How often do you do something for the joy of it? Because you love what you’re doing? In “Flow,” I kept trying (and crashing) because I loved the idea of it. The 100-mile runners in Born to Run race for the love of it, says Christopher McDougall. And if you’ve ever loved the feel of […]
Remember when you so loved the idea of something– your next job… a new project… your future wife– that nothing could stop you from pursuing it (her… him)? The best motivation is when you love the idea of it so much that you don’t really care how you’re doing at this moment: you’re having so […]
Have you ever found yourself trying to think more positively about something but in your gut or your chest you feel a clenching that says, “I don’t really believe this” ? If so, you’re not alone. Sometimes when we try thinking positively about a difficult topic, not only do we not feel better, we may even […]
Did you know that you are a storyteller? Or that you are just one story away from what you really want? Most of us don’t realize that we have a few central narratives running through our lives because the stories we tell ourselves are so familiar that we don’t even realize they are stories. […]
Not seeing the best in our students is not as much an issue for them as it is for us. Many of them go happily along feeling free and knowing they just want to stay under the radar of parents, school, teachers and traditional expectations. Jimmy, for example, is a C-student who, “… trained us. […]
Besides being creative, innovative, wildly successful and new-age businesses (that weren’t even dreamed of 30 years ago), do you know what Google, Amazon, Wikipedia & Sim City have in common? The founders of these companies (two at Google) have Montessori educations, says Peter Sims in the Wall Street Journal. What is “a Montessori education?” Although […]
I sometimes wonder why so much of what is considered “good literature” for ourselves and for students has to be dark, depressing, or unhappy. I’m not against stories in which something bad happens, but knowing that bad news seizes and clings, while good news slides right off us, I like to prime myself with uplifting […]
In a Wellesley Townsman column, Jeanne Mayell alerted parents to the teen suicide risks of anti-depressants. She said, “…they found that after being on the drug for many months, significantly more people became suicidal on the antidepressant than on the placebo.” This naturally leads to the question: are there alternatives? The short answer is: yes. […]