Lessons Learned From my In-Flight Magazine

Hello everyone,
I hope you are enjoying this lovely day.  I am ready for the fall!  Thank you all for coming to conferences last week.  I hope you had the chance to hear about all of the amazing things your children are doing each day and that you continue to team with teachers to provide the best support possible for our students.  I heard many parents remark how lucky their children were to have such great teachers, and I couldn’t agree more.

 

I have been thinking a lot about these things - teamwork and luck, recognizing how crucial it is to work together in any endeavor.  When watching my son’s soccer games or my daughter’s volleyball games, I see that they are most successful when they truly work as a team.  I’ll hear them comment that they “got lucky” when the ref made a certain call or when the ball sailed over the net just so, but is it really luck?  While it’s true that sometimes luck seems to play a role in our successes, can we enhance our likelihood of being lucky?

 

I was lucky enough (pun definitely intended) to travel recently on both the last day of the month and the first day of the next month.  This meant that I got to read not one but two in-flight magazines during my travels, and in each magazine I came across an article that seemed to be written expressly for me: one about teamwork and one about luck.

 

The first article was written by Katie Rich, a woman who writes for Saturday Night Live.  Her focus is on lessons she has learned about teamwork from her time in improvised comedy.  I attended a workshop this summer where we did some improv work, most notably the game, “Yes, and…”  I really took this notion to heart, and that “rule” ended up in our list of faculty norms at the start of the year.  Ms. Rich’s first lesson, “Just do it,” sets forth that same notion and actually references “Yes, and.”  She goes on to advise on the importance of just being there, or being present (another one of our faculty norms for the year!) and then advocates for the simple act of listening (again, one of our norms – was she at our faculty meeting?!).  Of course it makes sense – saying yes means listening.  It means really hearing what others have to say and respecting their ideas.  It doesn’t mean giving into every demand but rather working as a team to find a solution.

 

 Teamwork is crucial to improve, and Rich’s lessons describe (very humorously, I might add) how to be an effective teammate.  Part of being a good teammate involves figuring out which battles to fight.  Rich’s third lesson, “Don’t try to fix everything” discusses this.  The idea is that someone you work with may have some trait that you find particularly annoying.  Her advice: don’t let it annoy you.  Simple as that.  She passes along advice she got from a fellow SNL writer, Mike O’Brien, who told her, “Instead of being annoyed by that person, by their habits or behaviors, try getting a kick out of them.  Just try to get a kick out of people.”  I love that.  I guess it’s really an updated version of the glass half-full vs. half-empty, but it’s a great reminder that while we can’t control many things around us, we most certainly can control our reaction to those things.  And the way we react can affect our whole outlook on other people and on our own experiences.

 

The other article that resonated with me set forth many of the same ideas but from a different perspective.  The article, written by Brad Herzog, focuses on luck and whether luck is truly a game of chance or you can work at being lucky.  The author argues the latter and boils it down to four traits to enhance luck: opportunism, intuition, resilience, and optimism.  This shouldn’t really come as a surprise.  As we all know, Thomas Edison famously said that genius was one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.  That idea of resilience, or “stick-to-it-iveness” has proven to be key in success.  We have been working hard to challenge the stigma of failure at Dawson.  The more we can encourage students to learn from their mistakes and to use feedback constructively, the better prepared they will be to face the challenges of the world.

 

Herzog also emphasizes the importance of optimism, quoting Tennessee Williams, who said that luck is a matter of “believing you’re lucky.”  Just like Katie Rich encourages readers to “get a kick out of people” rather than let them annoy you, Herzog emphasizes the power of positivity in creating luck for oneself. 

 

And finally, having that positive attitude means acting on it by being kind.  I remember talking once with a friend about the importance of positive interactions with our peers, and he said, “I think it’s unrealistic to think we can always be nicey-nice with each other.”  Well, friend, I have to (respectfully, of course!) disagree.  I think we can always be “nicey-nice.”  This doesn’t mean we won’t have disagreements or shouldn’t feel comfortable speaking our mind.  It means we recognize that we are all human beings, and while we certainly won’t always agree with one another, we can always treat each other with kindness and respect.  This is Rich’s final lesson on teamwork.  She says, “Goshdarnit, be good to each other.”  She goes on to say that Tina Fey chooses her staff not based on talent but based on who she would want to be hanging out with after working all night and not having showered in a week.  Similarly, when I was a college counselor, the Admissions Director at Harvard told me that he often does the “Roommate” test when looking at applications: he asks himself, “Would I want this person to be my roommate?”  That’s an intangible quality that doesn’t have anything to do with test scores or class rank.  Ultimately, it’s all about kindness.  I’ve never heard an example of someone on their deathbed wishing they hadn’t been so kind to others.

 

Funnily enough, these in-flight magazines were on my Southwest flight, and I had actually been thinking about the fact that I always enjoy flying Southwest because the pilots and crew have a sense of humor and are consistently upbeat.  I thought about how flying can be a tiresome experience but, with not too much effort on their part, it is that much more manageable because of their positive approach.  Maybe they all read these articles, too!

So, in an effort to follow the lead of these authors, along with my Southwest pilot and crew, I’ll remember to get a kick out of people, to push through difficulty with positivity, and, above all else, to be kind.  Maybe I can make someone else’s day that much more manageable.  If so, I’ve done a good thing.

 

If you’d like to read the articles in their entirety (though I seem to have written a veritable novel describing them!), here are links:

 

 

 

Have a great day!

 

Take care,

Heather