The Song of Significance

All right, good morning, Seth. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

What a treat. It’s great to meet you.

So for anybody in our audience who does not know who you are or your background, could you just start out by giving us a little bit about yourself and your journey?

Well, I call myself a teacher, but I’ve never actually done the hard work of being in a public school on a salary. I started teaching canoeing in Canada when I was 17 years old, and since then I’ve written 20 bestsellers. I’ve started a couple companies, including one of the first internet companies. I write a blog every day. And I don’t know. I could go on and on, but I’m not going to.

You are one of those genuine people in the world who just, what do we call it, multi-passionate? That you are

Yeah

Just constantly changing and shaping the world around you? Yeah?

I’m doing my best. I’m easily distracted, but mostly if I can contribute, I learn from my parents that that’s an obligation and a privilege in one.

Yes, and that’s something we have in common. My dad, he always used to tell me, if you wake up and you put your feet on the ground in the morning, you have an obligation to serve. So, I said this earlier offline, but I’m gonna say it again, that as I transitioned out of the classroom and into entrepreneurship and in a world of serving teachers, it’s a weird juxtaposition because as educators, we are trained to serve first, and sometimes at the sacrifice of ourselves, but in business, it’s the opposite. And so finding your work at the beginning of my entrepreneurship journey has really been such a blessing because you taught me that selling doesn’t have to be sleazy, it doesn’t have to be weird, and it’s really just a conversation between two people built around empathy and communication. And so I have this understanding of how to serve people in a new way. That said, education as it stands is in a state of crisis at the moment. And so how can educators better market the changes that are needed to move forward?

Well, it’s a great question. And the crisis is long overdue because the world changed, but education did not. So let’s go back a little bit. Many of your listeners know who John Taylor Gatto is, but basically what we know is that education in this country is based on the Prussian paramilitary system from the 1800s. And it was designed to create compliant factory workers. There was a huge shortage of people who were willing to do what they were told indoors all day. over and over and over again. And so industrialists put up whatever money was necessary, whatever political influence was necessary to create this system where we’re training people to ask will this be on the test? Because that teaches kids to go get a job. 

And will this be on the test work great for a really long time? And now it doesn’t because with AI and with outsourcing and with a fast changing world, with a world filled with misinformation, just asking what do you want me to do now is not going to help people become who they can become. 

And the problem is that good teachers, teachers who care, are trapped in the middle. They are trapped between what they know to do, what they want to do, what they yearn to do, which is to lead, to teach, to connect, and what the system is pushing them to do, which is to comply under surveillance and test management. And parents and teachers have to stand up and say, nope, not on my watch. And we have to figure out how to tell a story to the board, to the administration, and to the parents that helps them understand that the single best thing they can do is encourage their kids to learn, not worry about the sticker on the back of their car. And that’s a long conversation about how to tell that story. But first, you’ve got to realize that that’s what you need to do to achieve your life’s dream.

Yeah, and that actually pivots into one of the questions that one of our listeners actually asked, which was what advice would you give to teachers who are trying to change the current system, but still have to function within it, right? So, I’m gonna go ahead and start with a question that I’ve been getting a lot of questions about. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to change the current system. 

Right, well, I’m going to start by turning it upside down. Many of the teachers I know have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they think they’re trying, but they’re not really. That you don’t currently have a job where you are managed 60 minutes every hour. You might be managed 40 minutes every hour, but there’s still this leeway. And in this leeway, because you were trained to do a certain thing and want to please the people you work for, it is tempting to just keep doing it for the next 20 minutes. But in fact, we all know a teacher who changed someone’s life. Maybe you’ve been that teacher. You didn’t do that by following what was in the curriculum. You did that by going off piste, by showing up in a different way for a bit. And what we have is the ability, if you desire to go down that path, to… keep veering away from the you can measure me by my kids’ SAT scores, that you can figure out when these kids are done with today’s class, or this month’s class, or this year’s class, what are they going to say about what happened in this classroom? And my kids went to public school. And when I think about the impact Bethrod had on my kids, when I think about the impact I could go down a long list of teachers had on my kids, it was one out of eight of their teachers. The other seven did their job. But one out of eight did something else. And that is available currently, for now anyway, to most teachers most of the time. You are under-appreciated, under-staffed, underpaid. That’s a given. You know that. That’s not going to change.

Yeah. Right.

But since you’ve already paid that price, what are you going to do when you show up tomorrow? And I think what you can do is risk the principal being disappointed, risk the parent asking you a question about why this wasn’t prepped, and instead change a kid’s life.

Hmm, powerful. And it’s something that I think every teacher aspires to do, but within the system that they find themselves caught in, they oftentimes, and you’re right, it is a juxtaposition that’s uncomfortable.

Oh yeah, it’s wearing you down. And please, I’m not suggesting any lack of respect or saying that what you’re doing is easy. It’s really, really, really, really hard. I get that.

But if you’ve ever been on a plane and seen a pilot who went above and beyond, she did that outside the rule book. And the same thing’s true with a cop, and the same thing’s true with a chef, right? But you went to the normal school. Do you know why it’s called the normal school? The first teachers college in America was in Massachusetts. They named it the normal school because it’s where they teach you to teach kids to be normal. That’s on purpose, that’s the name of it. So why are we surprised that that’s what you’ve been indoctrinated into?

Alright?

Right? And it’s particularly in what we do, which is advocate for arts integration, STEAM, project-based learning, these hands-on methodologies that at the heart are connecting teachers to students, getting to the understanding that everyone has a uniqueness about them, right? Normal doesn’t work. And we’re advocating for students to make choices rather than just cooks who follow the recipe, right? And at the same time, together, when teachers are working through that and recognizing that that is what is needed in order to offer that change, I wanna go back to this idea of crafting a different story.

Mm-hmm.

Because the story, I think, the story matters in everything. It’s the heart of marketing, it’s the heart of everything that we do, right? Humans are centered around story. And so when we’re talking about working with leaders, working with parents, and I want to get to leadership in particular a little bit later, what or how can we craft the story in a different way that’s more compelling, right? That the story has to be more compelling than the one that is currently being bought.

Okay, so I know a little bit about marketing, and I’m happy to say that marketing is about making a change happen. If you’re not gonna make a change happen, why did you bother showing up, right? There’s lots of other jobs where you have to do what you did yesterday, but marketing’s only purpose is to change the way people are going to act. And when we think about arts in particular, what we need to sell, kids and parents, is not that we are going to teach your kid craft. Because we don’t need any good oil painting. We don’t need any good pottery. And we don’t need any good sculpting or performance. What we need is bad sculpting and performance. What we need are kids who are willing to find the guts, to speak up. So I produced the fourth grade musical years ago, Wizard of Oz. It was a triumph. They’re still talking about it 20 years later. And we had three months to prepare and the first month no one got a script. For the first month, all we did with these nine-year-olds is get them to be loud, to stand up in front of other children and sing loudly, speak loudly. Show up and say, hello. That is really hard for an indoctrinated nine-year-old girl to do.

And to be able to have that experience and for me to hear from a young woman, uh, six months ago, reminding me of what happened to her when she was nine in that production, that’s why we do it. Not cause there’s a wizard of Oz shortage, but because it helps someone become a person who realizes that failure isn’t fatal. And so the story we have to tell as marketers is to create tension, not to relieve tension, but to create it, because the only thing that goes with change every time is tension. The tension of this might not work, the tension of I’m not sure, the tension of what happens next. So your job as a teacher or an administrator is to create tension, not to relieve it. And that tension can be created in lots of ways, but you have to do it with intent.

Hmm, now this is, I’m gonna ask a couple of questions because this will make a lot of people uncomfortable, right?

They’re not used to creating tension. It’s the other way around. So how do we create tension in a way that we can sit with it? And, and be open to where that tension leads, which could be failure. And many teachers are the gold star teachers. They’re the ones who sat in the front row, got the gold stars, got the A’s. So they don’t want that. How do we reframe or retrain ourselves to rethink failure?

Yeah, great question. So if you were interested in running the marathon and you came to me and said, can I get a coach who can teach me how to run the marathon without getting tired? I would say no. It is impossible to run a marathon without getting tired. And the people who finish the marathon are tired. And the people who quit in mile 22 are the people who couldn’t figure out where to put the tired. So if you tell me that you want to be a teacher of significance, that you want to be able to find the path to do the thing you set out to do, I’m going to tell you, you have to sign up for creating tension. And if you’re not willing to do that, then keep doing what you’re doing, because you’re going to enjoy it. But please don’t tell me you need the freedom to be the kind of teacher that you say you want. OK. So if that’s the case, then how do we? start training ourselves to deal with tension. So I’ll give you a simple example. You are sitting with an eight year old or a 12 year old and you have their work in front of you and you look to me and I say, I’d like to give you my thoughts on what you just did. And they look at you and then you sit quietly for 15 seconds and say nothing. How does that make you feel? How does that make them feel? And then when you say what you say, how does that make them feel when you relieve that tension? So it’s only 15 seconds. It feels like 10 minutes. And so we start with little tiny steps like that, right? That when… You don’t go from here to doing a Ted talk, but maybe you go from here to doing a practice Tedx that lasts four minutes, and then you work your way up to doing a Tedx, and then blah, blah, blah. So it’s the step-wise progression, which is the way we learn everything. And when we have the chance to introduce, when we say to a kid, you know, I had really high expectations for what you could accomplish, but when you just phone it in, I think you’re disappointing yourself. Most kids will respond to that by saying, how do I do better? As opposed to saying, I gave you a B- because you didn’t meet standards. Most kids will respond to that by saying, well, I guess I’m a B- student.

Or I don’t care.

And they’re going to live with that for the rest of their life.

Yeah, yeah. This reminds me of Eric Whitaker. I’m not sure if you know who he is. He’s an American composer who works specifically with virtual choirs. Interesting guy. He talks a lot about the intention of silence. I mean, I think he wrote an entire piece with silence in it. But the idea of creating space and leveraging that space to allow people to wonder, right, to be curious. And I think that leads to the next component that I wanted to ask when you can’t do this alone, you can’t do a change effort alone. 

And so one of the things that spoke to me most from one of your books, This is Marketing, was the phrase, people like us do things like this. And I think that speaks to the idea of community and that you’re building this tribe together. I think, especially when we look at change movements at schools, we talk about this in our company all the time, that it’s never gonna be the broad brush strokes. Right? It’s the frustrating part for me when I go out to schools and I’m like, if you would just use this approach, you would see such better results, right? But it’s the small grassroots communities that we do this and we recognize this. How do we build something like that in our schools as educators who are, I mean, we’re gonna talk about this when we talk about your new book, but the idea that everybody is a leader at some capacity, how do we build… communities like this where people like us do things like this.

So the sentence is a tautology. It doesn’t mean that you look a certain way. It means that if you act a certain way, you are part of a certain group of people who act a certain way. That is the definition of culture, right? That if you go to a jazz concert in New York City at the end of the piano solo, people will quietly applaud. It’s not silent. No one cheers. They will quietly applaud. People like us who go to jazz clubs do things like this. Well, when we think about the culture of a school, who gets rewarded, who gets amplified. That when the Sternlichs went to Vietnam in the 1970s, trying to help with community malnutrition, they could have shown up and said, we’re from the West, from privileged wealthy countries, do what we say and your kids will not go hungry. But instead they went around and they found the few families whose kids weren’t malnourished. And they had those moms put them up on a pedestal and said, tell all the other moms what you’re feeding your kids. By identifying the positive deviance and amplifying them, you establish people like us do things like this. That when we celebrate the teacher not who has the highest SAT scores, but who has kids who are coloring outside the lines regularly, we’re doing something. This is why it is so tragic that we do tryouts for the play

Or tryouts for the orchestra and give the person who has the biggest head start the role, which simply gives them a bigger head start. Because guess what? We don’t have a thespian shortage, nor do we have a soccer player shortage. Tryouts make absolutely no sense in school. What we need to do in school is say, who is going to bring an attitude of, I’m going to change for the better? Those people get the roles. Those people get to play soccer. Those people get to show up because attitude is something that people can adopt in one day. And if we create the cycle, people like us do things like this. We have a soccer team that doesn’t win games. We have a soccer team that builds humans. Right. Oh, I think that’s what school’s for.

True, instead of being normal, right? Instead of building normal, we build humans, right? So, and this is spurring a lot of different thoughts, so I’m kind of pivoting a little bit. I was actually just thinking about this example that you just shared about Triads, because my daughter literally just went through JV Triads for lacrosse last night, and when she came home off the bus, she said, you know, it was great, except that the girl that I was up against, She’s just a little bit better than me because she’s a sophomore, but she’s mean. She’s just mean. She was talking nasty about everybody else. And so my question to her was, what did the coaches do? Nothing.

Christmas.

We were trying out, right? It was about the skills. She was like, mom, it’s about the skills. It’s not about whether she’s nice or not.

that’s not a good word skills because being nice is a skill.

Yes, well, and that’s what we were talking about. I was like, yeah, but you gotta practice being nice too. If like, you know, if your home setting is nasty, we gotta work on being nice, right? So you talked about this idea of amplification of the deviant. And that’s gonna lead us to the leaders who do that. And there is, and we’ve been kind of talking about this idea of tension, of creating this movement for change. And the best way I think that we can describe that in schools is the difference between our leadership, whether that’s principals, assistant principals, deans, curriculum supervisors, whatever, and teachers who are in the classrooms every day. And so you have a new book coming out called Song of Significance. I would love for you to share just briefly what this book encapsulates.

This is personal for me, and I think it’s personal for my readers. I asked 10,000 people in 90 countries, what’s the best job you ever had? And I gave them a whole bunch of choices. And almost nobody picked. I got paid a lot. I got to work whenever I wanted. I got to travel. What people picked were I exceeded my expectations for myself. I was treated with dignity and respect. And I made a difference. Well, if that’s the best job you ever had, why can’t you have a job like that now? And when we think about what attracts someone to being a principal, what attracts someone to being a bureaucrat, they’re not bad people, but they’ve been indoctrinated into the fact that their day gets harder when they don’t color inside the lines. And so what we have to do is create the conditions for people. to do what they seek, what they dream of. And so what makes a great principle a great principle is they spend all their time finding people doing something right and celebrating it. And it spreads. And sure, they have to make sure the place is safe. They have to make sure that people learn how to read. But what they really need to do is enable teachers to take risks to enable young humans to become who they seek to be. And the entire institution can shift, not because there’s gonna be a memo or an edict, but because bit by bit, the individuals will seek what they sought in the first place, which is significance. And significance to me means you made a change happen. You personally made a change that you are proud of. Because I gotta tell you, we are rapidly approaching a time when, if all you’re doing is drill and practice and flashcards and test prep, I got a computer that can do that better than you and cheaper too.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and that’s why there’s, I’ve never, I will tell you this, Seth, I’ve never seen teachers more scared of something than I’ve seen them of chat GPT and of AI. I have never seen them more scared. And I am sitting here going, it’s a calculator. It’s the same thing as a calculator, it’s a tool. Why are we scared of a tool? But it’s to your point, right? If… If a computer or AI can do everything that we can do as teachers, which we can’t, but that’s another discussion, then our world will never, it doesn’t need to exist, right? As we know it.

I love the interconnection of artistry and work that you have in this title of Song of Significance. But I know there’s another aspect of this. So there’s the song of increase. What is that?

So the Song of Increase unlocked this for me. In May, in the Northern Hemisphere, the beehive near you will have survived, or not, a long winter. And the purpose of honey is to give the bees something to eat during the winter to sustain them. If they make it to the end of the winter, the council of maidens, who are the leading women who run most of what’s going on in the hive, will have a meeting. It’s not a metaphor, it’s true. They’ll have a meeting and they will come to realize that the hive is OK. And they will do several things. The first thing they will do is instruct the rest of the maidens to go collect as much pollen as they can, as fast as they can, through the month of June, and they will replenish all the honey supply. The second thing they will do is build a vertical egg chamber and they will instruct the queen to lay and fertilize a queen egg. But a bee colony can only have one queen. And after this queen egg is laid, they will lavish the baby with royal jelly and make sure it’s well cared for. And then just before the pip, that’s what you call a baby bee, is born, the maidens will send a signal. And all of the adult bees in the hive, more than 10,000 of them, will leave the hive within 10 minutes, swarming to a tree just 100 yards away. And they will never return. They will leave behind all the honey, the baby queen, all the baby bees. And they will leap into the unknown. And then they have three days to find a new hive, a new place to live in. If they don’t, they’re all going to die. And that leap, that song of increase, to say, I am not going to stay here. I am going to go do that other thing, make that change happen. When you hear it, when you see it, when you see that swarm that seems chaotic but is not, we look at ourselves and we say, and what are we going to do? Right? Did we build all this? Did we burn all that carbon? Did we create all of these systems? so that we could just say, what do you want me to do today? I don’t think so. I think we have a chance to sing the song of increase and not get stuck in the song of safety.

Hmm. So in this story, the song of increase is spurred by the direction of the maidens, right? If I heard you correctly. So what spurs us for our song of increase? [“Song of Increase”]

Right. Well, the thing about bees is a bee colony is basically a human brain inside out. Each bee is not an individual entity. If you kill a bee, the colony is fine. Bees will sacrifice their lives regularly for the sake of the colony. The maidens aren’t in charge of anything. They are just the mouthpiece for the entire hive. We are the maidens. We are the queen. We are all of it. The only thing that can spur the song of significance is you. You will not get a memo. You will not be indoctrinated into doing it. I was lucky. I had a job where that was expected of me in 1984. You shouldn’t wait for that to happen. You shouldn’t wait for David Cease to say, Oh yeah, I got this brand and a whole bunch of money for you to spend. Go. I know you’re unqualified. That was a miracle, right?

But my example isn’t the real example. The real example is every teacher who has ever shown up and made a difference. They are just as qualified as every teacher who didn’t make a difference, right? That the teachers who went out of their way for me, I was invited to Mr. Guillaume’s 80th birthday party and I met him when I was eight. And I think of him all the time. Every year on June 14th, Flag Day, I remember it’s his daughter’s birthday. And… How many people are gonna come to your 80th birthday party? I think that’s worth asking yourself a question.

Yeah, for sure. So additionally, in this book, I wanna kind of shift gears a little bit because teachers are practical beings. There’s a grid in your book that I found really interesting, this intersection of trust and essential work. Can you talk about what’s in each of those quadrants and how do we get to the quadrant we really wanna be in?

Yes, and I know a lot of people are listening, but I have it right here. So I’ll just try to talk us through it.

Some things need to get done are high stakes and some things are low stakes. Flying an airplane across the country is high stakes. If you make a mistake, something’s not going to work. Right. On the other hand, there’s lots of low stakes stuff. If you, if you go to order a piece of pizza and it’s 10 minutes late, no one’s going to die. Right. And then there are environments, low trust and high trust. So a high trust environment is you went to see a concert. There’s 7,000 other people there. But the musicians, they trust each other, that Bobby Weir and Jerry Garcia can trade riffs back and forth, and they know that they’re not going to get undermined. In front of all those people, it’s high stakes and high trust. High stakes and high trust is where significance lies. High stakes and low trust is a we’re going to put you under surveillance. Low trust is you’re not allowed to fly the airplane. The autopilot has to fly the airplane, because we trust the computer more than we trust you. That what education is becoming is high stakes, low trust.

And if the governor is telling you what you can teach, you should get a new job. You should just quit.

Yes!

You should not work there, because they’ve insulted you. by saying, I do not trust your judgment on how to teach these children. It’s high stakes, low trust. We’re going to surveil you. And surveillance keeps going up, up, up. And you can make a lot of money doing that. Amazon is a very low trust organization. Every step by every worker is measured. Bloomberg, which is a multi-billion dollar company, counts how many keystrokes its employees make per hour. Right? You don’t have to work there. You can decide the indoctrination isn’t worth it. I am going to go find a high stakes, high trust environment. But the problem with that, the challenge, not the problem, the challenge is you’re on the hook. And fish don’t like to be on the hook. But people, people should be on the hook. You want to be treated like a surgeon, like somebody who has a scalpel and no one’s going to tell you how to do your job better than you, because you know what to do. And we are seeing institutions arising where individuals are showing up and saying, put me in. Count on me. I trust you, and you can trust me. And if you are in a low trust environment, you either have to earn trust or leave. You’re not allowed to whine about it.

So how do we move from that quadrant to the other? How do we build trust and, you know, continue to work in this essential area of where we have significance?

You make promises and you keep them. And again, I believe in public schools. I put my family where my mouth is. But there are some institutions that don’t deserve you. And if you’re one of those truly, you should leave. And we know that great teachers are doing great work. But you have to make big promises and you have to keep them. And you begin by making little promises and keeping them. And the problem with the normal school is they have indoctrinated you into making the smallest possible promises. So you don’t get into trouble, because that’s what you’ve been doing your whole life is, will this be on the test? I got an A. I got promoted. Well, then why are we surprised that when you finally reach the pinnacle of your career, that’s all you get to do. And that’s not significant. And that’s not worth the low pay and the hard hours and the low respect. you can do better than that. And the way you do better than that is by figuring out who you can look in the eye, who you can challenge, where you can create tension and not say this is the administration’s fault. Because right here, right now, you have enough freedom to make some choices. And I’ve had teachers in my family my whole life. And my dear friend, Patty Jo Wilson, is a world class teacher. And I saw what Patty Jo Wilson did with low income kids who had been taught for their whole life not to believe. And her ability to, with not a lot of credibility, earn the trust of those kids to get them to believe. And then people like us do things like this, it all begins to change. I have such respect for the people who are listening to this, and I know how hard it is. But there’s just one step left to take, and that is the step toward claiming significance.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think they’re yearning to do that. And this is the key, is the yearning to do it. The only thing that’s stopping them from taking the leap, from leaving the hive and finding it, is the fear of dying, of not finding the other hive, to be able to live in,

and the fear of dying. But as people who have taken leaps, and I’m sure you can attest to this as well. We’re built to be able to find the next step. I truly believe you take the leap, you’re gonna land somewhere and it’s not gonna be in a box somewhere that you can’t feed yourself. You’re a smart individual, you can figure it out.

Yeah, it might not work this time, but if you have the foundation and you’re smart about it, you’ll get another time and another time. And, you know, the opportunity the book offers, and the reason I wrote a book and not a blog post is because I wanted to be able to say to people, here, let’s do this together. Right? And I made a special edition of the book that’s this little thing like this. So when people buy a bunch, they get a whole bunch of these pamphlets that they can hand around. Because if you say to your principal, I’m ready to sign up if we’re willing to treat each other this way. Maybe they’ll read it. Maybe they’ll talk to you about it. Maybe we can have these honest conversations. Maybe on back to school night, you can turn to 20 parents and say, look, there’s two tracks in my classroom. There’s the track for parents who want their kids to thrive and to sing and to be significant. And then there’s the track for people who just want the minimum. You raise your hand and I’ll do whichever one you want. But this is what you have to do on your end to earn that slot. And parents also have a lot going on in their lives. They’re all overwhelmed. So you can’t ask them to completely change the way they’re parenting. But what you can say is, this bus is going to Cleveland. And if you want to go to Tucson, this is the wrong bus.

Yes, yes, you’re talking about the commitments, right?

Yeah,

The commitments that are in the book, which we’re not gonna have time to go into, but I want everybody to understand that part of the work is, and building that trust, is centered around the commitments that we make together. Right?

Correct.

Correct. Let’s get real, or let’s not play.

Yes. So before we leave, I always ask my guests the same ending question. If there’s one thing you would love educators to know about change and creativity, what would it be?

I want you to know that you already know everything you need to know, and that we love you, and that we trust you, and we believe in you, and we just need you to do it.

Thank you so much. That is exactly what every educator I think in the world wants to hear and needs to hear at this moment in time. So thank you.

Well, thank you for leading the change. It matters.

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me today, Seth, and for all of the wonderful work that you bring into the world. It matters. I know it matters to me and I can assure you that it will matter to the educators who listen. So thank you.

Thank you, Susan.