, which, I argue, is each person’s responsibility.

However, it is easy to get distracted, and it is difficult for leaders to resist the pressure to constantly innovate, produce, perform, profit, repeat. With this pressure comes a barrage of bottomless productivity rabbit holes riddled with detours (more distraction).

I have written previously about the leadership fundamentals for achieving peak performance, the psychology of success. To lead at our best, we need to focus on what is task relevant while letting go of the irrelevant.

Becoming skillful in concentration—the ability to do one thing at a time, to see things as they are, to be still—is the key to perceiving suffering, learning from it, and growing stronger. As someone who routinely fails to avoid distraction, I realize how much more mental training I ought to do (the same kind that generates composure) if I want to lead from a state of awareness and focus.

Compassion

We arrive at the tip of the arrow. The point. Once you internalize the progression—and with consistent practice—the Five C’s framework works more like a self-sustaining cycle of interrelated skills.

Albert Einstein said, “Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” Compassion training isn’t all that complicated (if it is, consider that a red flag). Be kind as a habit. Automate giving. Put others first. Water a plant. Write a nice letter.

When leaders practice the altruistic skill of consistently and unconditionally showing compassion, without any thought of exchange, they lead with purpose. Purpose has a gravitational pull. Without it, we have the feeling of being lost in space.

Aim with compassion at your purpose, and you’ll likely hit the target.

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Beware the panic slide/spiral

Now that I know the Five C’s, am I all set? Will I be a principled leader now and forever? Nope. Not really. Actually, never. What goes up must come down.

In 2021, I wrote Are you a riser or a sinker? Summary: teams do better with positive people (risers) than negative ones (sinkers), even the biggest optimists will have spells of sinking, and there is value to be gained from both risers and sinkers.

Now we add the “or” to our positive framework. Put the Five C’s into an upward arrow, flip it, and you get—the panic slide! If we observe the characteristics of sinking, we can reverse the slide before it becomes a downward spiral.

To be clear, you don’t want to ride the panic slide. Nevertheless, despite your tremendous leadership prowess, one day you will discover—to your surprise and dismay—that you are indeed sliding. Here are the features of the panic slide:

1. Selfishness: Burdened by constant self-centeredness.

• Example: King Louis XIV of France who said, “I am the state.” His selfish rule set the stage for the French Revolution.

2. Distraction: Avoiding reality and living in the imagination.

• Example: Nicholas II of Russia ignored the suffering of the Russian people and instead focused on his personal affairs, leading to the collapse of the Romanov dynasty and the rise of the Russian Revolution.

3. Volatility: Triggered by challenges to the ego.

• Example: Emperor Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius, portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator. He was an erratic and ego-driven leader who left Rome in chaos.

4. Timidness: Crippled by the fear of being hurt.

• Example: Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was known for his appeasement of Hitler. His fear of painful consequences contributed to one of the greatest catastrophes in history.

5. Panic: Frantically escaping, a complete resistance to reality.

• Example: Adolf Hitler epitomized this stage in the final weeks of WWII when he went ballistic in his bunker and ultimately killed himself, unable to face reality closing in on him.

Do not fear. If you’ve trained well, you can stop the slide before you come crashing down on the panic button.

Leaders who practice the Five C’s will spend more time rising than sinking. Because they concentrate, they will observe their own thinking and behavior. They will identify selfishness, distraction, volatility, timidness, and panic, understanding the roots of their self-induced spiraling.

They will know the more skillful alternative, and they will not get stuck in a downward spiral.

Final notes on training

First, there are a few important questions about training to consider:

1. What do you prioritize when training your team (especially during onboarding)? What do people learn first? If these skills/topics aren’t the most essential things for people to know with regards to your team’s purpose and culture, you have more questions to ask.

2. What does your team think about previous training you have done? How do you know? And how does that inform the decisions you make about future training?

3. When does your team do “soft skills” training (like the Five C’s)? What proactive culture training do you do? What signals do you look for that might indicate a need for reactive training? What percentage of your training is proactive vs. reactive? I’d strive for roughly 80% proactive and 20% reactive.

And the final note. There are very few trainings that have a lasting impact. Sometimes, it’s because the training isn’t so great. Most of the time, regardless of quality, no matter how high or low we feel post training, somewhere down the road of our busy lives, whether it be a subtle drift or full blown panic slide, we return to baseline.

The trick to effective training is this: it is repeated over time, like all good practice, building upon shared values, reminding us of that light above the clouds, the same light within each of us that supplies the energy to push forward with this exciting human project.

At my current school, we have a tradition called the sunset climb. It’s my personal favorite (and there are definitely a few C’s involved). Our graduating students hike the local mountain at sunset and, one at a time, express their gratitude for their peers and mentors. It’s an emotional moment where kids and teachers feel the weight of close friends parting ways at the end of a hard-fought journey.

This tradition reminds me why I teach, and I know that if there were more “sunset climbs” sprinkled throughout the year, I’d feel even better about my chosen profession. When you think about training, instead of going through the motions, think about creating these sunset moments.

Remember the tip of the arrow: compassion. Concentrate on the point.

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Question for the club

What helpful tools, graphics, mnemonics, etc. have been useful leadership guides for you?

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I’m going to kick things off with a BIG quote from Kobe Bryant. Big in length, sure, but significant because it describes the “ideal performance state” for an athlete (Haff & Triplett, 2016, p. 156), which I will argue is transferable to any profession:

When you get in that zone it’s just a supreme confidence that you know it’s going in. It’s not a matter of if or this [or] that. It’s going in. Things just slow down. Everything slows down and you just have supreme confidence. When that happens, you really do not try to focus on what’s going on because ... you could lose it in a second. Everything becomes one noise—you don’t hear this or that; everything’s just one noise—you’re not paying attention to one or the other. ... You just really try to stay in the present and not let anything break that rhythm. Again, as long as you just kind of stay there, you become oblivious to everything that’s going on. You don’t think about your surroundings or what’s going on with the crowd or the team. You’re kind of locked in. ... You have to really try to stay in the present and not let anything break that rhythm.

Anyone who has watched Kobe Bryant play knows what the ideal performance state looks like, at least on a basketball court:

• Absence of fear

• Automatic motor skills, no thought or analysis necessary

• Undisturbed concentration on the activity

• A sense of effortlessness and control

• The slowing of time and space

He understood sport psychology, and he put it into practice. He understood that by using selective attention, one reduces distraction, narrowing focus instead on what is task-relevant.

High-level athletes can access the ideal performance state that Kobe describes—and so can everyone else. Today, (using the Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, Fourth Edition as my reference) I want to talk a little bit about how you can do that, and about how leaders can facilitate the ideal performance state, rather than obstructing it.

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The Psychology of High Performance

First, let’s acknowledge a simple truth. Each one of us, even the pros, only has so much energy to give. We have to practice psychological and physiological efficiency, which is giving no more than what is required to perform a mental or physical task. The psychology of success is not to work harder than everyone else all of the time. That’s a reliable recipe for burnout.

A key component of efficiency is practicing task-relevant focus. To perform at our best, we can’t waste attention on worrying and catastrophizing. These imagined concerns are task-irrelevant. Many well-intentioned coaches and leaders make a lot of task-irrelevant noise. More on this soon.

Athletes will lack energy when it matters most if they spend it on worry, anger, frustration, or anxiety. They will also perform with less confidence and less focus. Instead, if the athlete learns how to use her emotions to elevate energy and concentration, she is more likely to find that ideal performance state.

When does having the proper energy matter most? When we are faced with complex or new tasks, high pressure situations, and activities that demand deliberate focus. In these moments, there are a few recommended techniques for athletes—diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscular relaxation, autogenic training, routines, and systematic desensitization (feel free to pick up Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning, Fourth Edition for your next pleasure read). I want to offer three rules to remember:

1. Make it simple.

2. Get skilled.

3. Stay calm when facing complex decisions/tasks.

If you can do these three things, you will reduce the chances of experiencing a total meltdown when you find yourself in a dogfight. If you can’t remember these three things, remember this one:

1. Nothing inspires performance better than self-confidence.

In a world bursting with high performers, skill is never enough. You need to believe you can perform. Self-belief leads to heightened work ethic and determination. Of course, confidence isn’t necessarily enough either, but it’s what we’ve got. So before you call yourself a talentless loser, remember that no one gets far without self-confidence. Negative self-talk is akin to self-inflicted hamstringing.

Next, we’ll consider the fundamentals of psychology that all leaders should know so that they can motivate rather than demoralize.

How Leaders Facilitate or Derail High Performance

This might be the more important part. Well-intentioned leaders who misunderstand the psychology of performance may unwittingly pave the road to hell for their athletes (I’ll use “athlete” for consistency, but you can substitute it with whatever teacher-student model you want). Let’s circle back to the concepts of physical and psychological efficiency, both of which are compromised by:

• the athlete perceiving a threat to self-esteem

• the belief that one cannot meet the demands for success

• a fear of the consequences of failure

As a leader, if you contribute to any one of these perceptions, odds are you will decrease your athlete’s performance. The goal is not to mess with the athlete’s mind. Many leaders go wrong here in their attempts to motivate, pushing their athletes over the wrong edge of the Inverted-U Theory with too much arousal (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908).

People need to feel senses of competence and self-determination in order to succeed. There are some basic practices that can generate those feelings, which takes us to a question as old as Hamlet: to punish undesirable behavior, or to reinforce desirable behavior?

Wherever you look—school, sports, the workplace—the results all point to the same answer: to improve performance, use punishment sparingly and reinforce with positive feedback often. With punishment, athletes focus on what they are doing incorrectly, the task-irrelevant stimuli we talked about avoiding earlier.

Reinforcement is the opposite. It leads to athletes focusing on what they should do, what is task-relevant. They also “build long-term memories of success, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and confidence” (Haff & Triplett, 2016, p. 163), all key components of peak performance. It’s no exaggeration to say that positive feedback goes a long way.

There are a few nuances worth understanding in terms of helping people learn new skills. In stressful and competitive environments, providing clear directives concurrent with the activity is beneficial. However, when someone is learning a complex skill, the more effective strategy is to offer delayed feedback, at first frequently, but decreasing over time as the person masters the skill.

Starting with instruction is good, but in order for someone to gain self-confidence and self-efficacy, a leader needs to transition to discovery, allowing the learner to perform without immediate feedback. In essence, it’s harder to learn with someone breathing down your neck.

Practice the Mental Game

Against my better judgment, I put together summarized bullets to appease the scannability algorithm. It will look great on your refrigerator. Jokes aside, if you don’t practice the mental game, as Danny Devito said in a Jersey Mike’s commercial, fuggedaboudit!

• Develop automatic confidence.

• Don’t waste your energy. Use it for what matters most.

• Become aware of task-irrelevant distractions and practice task-relevant concentration.

• Make tasks simple and get skilled.

• Reinforce the good before punishing the bad.

• Learning is a process, not a prescription. Let it happen.

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Question for the club:

If positive reinforcement builds long-term success and punishment causes athletes to focus on task-irrelevant errors, why do many leaders still default to high-pressure, fear-based motivation? How can a leader maintain high standards without triggering the threat to self-esteem that derails the ideal performance state?

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References:

Haff, G. G., & Triplett, N. T. (Eds.). (2016). Essentials of strength training and conditioning (4th ed.). Human Kinetics.

Wells, N. (2021, March 12). Inverted-U theory. Sport Science Insider. https://sportscienceinsider.com/inverted-u-theory/

Yerkes, R. M., & Dodson, J. D. (1908). The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation. Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology, 18(5), 459–482. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.920180503

After reading one of my posts, a colleague asked, “So, do you just write about whatever you are reading?” My answer: sort of. It doesn’t happen all the time, but often enough there is a collision between a book and my experience, and I feel like writing about it. The book now is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by . He argues that generalists, people who develop range through diverse experiences, thrive in a wicked world (wicked being unpredictable, ever-changing, unclear, misleading). It’s a well-researched and engaging book, and as a person who leans generalist, I found it reassuring that I might not be a hopeless wanderer after all.

The collision. I work at a summer camp, and we recently lost another fantastic counselor to the college internship, an unsettling trend. The pressure on young people to take the “next step” toward a successful career is rising. For many, working at a summer camp has become the wrong step, at least not the best one. If your goal is to have a higher-paying job out of college, you have a point. Data do seem to favor the internship on that score (though, I bet there are some other variables we aren’t controlling for that explain those outcomes).

However, Epstein also sites a 2017 study published by four economists that found “people who got narrow, career-focused education were more likely to be employed right out of school and earned more right away, but over time both advantages evaporated; decades later, they had spent less overall time in the labor market and had lower lifetime earnings than workers who received general educations.” Adam Grant agrees that “generalists excel over time” sharing a 2025 Science article, “Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance,” which concluded, “Across domains, world-class performers, compared with peers performing just below this level, engaged in more multidisciplinary practice and showed more gradual performance progress through their early years.”

I believe the majority of our discontent—our envy, contempt, greed, longing, anxiety, hostility—comes from our conviction that we are (or should be) more than who we are. Somewhere along the way, we are convinced that we have not arrived at our destination, that there are grander things in store for us, more that we are destined to achieve. We forget that people on their death beds wish they hadn’t worked their life away, too busy to be present, too consumed by expectations that took precedence over love and happiness and relationships. It’s so easy to fool ourselves into thinking, later, there will be time.

Epstein argues that young people, instead of specializing early, should diversify their experiences as they try to find “match quality,” which he says is more likely to happen later in life. One could use that reasoning to justify seeking a variety of internship experiences. I can get on board with that. However, the rationale I hear most often is along the lines of needing a head start or a foot in the door to avoid falling behind on a specific track. This logic runs out of runway. While it increases your chances of the higher paying job after college, it neglects a basic, inevitable truth: who you are now is different from who you will be after college, and who you will be then is different from who you will be 5 years later, and so on and so forth, should you live long and prosper.

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Obviously, I think young people should choose the camp counselor job before the college internship (and if you search “skip the internship, go to summer camp,” you’ll see I’m not alone). I’m biased, but hear me out. Epstein proposes that “you don’t commit to anything in the future, but just look at the options available now, and choose those that give you the most promising range of options afterward.” Working as a camp counselor offers tremendous range, especially when it comes to leadership and management. With all due respect (love that loaded phrase) to internships, here’s why I recommend camp counseling instead:

1. Life happens now

When working with kids, this couldn’t be more true. Lots of people feel guilty about doing what they enjoy, even more so if it gets in the way of “growing up.” If you enjoy the work of a camp counselor and you have the energy to do it, now is the time. You won’t have that same energy as you age, and you have the rest of your life to frolic with spreadsheets and cubicles and emails and all the other perks of a “real job.”

And keep in mind, Epstein notes, “Big innovation most often happens when an outsider who may be far away from the surface of the problem reframes the problem in a way that unlocks the solution.” What seems off-track now may end up being the key to success—and camp counselors spend all day problem-solving.

2. It’s the healthy choice

As a camp counselor, you spend the summer outside, in nature, running around, laughing, playing, unplugged. In essence, you get to be a kid, and you are paid to do it with people you love like family. Talk about the ultimate reset before diving into another academic year or even your first full-time job.

Does the internship give you this gift? Years from now, maybe with kids of your own, will you daydream of the beloved internship that you posted about on LinkedIn?

3. The network is broader

Not only will you develop range in your leadership, but you will expand the range of your network. It’s very likely that someone working at the camp has a connection in the area of the internship you are considering, and it is likely that connection also went to camp. If you prove to be a great camp counselor, this connection is gold.

The internship network will be narrower, as well as the skills you develop.

4. You will learn antifragile skills

Being antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder) is a step beyond resilience. It isn’t just about enduring through challenges, but growing because of them. Antifragile people don’t break under pressure or uncertainty. They thrive. Becoming harder can be useful in difficult circumstances. Becoming stronger and more skillful is far more functional. Building human muscle with heavy resistance is a good representation of antifragility. Though the stress of the weight initially damages the muscle fibers, they repair and adapt, becoming bigger and stronger than before.

What antifragile skills do camp counselors build? They learn how to care for others under variable conditions and how to maintain safety by dealing with risk. They adapt to unpredictable problems. They manage different conflicts with different strategies at different times. They lead through crises, engage small and large groups, inspire a child to face his fears and be himself. The list is endless—and wonderfully general.

5. You will learn to lead

If you run a cabin of campers, you are learning to lead a team and build a culture. If you run a division of campers and other counselors, you are the mayor of a small town, a CEO if that sounds better on the resume. There are few roles where you can have so much responsibility at such a young age.

We learn the most through experience, in practice rather than theory (as Epstein says repeatedly), and the leadership experience you get as a camp counselor, particularly if it includes the management of larger groups, far exceeds that of the intern.

6. Without camp counselors, there are no camps for kids

Let’s face it. It’s not all about you (I hope you agree). Kids need camps, especially boys (I will restrain myself from going further on that point in this post). agrees in Notes on Being a Man, describing summer camps as necessary “third spaces” (a social environment separate from home and work/school) for kids to connect and mature. And Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, says, “Summer camp is the best way for a child to detox from smartphones and social media. All the activities and camaraderie are a substitute for the drama of virtual life, so not just a denial of something, but a substitution with something healthier.”

If there are no camp counselors, there are no camps. No camps means fewer spaces for kids to play outside and discover who they are. Fewer communities where they belong. Fewer places where they learn to be independent and responsible, making choices and practicing self-discipline. Fewer opportunities to receive mentorship from a role model they can relate to. Fewer doors opened to new experiences and new people. Fewer moments to fail, try again, find success, and gain confidence. If I needed to filibuster something in a pinch, I’d talk about the value of summer camps.

The important point I want to emphasize here is that I hope young people take impact into consideration when weighing the value of working at a summer camp compared to landing an internship. The kids you work with will remember you forever, and there is no way to quantify the ripple effects of the good you are doing. It is limitless.

General closing thoughts on deciding what to do with your life and career

With all that said, I do recognize that not everyone has the opportunity, interest, or match quality to work as a camp counselor. There’s also a financial privilege variable. Some people may need to make more money than a camp salary can offer. That’s legit. And for those young adults who want to test the waters by trying out various internships—bonus points for those that have a positive impact on the welfare of others—go for it.

Internships aside, there are infinite experiences to choose from that don’t include camp counselor, and any one of them may very well be the right choice. I’m just a camp guy defending the honor of a position with diminishing status. Pity me. Ultimately, the choice is yours. Whatever you decide as a young person and aspiring leader, I encourage you to keep the following thoughts in mind.

Epstein says, “It is difficult to accept that the best learning road is slow, and that doing poorly now is essential for better performance later.” Finding a career with high match quality takes time, and match changes as we grow. For example, if you threw me back into a cabin of 10 kids as their counselor, it wouldn’t be the same experience, and certainly not the optimal situation for anyone involved. I can only imagine their wide-eyed horror, and my monotoned enthusiasm falling flat with the dust between the floor boards. There’s a younger, more relatable, more energetic person for the job, and it’s OK that I’m not that person anymore.

Most people, even if they don’t want to admit it, even if they don’t like it, know the road to high performance is slow. It’s the “doing poorly” part that really freaks us out. Waiting makes people antsy. Failing, just the prospect of it, terrifies people enough that they don’t even try (initially, I wanted to say makes them quit, but sometimes one of the best things we can do is quit and move on).

When we aren’t put in situations where we are likely to hear tough feedback, we miss precisely what we need to hear to increase our range and perform at our best. Here’s a thought-provoking and unreserved white paper on how this applies to college career services helping students with low social capital.

I remember a high school classmate explaining how he was taking an easier science offering despite qualifying for a popular physics course with one of the school’s best teachers. His rationale was that he would definitely get an A in the unchallenging class, which would be better for his GPA, which would be better for his college prospects. He had it all mapped out. I don’t know the degree to which that decision impacted his future, but I took that physics class.

It was hard. I stayed after school a lot to do practice problems. There were times that I did poorly. There was maybe one other class in my high school career that demanded more from me. To this day, I still draw from that experience—the reasoning skills, the importance of practice and retrieval, the wonder of solving problems, the value of a strong relationship with a teacher who also looked like a mad scientist—and I have no clue what my grade was. My guess is no one cares.

I said I don’t know how things worked out for that guy who took the easy science class, so naturally I did a quick search, and he has letters next to his name that suggest he is doing great. Good to hear. Was I hoping he was involved in a massive scandal or bankrupt to prove my point? Of course not. I still maintain my argument. In my case, I may not have gotten the best grade, but I experienced the most growth.

And I have this to add about his plans, and my plans, and everyone’s plans. In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, says, “If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.” I love this line. It’s so dark. Our plans are just plans, irrelevant to reality. I suggest we invest in our present before our plans.

I also believe there is more to be gained from vigorous observation than overplanning. I’ll turn to Lamott again (exercising range, nice), as what she says about writing plot can teach us about living life:

In lieu of a plot you may find that you have a sort of temporary destination, perhaps a scene that you envision is the climax. So you write toward this scene, but when you get there, or close, you see that because of all you’ve learned about your characters along the way, it no longer works. The scene may have triggered the confidence that got you to work on your piece, but now it does not make the final cut.

This is a reasonable and effective way to approach decisions about your future. Life does not follow a script. It unfolds, and we do not know what comes next. Such is the nature of good stories.

With the specifics behind us, and for the readers who skipped straight to the end, I come now to my grand, generalist crescendo. Range is a wonderful thing, and every person is capable of doing something wonderful. Like a kid at a summer camp, we should do something that cultivates a sense of wonder, for ourselves and others.

We need not be afraid of taking the slow road, for time is excruciatingly short. Rushing to achieve match quality will only lower our odds of discovering it, and what one does now, especially what one does poorly now, is the real learning that will get us to wherever we are going. Godspeed.

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Question for the club: I’m interested in hearing what questions young people have about all of this, and I bet young people are interested in hearing the thoughts of potential employers and not just some rando named Nowak. Not a question, but fire away.

Though I hesitate to call myself a leader, I am comfortable being called quiet. I’m an introvert, no bones about it. This probably doesn’t surprise some of my readers. For me, small talk in big crowds is a test of fortitude. I prefer to exercise alone. I’ve never considered myself popular, nor have I been praised for being the life of the party—and I don’t foresee that happening any time soon. Recently, I read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by . No lie, I was silently fist pumping. This is a book I could have used sooner. Then again, the topic is as important as ever.

The world favors extroverts, particularly when it comes to leadership. I don’t think extroverts are bad, but a lack of introverts is. My take is that leadership teams should aim for a relative balance of introverted and extroverted contributors, and introverts should feel confident that their quiet style brings high value. The common problem is that introverts are not taken seriously as leaders. There is considerable evidence to suggest that a diversity of perspectives leads to better decision-making, and the analysis that comes with quiet leadership is critical.

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I don’t want to cherry pick Cain’s ideas and present them as my own, so I’ll focus on my experience as a quiet person. In cultures where the loudest voice wins, everyone loses. The quiet voice depends on the quality of its content. As a quiet person, you know you have to make your words count. And others have to be paying attention and thinking critically to hear the sense in the words.

We should be listening for quiet voices and elevating them into leadership positions. The key to navigating a loud world is not to get louder, just as it is unwise to panic in the face of crisis. To focus on task-relevant action, you need to reduce task-irrelevant stimuli. Quiet leaders generally aren’t overstimulating (though they can get overstimulated). They are good people to turn to when the volume or the temperature is climbing to harmful levels. You can be sure they want to cool things down.

Notes to Quiet Leaders (Advice for Introverts)

• You can learn how to lead, quietly.

• Introversion is not an excuse for inaction. It’s a reason to act.

• Figure out what percentage of your day you can sustain being more extroverted (mine is about 10–20%, or 1.6 to 3.2 hours in a 16-hour waking day).

• Schedule quiet time every day.

• Hold your communication to a high standard and practice it (listening, writing, speaking, etc.).

• You can be another quiet person’s hero.

• Team up with extroverts who know when to call on you.

• If there are no extroverts who know when to call on you, help them understand why they should. Just avoid going full Milton Waddams from Office Space.

• Try not to shrink when it gets loud. Soak it in and grow bigger.

Steps for Teams to Elevate Quiet Leaders

1. Identify who they are. Once you know that, you can stop forcing them to be a different kind of person and start playing to their natural strengths.

2. Transform your team’s culture of feedback and decision-making to ensure fair process and an accurate representation of perspectives (for example, before you start a group discussion, survey the entire group and display the data so the team can see the balance of perspectives, rather than letting the first voice steer the ship).

3. Empower quiet leaders in quiet ways. They probably aren’t hoping for grand gestures. A thoughtful letter or one-on-one conversation will likely be more meaningful, and you can communicate confidence by giving them uninterrupted time for focused work that matters to the success of the whole.

I’m quiet, and I approve this message.

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Question for the club: What is one piece of advice or encouragement you would give to a young, quiet professional starting their career?

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I keep a list of one-sentence ideas that might be worth expanding on later. Here’s one that bubbled up for me recently: Welcome suffering and learn how to end it. This is a daunting challenge, easier said than done, I assume for everyone reading this. Yet, if we can meet this challenge, even a little bit, then we have a priceless gift to share. For me, the late Charlotte Joko Beck, an American Zen teacher, offered clear insight to size up this feat.

Let’s start with what may be one of the most baller statements of all time. If I ever open a gym or something, I’m putting a version of this on the front door. She said that if we are fixated on feeling good, blissful, or enlightened, then “we need to be disturbed. We need to be upset.... Don’t come to this [Zen] center to feel better; that’s not what this place is about. What I want are lives that get bigger so that they can take care of more things, more people.” This sentiment applies to leadership. Don’t come to leadership if you want to feel better. Come to grow bigger. Anyone who believes leadership will make them feel better, or that it is about the self, will be sorely disappointed.

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Disappointment brings us to our next piece of wisdom from Beck. She said that our “problems arise because we separate ourselves from our experience. The discomfort and pain are not the cause of our problems. The cause is that we don’t know what to do about them.” Leadership requires a shift in mindset. It is not about evading problems, but embracing them. The more we run from discomfort, the smaller we become, and the smaller our world becomes. The more we understand pain, the bigger we grow, and the more expansive our leadership.

What might this look like in the context of leadership?

• Facilitating a dialogue about a controversial policy

• Listening to feedback about an unpopular executive decision

• Debriefing an organizational failure

• Tackling a difficult or undesirable project

• Mediating a conflict between colleagues or sharing one’s own feelings of frustration

• Doing the right thing, despite there being a more profitable option

And now back to the original thought of welcoming suffering and learning how to end it. All too often we reject suffering wholesale. By rejecting it, we cannot learn from it. Instead, we anxiously and hopelessly construct a small and fragile world where everything must go right. When things don’t go right, we get incredulous, upset, angry. When something goes wrong, which it will, here are some alternative responses:

1. While it may be hard, don’t freak out. Observe the difficult experience and try to identify what is hard about it.

2. Don’t blame anyone. Instead, explain what happened as a matter of fact without making it personal.

3. Ask, is there anything to learn from the difficult experience? How can this be viewed as a test, and how would one pass the test if a similar event happened again?

4. Identify a fresh, replicable practice that would end future suffering and is of value to others.

As a society, we have become obsessed with reducing friction. We want to make things easier, to remove barriers. We want everyone to have an open road with endless opportunities. But this isn’t life, and it certainly isn’t the landscape in which leaders emerge. Principled leaders take their shape from friction. They feel most alive when life pushes against them, knocks them around a bit, and they roll with it. We’re not here to feel better. We’re here to get bigger.

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Question for the club: Do you have any effective practices when it comes to growing through friction?

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How about this for a novel idea? Instead of another speech including “so I asked AI...” what if we led with “these words are 100% my own and not AI-generated”?

The rumors are true: AI saves you tons of time. It is a powerful tool that improves efficiency and increases one’s output. It’s going to become as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi, and, as we delegate our thinking to it more freely, people are going to be crippled by its absence. I’m going to focus on how leaders need to be wary of eroding human connection through AI over-reliance. The majority of workplace dissatisfaction boils down to poor communication, and we don’t want AI to compound the issue. Before we obsess over upskilling in AI, we should prioritize good communication.

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First, more on the claim that poor communication is the primary cause of the workplace blues. I could rattle off some findings that support my statement—from Gallup, McKinsey, Deloitte, peer reviewed journals—but I’ll speak from the heart instead. Here’s why poor communication is the root of dissatisfaction:

It misses the point.

The point is the raison d’etre. When a leader is vague and beats around the bush, he misses the point. When a supervisor does not listen to the direct report who disagrees with a policy, she misses the point. When people are unhappy with their existence at work...and then don’t converse with their feelings, they miss the point. You may be thinking that I have recklessly broadened the definition of communication. I say, nay! “The successful conveying or sharing of ideas and feelings” can happen in a variety of modalities, including self communication. It is how we connect, and we are creatures of connection.

This is why I believe communication is so essential. I worry that if we forget how to do it, or we don’t develop the skills in the first place, we don’t just lose our human connection to one another and the cosmos, but to ourselves. Outsourcing the labor of connecting will render us unfeeling.

I am currently reading Make Something Wonderful, a posthumous collection of writings, speeches, interviews, and correspondence from Steve Jobs. It’s hard to imagine Jobs composing his emails with AI, and I’d love to hear his take on AI in general. He once said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” He also said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” To have a hope of connecting things, the beautiful process of being in the world, we cannot turn to a chatbot every time we have a question. To have a voice, we have to speak—with vulnerability, uncertainty, courage.

These words are 100% my own. They are nothing special, but I know that in the absence of my breath, they would not exist, and that is pretty neat. These thoughts could only come from me, and they have the chance of connecting with someone else, and that connection will be the result of our shared thinking, heartfelt communication—even if just for a moment—a nod from afar, above the fray.

Great leaders are great communicators. Communication is a skill they practice and do their best to perfect. And it is a responsibility they cannot abdicate.

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Question for the club: How do you develop strong communication skills and avoid poor communication that demotivates?

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This past weekend was my second time riding the Pan-Mass Challenge. It's a massive undertaking with a lot of build up, raising more money for charity than any other single event in the country (specifically for cancer research and treatment). Between the fundraising and the logistics that go into a two-day bike-a-thon, it's a heavy lift. As PMC folks like to say, "The ride is the reward." This couldn't be more true. The experience gives you chills. It is visceral proof of our intimate connection to others. We depend on one another, and we are at our best when we are supporting one another.

With the PMC, there are a lot of leadership lessons I could harp on – the compounding interest of daily effort, why we should take leaps of the heart, the infinite returns of generosity. What I want to highlight is the power of small gestures.

On the final stretch of the ride, I passed a woman who was standing and smiling next to a life-sized cutout of a man cheering in a lawn chair. This struck a chord with me. I crafted this woman's story in my mind, and here I was, a part of it, some stranger pedaling a bicycle. During the ride, you pass a lot of supporters, young and old, but you don't see everyone. You don't see all of the people who have donated to the cause, those who have participated in the past, the countless lives that cancer has touched and connected. Untold shared suffering, and an even greater wave of compassion to ease that suffering.

I thought of my dad, who was always on the sidelines of my games, my biggest fan. I remember him standing on a median in Boston and yelling to me at the final sprint of my first half marathon. If he hadn't passed from cancer, I know he would have been there to support me – but this cutout in a lawn chair... In most contexts, I’d probably consider it a silly use of materials, but this small gesture reminded me that my dad was out there. I don't know the woman or the man or what their relationship was, but I thank them for their encouragement.

Small gestures have a big impact. Moving forward, I want to challenge myself to make at least one small gesture of compassion each day. Ideally, I'll exceed that minimum, but I want to hold myself to the one, whether it be a handwritten note, a passing favor, supporting someone's cause, giving a compliment, whatever. I wouldn't suggest thinking of this as a problem to solve or a box on the to-do list to check. Rather, small gestures, giving in general, should be viewed more like little pieces of chocolate, a modest reward, sweet to the senses, warming to the soul, leaving you wanting more.

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Five free ideas to make small gestures easy:

• Carry a little notebook or notecards that can fit in your pocket. I've seen someone who does this with sticky notes. You'll always be ready to write a quick note that will brighten someone's day.

• Think of your small gesture for the next day before you go to bed. Write it down and recall it in the morning. This gives you an evening ritual that feels good and keeps you accountable.

• Use a threshold reminder. When you walk through the threshold of a room where you interact with others, tell yourself to make one small gesture of compassion before you leave.

• Automate it. Give at least $1 a day to a high-impact charity (here are some ideas). If you give $31 a month, you can set a daily reminder that you gave $1 to help others today.

• Ask someone what they have to do on any given day, and then offer to help with one of those tasks. Even if they say no, that's a small gesture of compassion.

Question for the club: Do you have any small gestures of compassion that you would recommend?

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If you only read the first sentence of this post, let it be this: 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People (2024) by David Yeager, PhD is an indispensable book.

Why? you ask. Yeager describes the effect of applying a mentor mindset: "This is a mindset in which young people are held to high standards, but they are also given the support they need to meet those high standards." This is instead of an "enforcer mindset" (high expectations, low support) or a "protector mindset" (low expectations, high support). I believe boys need role models with mentor mindsets, rather than enforcers or protectors. And, in case you were wondering, low expectations and low support – AKA neglect – is another ill-suited alternative.

Enforcers rely on dominance, and though they have followers who fear them, those followers will gladly find greener pastures when the opportunity presents itself. Protectors rely on comfort, and their followers may freely frolic in fields of flowers, but they will not grow into their full potential, and they will be unprepared for the harsher seasons to come. Meanwhile, the mentor mindset:

• Upholds high standards

• Maintains order and avoids chaos

• Conveys care

• Takes young people seriously

Yeager says that "status and respect" are core needs for young people, and that if we honor those needs, we'll be much more effective in helping them make "important contributions to our organizations, families, schools, and society." In short, we help them "find motivation to do the right thing."

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Like any good theory, it is easier said than done, and Yeager isn't the first person to proclaim the effectiveness of high expectations and high support. Whether it be culturally responsive teaching, growth mindset, the warm demander stance, or restorative practices, there is a lot of scholarly chatter circling around similar conclusions. If everyone could read a book and become an effective mentor, that would be sweet. Alas, being a mentor is hard work, and you don't build rapport by regurgitating leadership philosophy. Once you get off the page and onto the pavement, things get real. Life isn't scripted. Including a mentor mindset, I would ask for the following requirements on a role model application:

• Leads by example, modeling ethical behavior and respect for all

• Practices self care, care for others, and care for the environment

• Believes in reintegration and collaborates to repair harm

• Cultivates compassion in all interactions

• Is open to viewpoints that differ from one's own

• Listens with the sole purpose of helping the speaker and avoids judgment and interruption

• Values humility, interdependence, and reciprocity

Apply today! These are the kind of role models we need, across the map. I'll take the selfless, patient, kind, and skillful before the uncompromising egomaniacs who force their insight on others. The person who thinks they are no better than anyone else is wiser than the one who thinks they are the best.

We've been told that boys and men are clamoring for prestige with no regard for anyone else, yet, every day, I see boys who want to be good. I see boys who want to make a positive impact on the world, boys who want to create and experience a sense of belonging. I'm growing more certain that my eyes are not deceiving me – and rather that certain media is deceiving us all.

As adults, it is our responsibility to help pair the youth with good role models. To be clear, I am not advocating for the intensification of cancel culture. I've never been keen on ordering kids to stop hanging out with "bad" influences. That has always felt akin to an arranged marriage. Young people should exercise their critical thinking to decide who they spend their time with, forming close friendships based on mutual respect. Adults are essential in this process because they help kids, through modeling and conversation, identify the qualities of healthy relationships and honorable people.

Yeager discusses the power of creating a "stuggle-success-status positive feedback loop." He thinks summer camps are especially good at this: "At camp, you struggle at first to do hard, scary things (e.g., climb a ropes course, learn to water-ski, make friends with strangers) in the care of supportive adults. Then you get lauded with status and respect for overcoming your fears." As a long-time camp guy, I can attest to the impact of this feedback loop. No place has ever made me feel more confident, more like I belong, than camp.

The struggle-success-status feedback loop is a game changer for boys, especially in a world that often seems less interested in helping them overcome their fears, and more invested in communicating that they are the ones to be feared. As I've said before, we should not be teaching young men that it is inherently better to be a boy, that they possess a higher status because of their manhood. Instead, boys need role models who show them it's OK to be boys. It's OK for them to struggle, to earn success, and to be respected for the right reasons – and for who they are.

To get started as a mentor, I really like these paraphrased tips from Yeager:

1. Ask, don't tell. Respect young people by treating them as adultlike. Adults are asked; children are told.

2. Find ways to honor the young person's status – for example, point out their competence and expertise – rather than pointing out your own authority. Avoid an I-know-better-than-you attitude.

3. Validate whatever negative experiences young people may have had. Treat their feelings as real and legitimate. Then look for a way forward.

4. Presume agency. Acknowledge that the young person can make up their own mind, and then make it clear that you are rooting for them to make a good choice. Also, explain how their actions have broader consequences in the world.

Bill Milliken (Founder and Vice Chairman of Communities In Schools, Inc.) said, “It's relationships, not programs, that change children. A great program simply creates the environment for healthy relationships to form between adults and children. Young people thrive when adults care about them on a one-to-one level and when they also have a sense of belonging to a caring a community." And just as important as the adults, are the peer role models. Children learn from people they love, and boys love each other. It is my sincere hope that every boy gets to experience a caring community filled with role models where they develop loving friendships. I wish every boy will feel confident saying, "I love you," to a brother.

My Man: It’s OK to be boys (Part I – Introduction)

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Question for the club: Do you have a helpful case study to share that illustrates the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of one of the mindsets above? And, theory aside, do you have any strategies for building rapport?

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Are independent schools defensible? Do they serve a noble purpose in the scheme of greater education, or does their reach only extend as far as their private interests? It's easy for this to feel like an exercise in self-assurance, an opportunity to explore the ways in which one can argue that independent schools are more than businesses with a basic priority: remain financially strong. How often do you hear of a school, like Jhamtse Gatsal in the 2014 film Tashi and the Monk, that gives up one meal a week to feed impoverished people in the local area? How often do you hear of an athletics program that advertises its modest facilities and equipment? How often do you hear of a school that deliberately goes without so that a community with less can go with?

What I am going to suggest is simple. Many will call it idealistic or naive. And I assume many more will think it a horrifying and foolish concept altogether. I believe independent schools should give people a look under the hood. I hesitate to use the expression "see how the sausage is made"–it implies something gross is happening, something that is better left unseen. However, with the exception of information that should remain confidential to ensure privacy, I don't think schools, institutions designed to educate children, should have anything to hide when it comes to the way in which they operate.

What does this look like in practice? In my role, it might look something like this:

• My interactions with students are appropriate and professional, and I would be comfortable with any student's family observing the way I speak to or treat their child.

• My approach, as it pertains to behavior management, student motivation, and culture building, is based on educational research and evidence.

• Anyone who is interested can better understand my educational philosophy because I articulate it clearly in writing and demonstrate it in practice.

• My educational philosophy is open to analysis and revision when new information prompts a need for growth or change.

• I collect data that demonstrates the effectiveness of my educational approach that I can share with the public, while maintaining privacy.

• I collect data that demonstrates the fair and equitable treatment of students (or lack thereof), regardless of their background, status, or identity.

• My work with students promotes the public good, including community outreach and a commitment to engaged and responsible citizenship.

This may not be a comprehensive list, but it's a start. I'm going out on a limb here, but I imagine prospective families and potential donors would be excited to work with a school that expresses values of transparency and integrity. And if school leadership or the board or alumni or parents want a school that offers a "best-in-class" experience with all the bells and whistles, go ahead and sell that product. There's a market for it. However, if we are going to talk seriously about independent schools communicating their public purpose, then we need to begin where the rubber hits the road.

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Take the admissions office, the development team, the academics and athletics and student life departments, and decide what it means to look under the hood. If you see a rusted part, a fluid leak, or some frayed wires, consider addressing those trouble spots first. Schools should not be in the business of luring families into faulty vehicles. In that scenario, the value of independent schools is exclusive at best, harmful (and sometimes traumatizing) at worst. And for what? For the selfish practice of "dream hoarding" (more on this later)? For a tradition of "excellence"? For the endowment of the school's lineage, rather than the greater good?

Forgive me if I sound sarcastic or cynical. I've had that problem most of my life. I'm trying to be honest, not negative, as I too believe in the value of independent schools. Concurrently, I also believe it is imperative that we understand, especially in the private sector, that we do not exist without the public. Just like public schools, independent schools depend on the success of democratic principles and nations, they depend on global cooperation and peace, and they depend on independent people having the financial independence to fund them. This question of the value to the public is existential. And I imagine schools that don't have a good answer, or instead have a deceptive one, will not stand the test of time.

There is a place for independent schools, but it must be alongside public schools, rather than above them. For if the public fails, the foundation, not just of education, but of society, crumbles. There is a divide in desperate need of a bridge, one that is most clearly measured by wealth. I wonder if we shouldn't be a touch more critical, or skeptical, of the word choice "independent." Should independent schools be planting their flags in their dissociation? Might we consider referring to them as "partner schools" or "associate schools" or anything that doesn't emphasize a disconnectedness from public life?

Again, I am not arguing that all independent schools, when you look under the hood, are hotbeds of corruption, deception, and greed. It's easy to generalize, and perhaps a little pleasurable to write off everyone involved in these institutions as ivy-dripping, ivory-towering, and, while we’re at it, rhino-poaching elitists. We know that's not the truth, and we also know independent schools are not dependent on lots of things, such as teaching certifications, an obligation to serve the public, and shared curriculum standards. That's not to say these things don't exist at independent schools, just that they aren't required to.

If we want to talk about values, let's talk–with the hood wide open. If we want to tell the stories of independent schools, let's tell them–with the good and the bad and the commitment to improvement. Let's do it with integrity. Independent schools, like everything else, are impermanent. And if they are not connected to the public, they are increasingly at risk of becoming meaningless in the grand scheme. Independent schools face the challenge of proving their relevance through their actions. Proving that they are capable of being accessible. Proving that their missions are bold, transformative, and aimed at liberating living beings around the world, rather than advancing a selective us and peering down their noses at them.

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Shall we devise a plan of action then? Here are some potential phases to get the ball rolling.

Phase 1: Values Alignment

• Define the "public good" as a school and identify how your institution contributes to it.

• Review the existing mission and school values to determine if contributing to the public good is a strategic outcome.

• Gather input from stakeholders (board of trustees, school leadership, faculty and staff, students, families, alumni) to better understand how the school community wishes to engage with public issues.

• Develop a vision statement that articulates the school's commitment to the public good.

Phase 2: Strategic Planning

• Develop achievable and measurable standards addressing the value added to society.

• Have the various school departments articulate how they will align their practices with institutional standards.

• Develop and implement core curriculum that promotes critical thinking, ethical decision-making, and civic engagement, including community outreach and service learning.

• Build community partnerships with local organizations, nonprofits, and schools that share a commitment to the public good.

• Collect and share data to demonstrate an effort to build an inclusive culture.

• Display an annual financial statement of operations that is transparent, accountable, and aligned with the school's dedication to the public good.

Phase 3: Evaluation, Communication, and Growth

• Collect data on student outcomes and community impact.

• Implement tools to measure improvement in community engagement and ethical decision-making.

• Communicate the school's commitment to the public good and share evidence of action and progress. This includes being transparent about the school's finances, operations, and impact.

• Identify areas for improvement and adjust the school's approach and evaluation process as necessary.

• Stay connected to local issues and foster a culture of learning and problem-solving.

• Share stories from external public figures, in addition to internal stakeholders, who have experienced the positive impact of the school in the greater community.

In ' 2017 book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It, he explains that it is not "just the top 1 percent pulling away, but the top 20 percent" (p. 22). He attributes this to "opportunity hoarding...when valuable, scarce opportunities are allocated in an anticompetitive manner: that is, influenced by factors unrelated to an individual's performance" (p. 102). To prevent the U.S. from becoming a more unequal and less mobile society, he urges the upper middle class (which he self-identifies with), the top 20 percent, to rezone neighborhoods to favor some higher density housing; to be less exclusive about the kind of kids their children go to school with; to eradicate legacy preferences in admissions; to democratize internships; and, wait for it, to pay "a bit more tax" to fund more opportunities for less fortunate children (p. 154).

This talk generally makes people uncomfortable, as most of us are more inclined to rally behind the idea that the top one percent is to blame for all of the inequality in the world. I suspect that discomfort, and perhaps a little incredulity, earned Reeves' book its 3.7 rating on Goodreads. However, I believe it is this discomfort, this dirty little possibility that more than one percent of us might be complicit in perpetuating inequality and injustice, where we need to plant our flags.

Alas, can independent schools, free from bureaucratic hoops and politicized mandates, declare, with confidence and honesty, that their value to society is more than worth the cost? Is the investment of time and resources and energy and money not better spent elsewhere? Are the public schoolers out there, the vast majority of people, getting a bad deal? Is it not in their best interests to demand the policy makers to do something about this highway robbery? After all, imagine, for example, what the country could do with Harvard's $53.2 billion endowment alone (an AI analysis suggests a targeted investment of this magnitude could build a nationwide electric vehicle charging network or modernize the water infrastructure; for context, the Manhattan Project cost about $2 billion, or roughly $30 billion today, and Taylor Swift's net worth is about $1.6 billion). Consider my interest piqued. I'd love to hear the answers to these questions.

I'll offer this. When it comes to their value added to society, independent schools have an undeniable advantage: they have the ability to prioritize the public good. In the way they partner with local schools and organizations, in the way they emphasize community service and civic engagement, in the way they share their resources and expertise, they can choose to be of value. They can choose to be yoked together with the public. As Reeves says, "I guess we'll find out."

Question for the club: You have any bright ideas?

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Hans Rosling writes about our "dramatic instincts" in Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, and I've been reflecting a lot on the "negativity instinct," which is another way of describing the negativity bias. Rosling is not the first person to point out the human tendency to focus on the negative. Experts say we are 7x more sensitive to negative stimuli than positive. Rosling explains that even though a growth curve may be positive overall, we only notice the negative dips, not accounting for the reality that we are in better shape at the slumps than when we started. We don’t recognize progress over time.

As a dean of students, I often feel like a bad news filter. I can attest to feeling the 7:1 bias. Sometimes, a single unfortunate incident will cast a shadow over the whole world. Even though I am aware of the negativity instinct, I'm not immune to its effect. I don't know anyone who is. However, like Rosling, I do believe we can do something about it.

In reality, there are not 7 bad things for every 1 good. It just isn't so. Take a tray of chocolate chip cookies for example. In this desirable scenario, grab a cookie, and the odds heavily favor an enjoyable experience. There are plenty of positives out there, and I believe we can transform our daily experience with a single strategy: go for 1:1.

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Someone recently called me the "dean of discipline." An honest mistake that gave me a good chuckle. Nonetheless, I don't accept the title. If all I did was discipline, I would go mad. As Rosling suggests, I expect bad news (and a large part of keeping your sanity is reframing the "bad" as a learning opportunity and realizing, as Rosling says, that things can be “both better and bad” at the same time). I also seek out good news, and I do my best to live in the realm of 1:1. When I find the good (in my case, good behavior), I make an effort to follow up with the appropriate students, and sometimes their families, to share my appreciation for their helpful actions.

Expressing thanks doesn't take long. On average, a fist bump and a compliment adds up to a 10-second procedure. I’ve tried to create a system that makes positive reinforcement a part of the job. For me, it’s a simple spreadsheet where I log good conduct and then note when I have shared feedback with a student and/or the family. I dedicate time to deliver praise, and since bad news is reported more frequently than the good, I have a reminder pinned at the top of my daily tasks: “look for the good.”

This is pretty simple stuff. Sure, a mathematician (or anyone who is better with numbers than me) may see that I haven’t quite got the ratio business right, but, in all seriousness, it’s the effort that counts. Notice I said “go for 1:1.” It changes the way you feel about your work, and it fosters a culture of belonging. With a low cost and a high reward, I haven’t experienced much downside with the 1:1 strategy. And if you think the world is doomed so why even try, here are 32 global improvements worth celebrating.

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Question for the club: What practices have you found effective when addressing the negativity instinct?

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I attended K-12 public schools, I have worked in independent schools for the past 12 years, and, given that education is in the news, I want to share why I think privatizing education would be a grievous oversight with catastrophic effects. The late Frank L. Boyden said one must “never make a decision just to get something done” (McPhee, 1966). I don’t know many people who think we’ve gotten education “right,” and there’s good reason for that conclusion. Decisions of such enormous influence, ones that will define future generations of Americans, require logical and thoughtful thinking, aligned with national—and principled—values, values with sturdy roots that grow and strengthen with changing times (just as the Constitution does). Unfortunately, all sides of the political aisle have fallen short with these decisions, for a while, and it’s clear that we remain divided on the issue of how to best educate children.

I’m not trying to put myself out of a job, but here’s my thesis: the United States should commit to the systemic reform of public schools, encouraging accountability through the electorate and granting flexibility to educators to, I don’t know, teach kids how to practice ethical skills and values with confidence and joy so that they may serve others, their communities, and this world. Historically, widespread inequality is ruinous to the success and vitality of a nation. Therefore, schools should foster personal liberty while still advocating for the public good. Poverty and inequality are the root causes of underperforming schools, and the free market promises innovation—not equality. Privatization will lead to further division. The holistic improvement of education through public schools (which serve over 80% of enrolled students) is our best bet.

Before addressing the puzzle of schooling, one must acknowledge that inequality, not schools, is the root cause of lagging education and student achievement. When it comes to the relationship between poverty and achievement, the facts are clear: “There are never any flat lines when one compares student achievement to family income; that is, as a group children of wealth always outperform students of modest means, and children of poverty perform the worst” (Onosko, 2011). This correlation is indisputable, unless you ignore the facts, so we cannot ignore wealth inequality when discussing school reforms. Some may believe that a public effort to combat inequality is too costly, but history has proven time and again that vast inequality within a nation leads to turmoil, revolution, and collapse. If America does not invest now, if it does not address the root issue by allocating federal resources “based on need, not on competition between the swift and the slow” (Ravitch, 2013), then it will pay a much higher price further down the road.

The free-market system has led to America’s development into an international superpower. No argument from me there. However, free-market forces, devoid of a collective voice and purpose, are not concerned with inequality. Steven Miller and Jack Gerson say, “Privatizing public schools inevitably leads to a massive increase in social inequality” because “private corporations have never been required to recognize civil rights” (2008). It is important to understand why their claim is not merely speculation. Milton Friedman, a supporter of privatization, confessed, “No one can predict in advance the direction that a truly free-market educational system would take,” but he had faith in “how imaginative competitive free enterprise can be” (1976). While Friedman and other hopeful privatizers have imagined, we have all experienced the mixed effects of innovation–the movement from small farms to big factories in the meat industry, the production and recall of automobiles, microplastics. To put it bluntly, the ultimate motivators of the free market are profit and consumer needs, not justice and egalitarianism. The bottom line is financial success, not the ending of human suffering.

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If free-market forces define a privatized education system in America (if education is a good, subject to supply and demand, rather than a basic public right), then the public voice will take a backseat to private interests. Benjamin Barber warns, “Once profit displaces pedagogy, private interest will displace public good and corporate interests will displace pupil needs” (2004), which (as Miller and Gerson explain) “has the effect of silencing the public voice” (2008). An every-school-for-itself mentality would undermine any sense of collective responsibility for collective needs. It’s tough to have a strong and united nation without shared interests. By handing over the reins of public education to the private sector, there will be no assurance of equal educational opportunity. The private market is a race to the top. It would be bad business to level the playing field or to settle for less so that others can have more. Without meeting the collective needs of the public—which includes personal liberty and the unrestricted pursuit of one’s potential—without curbing inequality, schools will further divide the American people.

Instead of abandoning common interests and resorting to the fragmented, hands-off approach of privatization, America should focus its efforts on the systemic improvement of education through public schools. As John Tierney points out, “We cannot improve education by quick fixes” (2013), and as Michael Fullan insists, the US “has a habit of breaking things into pieces: what looks like a system is not, because the pieces are not well connected.” Though this may be an efficient way of producing goods, it is not an effective way of cultivating mindful citizens. Fullan says, “Systemic means all elements of the system are interconnected and involved, day after day. Systemic is experiential not theoretical” (2011). In order to develop lasting and effective educational reform that serves national, rather than private, interests, the focus should turn toward a public school system that can build upon a stable and advantageous foundation.

A successful public school system needs a strong and skilled community of educators who have the flexibility to innovate with technology, instruction, and insight. Fullan emphasizes how effective reforms must “change the day-to-day culture of school systems” (2011). Quality public schools can ensure that teachers are accredited and experienced (private schools can side-step this process if they wish), and they can trust their teachers to use and request evidenced-based instruction each day in the classroom. Perhaps you’ve heard complaints about the low morale and frustration of soldiers who go into battle with “their hands tied behind their backs.” Teachers often experience a sense of devaluation, and they will benefit from flexibility, optimal conditions to do their job, and an appreciation for what they do. Paying them more would be a nice gesture too. Aspiring educators must first understand education fundamentals in order to handle flexibility, which is why generating high quality teachers is paramount.

Of course, when it comes to the issues between public and private, there is a balance. If Americans decide to commit their funding and efforts to public schools, they must avoid the authoritarianism that decades of politicized educational reforms have bred. Both the public and private sector, if granted too much power, can create an education system (or any system) that, “while being an effective machine to instill what the government [or corporation] wants students to learn, is incapable of supporting individual strengths, cultivating a diversity of talents, and fostering the capacity and confidence to create” (Zhao, 2014). The public school system in America can avoid this outcome because, while schools inform the electorate, an informed electorate holds the public system accountable. An authoritarian education system that narrows learning “threatens our democracy due to students’ reduced capacity for informed decision making” (Onosko, 2011). The protection of democratic values and rights depends upon the integrity of schools, which a system of public checks and balances can uphold. Or we could just leave it to social media.

The Founding Fathers believed that government was a means to achieving liberty for all:

They were careful to design a system that guarded against democracy’s ‘turbulence and follies.’ They used the division of powers (among other things) to prevent the most common dangers of democracies: majorities oppressing minorities, minorities hijacking the government, and elected representatives putting their own interests before the people’s. (Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 2004)

No matter the political stance, one could argue that some, if not all, of these dangers—whether consciously or unconsciously—threaten America (and humanity) today. The United States of America, as far as I understand, does not officially endorse a single group of special interests as superior. Instead, it is a nation that aspires to promote shared interests for the common good. By committing to a public school system, the public declares their trust in the republic while guarding against the influence of private interests over national interests. In recognizing the common good, the informed citizen realizes that nations fail when inequality and partisanship become acceptable, costs of doing business. If Americans do not feel that they are a part of something greater than their own preferences, if they do not feel compelled to contribute to a purpose greater than themselves, to the liberty of all people, then we have a nation that is blundering toward a rude awakening.

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Question for the club: Do you have any thoughts on the education divide and what education reform might look like? Or can you suggest simple ways for someone to get involved?

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Works Cited

Barber, B. (2004, May). Taking the public out of education. Retrieved February 3, 2016, from http://www.aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=14096

Friedman, M. (1995, June 23). Public schools: Make them private. Retrieved January 31, 2016, from http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-023.html

Fullan, M. (2011). Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform: Overview. Retrieved February 10, 2016, from Fullan website

McPhee, J. (1966). The headmaster: Frank L. Boyden, of Deerfield. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Micklethwait, J., & Wooldridge, A. (2004). Right from the beginning: The roots of American exceptionalism. In The right nation: Conservative power in America (pp. 314-333). New York: The Penguin Press.

Miller, S., & Gerson, J. (2008, March 10). Exterminating public schools in America. Retrieved February 3, 2016, from http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2008/03/exterminating-public-schools.html

Onosko, J. (2011). Obama's Race to the Top leaves children and future citizens behind: The devastating effects of centralization, standardization, and high stakes accountability. Democracy & Education, 19(2), 1-11. Retrieved February 8, 2016, from http://democracyeducationjournal.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=home

Ravitch, D. (2013). Chapter 3 & 4. In Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Tierney, J. (2013, April 25). The coming revolution in public education. Retrieved February 3, 2016, from http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/04/the-coming-revolution-in-public-education/275163/

Zhao, Y. (2014). Fatal attraction: America's suicidal quest for educational excellence. In Who's afraid of the big bad dragon?: Why China has the best (and worst) education system in the world (pp. 1-11). Jossey-Bass.

I really appreciate you taking the time to read this. Feel free to reach out to me directly.

First off, I apologize. This article is behind schedule. I have lots of excuses, none of which I will deploy. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of asking or, as in, “This or That?” While it is true that one can have This and That, I believe the or question is more imperative to address. For example:

• Do you want to be happy or successful?

• Do you want to be respected for your kindness or for your harshness?

• Would you rather be rich or joyful?

• Is it better to be frantic or focused? Mindful or manic?

• Are you helpful or harmful?

Asking or is so important because it forces us to choose, to prioritize. When we try to be This and That, we end up stretching ourselves thin, often to the breaking point, and sometimes beyond it. Whether it be personal or institutional philosophy, I suggest you explore the or. It may be the essential question you're avoiding.

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For those who are looking for a place to begin, I’ll offer this adaptation of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Five Mindfulness Trainings. Answering these questions will likely be a challenge:

• Are you committed to cultivating interdependence and compassion or isolation and indifference?

• Will you protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals or exploit them for personal gain?

• Will you practice openness, nondiscrimination, and critical thinking, or will you welcome anger, fear, greed, and intolerance?

• Are you committed to practicing generosity in your thinking, speaking, and acting, or will you try to be superior to others?

• Will you share your time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need, or will you hoard opportunities to maintain your status?

• Do you see that the happiness and suffering of others are not separate from your own, or are the happiness and suffering of others not your concern?

• Do you prioritize wealth, fame, power, and pleasure, or do you prioritize service that reduces the suffering of others?

• Are you committed to cultivating loving speech and compassionate listening, or do you speak to obtain and hold attention?

• Are you committed to speaking truthfully, using words that inspire confidence, joy, and hope, or will you spread uncertain news and cause division and discord for the purpose of capturing an audience and gaining followers?

• Will you avoid speaking and acting out of anger, or will you use your anger to fuel your words and actions?

• Will you prioritize understanding, love, joy, and inclusiveness for all, or will you seek to win prestige at the expense of others, using disparaging remarks and excluding outsiders?

• Are you committed to cultivating good health, both physical and mental, by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming, or are you committed to entertainment at the expense of your body and mind?

• Are you determined not to use or create products containing toxins that are harmful to the body, mind, and environment, or will you use and create the necessary products to maximize profit and personal gain?

• Will you consume in a way that preserves peace, joy, and well-being for one and for all, or will you consume in a way that expedites the attainment of wealth, fame, and power?

Be it thought-provoking or infuriating, I hope you find this process helpful. Ultimately, we can't have it all. We must choose.

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Question for the club: What or questions do you think are important to ask? Also, please feel free to ask me a question at any time. I’ll do my best to share my two cents.

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