Dave Stuart Jr.

As I shared last time, the late Austrian management philosopher Peter Drucker spent his six-decade working life in pursuit of one big question. How do we make society both more productive and more humane? This is what Drucker wanted to know. The question fascinates me because it is so difficult, so important, so balanced. Any […]

There’s a question that’s been nagging at me for months and months, starting at the end of last school year, persisting at times through the summer, and now louder and clearer with a new school year under way. It’s been a hard one for me to voice because I’m keen on focusing on what I […]

Get talking with a productivity buff about email, and you’re bound to hear OHIO, an acronym that stands for “Only Handle It Once.” The idea is pretty simple: if you’re going to open an email, then right then and there you’ve also got to deal with it by responding, archiving, forwarding (shudder), or task-listing. You […]

Today as I met my students for the first time, I couldn’t help recalling an old Hebrew hymn in which the author writes, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” While perhaps not many of us public school teachers share the Hebrew poet’s […]

All of our tasks exist on a spectrum. On one end are the tasks that directly touch the core purpose of our jobs, and on the other end are the tasks that we ought to try skipping. But which tasks are those? Which can we not just satisfice, but skip? To have a chance of […]

If you and I are going to stay sane this year — sane as in healthy, of sound mind, common sensical, practical — then we’ll need to practice what I’ve come to call the precious s’s: satisficing and skipping. Satisficing is what we do when we accept an available option as satisfactory rather than working […]

Then you’ve got to be kind to people when they’re mean or rude to you. This is how the virtues strengthen: not by doing them when they’re easy, but by doing them when they’re hard. Consider: You cannot get braver unless you do what needs to be done when what needs to be done makes […]

One of the easiest ways to be a moron is to think you know something that you actually don’t. And right out of the gate, let me just admit that I’m adept at this kind of idiocy. But it’s not just me. In 1999, social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger formalized something that we’ve […]

Long ago, I wrote that one of the “Jedi mind tricks” for avoiding burnout is this: you are not your job. Or rather, the mind trick lies in training yourself to habitually remember that your job performance is not indicative of your value as an individual. It helps to think here of two circles: one […]

In the first days of June 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower faced befuddling complexity as the final decision for the coming D-Day invasion loomed before him. The question was easy to ask — On what date shall the invasion begin? — but soul-crushingly difficult to answer. He needed a full moon in order for his nighttime […]

Great teachers did more than obsess on the efficiency of their classroom — their questions were artful; their assignments, demanding — but there was a clear tendency among positive outliers to see the power of the humdrum, the everyday. Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and […]

The workshop was being led by Dr. Chris Hulleman, the much-admired researcher behind the “Build Connections” intervention that I share in the second chapter of These 6 Things. He was leading a session at Character Lab’s annual Educator Summit in Philadelphia, and I couldn’t believe that I was actually in the same room as this […]

Picture all the things you’d like to accomplish this school year as a bucket. In that bucket is your effectiveness, your sanity, your impact on long-term flourishing, your ability to facilitate a learning experience. It’s a good, good bucket. And then that one student misbehaves again. Or that after-lunch class starts running off the rails. […]

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. F. Scott Fitzgerald If your goal is to optimize your career performance without sacrificing your life in the process — in other words, to run your career […]

The next time you’re tempted to say yes to sponsoring a club, pursuing a degree, joining a committee, or reading a book, ask yourself: If I couldn’t tell a soul about this, would I still do it? This Ego Detector is such a useful thinking tool because people like you and me are after usefulness […]

Kym was convinced that she had a disorder: she was unable to speak in class, and there was no way to solve it. This is what I learned on the first day of school when Kym filled out an index card telling me a bit about herself and who she wanted to be. I can […]