There are thousands of ways to be a great, master teacher, but there is really only one way to be a bad one. It has to do with how the critical juncture is handled. This is the critical juncture: the moment when you realize a negative difference between how you expected things to go, and […]
Inner Work
The Any-Benefit Approach
The any-benefit approach to decision-making says that if anything good can possibly come of a new strategy or lesson or unit or initiative, then it’s worth using (Newport, Deep Work, p. 186). Unfortunately, this is often the approach we take to deciding whether The New Thing We Learned is worth giving a go — in […]
Fixed-Schedule Productivity
I’m not the only dedicated professional who takes his work seriously enough to stop doing it around dinner time. Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to being a productive academic, he’s also written several successful non-academic books. [1] In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Newport introduces […]
Start With the Constraint
It’s possible that the most important moment in my teaching career came not while teaching, but while speaking to a beautiful young woman I dated at the start of my career. I was a first-year teacher, and I was introducing this woman to what my working life was like. “Some days,” I told her, “the […]
Productive Curiosity: The Billion Dollar Character Strength?
In January of this year, “billionaire buddies” Warren Buffett and Bill Gates held a Q&A session at Columbia University. At the 5:08 mark, the moderator asks, “What quality has been most important for you?” They both answered with the same thing: curiosity. Here is how Gates defines curiosity in the interview: “You try and predict […]