Hello, If I told you that I played the violin for over a decade, including in college, you might assume I was talented. We tend to equate time with quality. The more hours invested, the better the outcome. You might even reference the 10,000-hour rule. But repetition alone does not produce excellence. It is not practice makes perfect. It is refined practice that makes progress. If I repeat the same mistakes for years, I simply become good at doing them wrong. If I consistently perform a task...

Hello, Recently, three different friends shared situations they were navigating. On the surface, their stories had nothing to do with one another. Beneath them, however, was a striking similarity. The first friend, who professionally works in mediation and restoration of harm, reached out to someone she occasionally walked with. No response. She followed up. Still nothing. She was left wondering what she had done. The second friend, a school principal, experienced an accident in her building....

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called On Target . It was about schools as systems, and how easy it is for leaders to miss the mark when they forget who they actually serve. The bullseye model I shared was my way of naming a simple truth: you support the people you directly touch, and that support is what makes student success possible. More recently, I wrote another post called Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game . That post was less about the structure of a system and more about the...