I’ve been asked what the school is actually built on. Not the mission statement version — the kind of language that sounds good on a brochure and means nothing when you’re standing in a classroom trying to teach a kid something real.

I mean the actual version.

The load-bearing walls. The parts that, if you pulled them out, the whole structure comes down. So here they are. Ten of them. I’m not writing these because I read them somewhere or workshopped them in a strategy session.

I’m writing them because I lived every one of them in my life. Some of them cost me. All of them are non-negotiable.

Capable Hands

I was thirteen years old the first time someone put a real tool in my hand and expected me to use it right, not just safely. Ralph Gerdes owned the VW shop. Rudi ran the floor — Porsche factory-trained, the kind of mechanic who didn’t talk much because the work talked for him. He never once told me a job was “good enough.” Good enough wasn’t a category he recognized. A job was either right, or it wasn’t done.

I didn’t know it then, but that shop was teaching me something most schools never touch: that competence is its own kind of freedom. A kid who can fix what’s broken in front of him isn’t waiting on anyone.

Subscribe now

He’s not calling a stranger and hoping they’re honest. He’s not standing helpless in front of his own life. That’s the whole pillar, right there, and I’ve said it before:

You cannot have a free people who are also a helpless people.

I didn’t write that as a slogan.

I wrote it as a description of what happens to a person, and eventually a country, that outsources every practical skill until nobody remembers how anything actually works.

This school teaches trades — real trades, hands-on, from the first years a kid is capable of holding a tool — not as a fallback for the kids who “aren’t academic,” but as a foundation every kid gets, the same way every kid gets reading and math.

A mind that can think but can’t act is only half-free.

Clear Minds

I went to a school owned by a man named Kirchanski, and most of my teachers there were above average — genuinely better than what my friends were getting a few miles away in public school, and I understood that difference even as a kid.

All of them taught us to think critically, not just to memorize and recite. That wasn’t rare at that school. It was the standard.

But one teacher taught me something specific that none of the others did.

John Meeks, a former Marine, taught English through syntax. Not vocabulary lists and grammar rules memorized for a Friday quiz — the actual structure of a sentence. How a subject and a predicate fit together.

What every part of speech was actually doing in a sentence, not just what it was called. We mastered that structure as tools, the same way you’d master the tools in a shop, because that’s exactly what they were.

What made Meeks different wasn’t that he was the only good teacher I had. He wasn’t. What made him different is that he was the first one who made me feel like I’d figured something out myself.

He’d ask a question and then sit in the silence — real silence, the kind that gets uncomfortable fast in a room full of thirteen-year-olds — until somebody found the answer on their own. I still remember the exact feeling of arriving at an idea and knowing it was mine.

Nobody handed it to me. I built it.

That’s the whole pillar. Not “there was one good teacher in a broken system,” because that wasn’t my experience. It’s that even inside a genuinely good school, with genuinely good teachers, one method stood out as fundamentally different from the rest — teaching a kid the structure underneath the thing, and then getting out of the way long enough for him to use it himself.

This school is built on the belief that every subject can be taught that way, not just English, and not just to the handful of kids lucky enough to land in the right classroom.

Strong Bodies

I’ve trained internal arts most of my adult life, under people who understood something modern schooling has completely forgotten: the body isn’t separate from the will. You don’t build discipline by talking about discipline.

My son actually took this to a much higher level than me. I recognize he is an athlete, where I am athletic. I missed my window of opportunity when I was not allowed to participate in high school team sports.

But I learned physical discipline through diligent martial arts practice. 6 days a week first at the dojo, where I learned form. Then Tai Chi morning and night for several years, where I learned patience and the value of quiet.

Then 8 months of intensive training 4 nights a week with a phenomenal teacher and master in internal kung fu and qigong. I learned about how to integrate whole body strength with movement and fully activated my internal channel qi meridians.

Then 4 years of qigong classes - several nights a week with another teacher from China at night as the T.A.. During daily personal practice, I would often hold a single standing posture for 1 1/2 to 3 hours at a time. The purpose of that posture, at the time, was storing energy. And I did exactly that.

You build discipline by making the body do hard things — over and over, on days it doesn’t want to — until the mind stops arguing with it and just does the work. That carries into everything else. A kid who has never been asked to push through physical discomfort on purpose has never actually practiced the thing discipline requires.

A school that treats the body as an afterthought — something to burn off at recess so it doesn’t interrupt the “real” learning — is missing the most obvious tool sitting in every student. We don’t treat physical training as an elective here. It’s a discipline in its own right, taught with the same seriousness as anything else on the schedule.

Martial arts. Strength training. Flexibility. Durability. Precision.

Natural Health

I’ve watched institutional medicine fail people I love. Not because the people working inside it are bad people — most of them are trying — but because the system itself isn’t built to ask why. It’s built to manage a symptom and move to the next patient in the next fifteen-minute slot.

Nobody in that structure has the time, or frankly the incentive, to ask what’s actually causing the problem.

A kid who grows up understanding how his own body actually works — food, movement, sleep, the basics that used to be common sense before they became a specialty you pay for — isn’t dependent on a system that’s already shown, over and over, that it doesn’t have his interests at the center.

That’s not a rejection of medicine. It’s a refusal to hand over the whole of your health to a system with different priorities than yours.

Land and Food

You don’t understand food until you’ve grown it. Not read about growing it — grown it. Watched something die because you got the timing wrong, or the water wrong, or you weren’t paying attention when it needed you to be. Watched something else thrive because you did pay attention, and started to understand why.

A student working the farm and then walking into the kitchen an hour later is watching the whole chain from ground to plate, which is the only way anyone actually understands what food costs, what work it represents, what it means to waste it.

Regenerative agriculture isn’t a curriculum unit tucked into a science elective here. It’s a way of teaching patience, cause and effect, and the plain, unglamorous fact that the earth doesn’t negotiate.

It doesn’t care about your excuses. It rewards attention and punishes neglect, exactly the same as everything else worth learning in this life, and a kid who’s felt that lesson in dirt under his fingernails understands it in a way no worksheet will ever teach him.

How Kids Are Wired

Every kid is wired differently, and almost every school pretends they’re not — one method, one pace, one way of proving you understood something, applied to thirty kids who don’t think alike. I built my own working life around understanding my own wiring. I know my own conative result, and knowing it changed how I ran everything — how I delegate, how I make decisions, how I understood for the first time that the way my mind works isn’t a flaw to manage, it’s just the shape of the tool I was given.

Some kids need to build a thing with their hands before they understand it. Some need to talk it through out loud. Some need to see the whole system laid out before they’ll trust a single piece of it.

A school that forces one method onto every kid isn’t teaching the slow ones — it’s manufacturing kids who think they’re slow, when the truth is they were just never taught in the shape of their own mind.

Earned Mastery

Rudi never gave out participation trophies. He didn’t believe in the concept. Mastery, in that shop, meant the job was right — quietly, completely, without anyone needing to double-check your work behind you.

That standard shaped me more than anything I ever sat through in a classroom, and it’s the standard this school runs on. We don’t grade on a curve. We don’t measure “good enough.”

We ask for the same thing Rudi asked of a thirteen-year-old with a wrench in his hand:

Do it right, because the work deserves it, not because someone happens to be watching.

Free Households

Freedom doesn’t get protected by armies first. It gets protected in houses — by parents who teach kids to think instead of comply. By a man who replaces his own water heater instead of calling someone and feeling helpless when it breaks.

By a citizen who reads the actual founding documents instead of trusting somebody else’s summary of them.

I left home at fifteen and a half with nothing but a note that said don’t try to find me. Nobody handed me freedom. I had to figure out, alone and scared more often than I’ve ever admitted.

That’s the part people skip when they talk about freedom in the abstract:

It’s not a right you receive once and then relax into. It’s a muscle. You either use it — make real decisions, live with what they cost, get better at your own judgment — or it atrophies, and you become someone who talks about valuing freedom while quietly waiting for somebody else to decide things for you.

This school exists to build that muscle in kids on purpose, deliberately, before life forces them to build it the hard way, the way it forced me.

And in a different context - with older kids - who have never learned about freedom - train them in the value of freedom, and how by protecting individual freedom, you protect the freedom of the whole - society.

Community by Design

This was never meant to be one building with kids sitting in rows inside it.

It’s meant to be a real community — founding households who chose this on purpose, raising kids alongside other families who share the same standard, so no single household is carrying the whole weight of an alternative alone.

We’re in our fifth year of fostering now. We have six kids with us at the moment, and we’ve fostered more than seventeen total since we started. Every one of them came through a school system that was supposed to catch what was wrong before it got worse, and almost none of it did.

Not because the teachers didn’t care — most of them cared plenty. It’s that the system isn’t built to see a kid. It’s built to move a kid through.

Compliance gets rewarded. Curiosity gets managed. A kid who asks too many questions gets labeled a problem instead of noticed as promising.

I watched that happen in real time, more than once, to kids I loved. A community built by design, on purpose, around a shared standard, is built to actually see them instead.

A Living Vision

I saw this whole thing once, complete, in a the same dream - two nights in a row -when I was nineteen years old. 1973. I didn’t have the land. I didn’t have the money.

I didn’t have the first practical idea of how you actually build a school and a community from nothing. I just had the picture, whole and finished, and fifty years of carrying it quietly until I was finally in a position to start laying the actual stones.

Every pillar above is a piece of that original vision, finally getting built instead of just remembered and told at dinner as a story about the strange dream I had once. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a debt I’ve owed myself for half a century, and I’m done deferring payment.

The Line

Here’s the line I won’t cross, same as I said back in Article 13:

I will not build a school that produces compliant kids who test well on paper and can’t fix a leaking faucet, can’t grow a tomato, can’t sit in silence long enough to find their own answer to a hard question.

I’ve watched that system fail for forty straight years, producing the same result on different kids, and calling each failed cycle “reform.” I’m not interested in building a slightly better version of it. I’m interested in something built from scratch, on pillars I know can hold weight, because I’ve stood on every one of them myself.

These are the pillars. Not because I read them somewhere and liked how they sounded. Because I lived every one of them, one at a time, long before I sat down to write this — and I’m not asking any kid at this school to learn a single lesson I haven’t already learned the hard way myself.

If you read this and felt it — if you know what it means to hold a standard nobody’s checking, or you’ve watched a kid learn something with their hands and come alive doing it — I’d like to hear from you. I’m not looking for spectators on this one. I’m looking for the people these pillars are actually built for: tradesmen, teachers who’ve felt the difference between compliance and real understanding, growers, martial artists, families who want their kids raised on this standard from day one, anyone who’s built something real and wants to help build this.

Leave a comment

And if you see a pillar here that’s wrong, missing, or needs to be built stronger — I want that too. This isn’t finished. Tell me what you’d challenge, what you’d add, what you know how to do that this list doesn’t even mention yet.

I’d met him once, at a woodworking machinery show. A salesman, I thought — knew every machine on the floor, sales and production both. Turned out he was also a master machinist and fabricator himself, the kind of man who could sell you the equipment and then rebuild it by hand if it broke.

Months later he knocked on our door in Hamilton, Montana. We were not the destination. He’d driven up from Los Angeles calling on big woodworking operations in Idaho along the way — we were a detour, a little grinding shop he remembered from a trade show. But that detour was about 150 driving miles out of his way.

You’re in the Top 5% of Grinding Shops in This Country

He walked around while the machines were running, watched our guys grinding saw blades, router bits, and profile cutters. Then he said: “You guys are in the top 5% of all grinding shops in the country.”

I asked him: “ Why? We don’t even have automated saw grinders. Everything we run is manual equipment.”

“No,” he said. “But you dial indicate the OD of all your grinding work. Ninety-five percent of shops don’t take the time to do that.”

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me not to.

Subscribe now

A Standard You Hold When Nobody Is Watching

That’s what self-reliance actually is. Not a lifestyle. Not a hashtag. A standard you hold when nobody’s watching and nothing forces you to.

We’ve built a culture that no longer requires it. Flip a switch, the power’s there. Call a number, someone else fixes it. Most people alive today have never had to be capable — only convenient.

And for a while, that worked.

It doesn’t anymore. Prices for the basics — food, fuel, shelter, repair — climb faster than wages. Supply chains that felt permanent are proving they aren’t. And underneath all of it, something older is under real pressure:

the confidence that a free people can take care of itself without asking permission.

That’s not a trend piece about living off-grid. That’s the actual question in front of us:

can we still produce people who know how to do things — with their hands and with their minds — or have we raised a generation that can only consume?

Three of My Four Children Were Born in Montana

All four of them were home births with a midwife. Three of them were born in Montana. That matters more than it sounds like it should.

Montana has always run on its own clock, because winter is never far off. Generations lived there without prefabricated insulation, without the guarantee that help was a phone call away. You learned to read weather, fix what broke, stock what you’d need before you needed it — not as a philosophy, but because the alternative was real trouble. That kind of readiness doesn’t come from a class. It gets built into you.

My grandchildren carry that, whether they know it yet or not. And if you take what’s already wired into them — that instinct to be ready, to be capable — and combine it with real training across trades, thinking, and leadership, you get something rare. Not just kids who can fix a furnace.

Kids who can run something. Direct something. Rebuild something.

I don’t think that’s a stretch. I think that generation — my grandchildren’s generation, trained right — could be the ones who help turn this country back toward what it was supposed to be. Not through politics. Through capability. Through being the kind of people a free country actually needs in order to stay free.

This isn’t a new idea. It’s the oldest one this country has.

The founders didn’t design a system for a passive population. They designed it for citizens — people capable enough to run their own affairs, informed enough to govern themselves, and free enough that no one could tell them not to. A republic doesn’t survive on good intentions. It survives on people who can think clearly, act competently, and refuse to be managed.

We’ve drifted a long way from that. An electorate that doesn’t know how its own government works. A citizenry that can’t fix its own furnace, let alone question its own institutions. Dependence dressed up as convenience. You cannot have a free people who are also a helpless people — history has never once produced that combination, and it isn’t going to start with us.

That’s the gap this generation has to close. Not just skilled — capable. Not just capable — informed. Not just informed — free enough in mind and character to act on what they know.

This is where the trades come in. Not as a fallback for kids who “aren’t academic.” As the actual training ground for everything I’ve just described.

A kid who learns HVAC doesn’t just learn to fix an air handler. He learns to diagnose — to look at a system that’s failing and figure out why, methodically, without panicking, without calling someone else to think for him. A kid who learns electrical work learns that shortcuts get people killed, so precision becomes a habit, not a virtue he talks about. A kid who learns plumbing learns that everything is connected — that a problem three rooms away started somewhere you can’t see, and you have to trace it back.

That’s not just a skill. That’s a mind being built. The same mind a republic needs.

And it’s not separate from the thinking side — it’s fused to it. The kid holding tight runout on a saw blade so it performs true under load, cutting all day in production, is doing the same thing, in a different material, as the kid who reads the Constitution and asks what the founders actually meant instead of what he’s been told they meant.

Both are refusing to accept the easy, careless version. Both are building the habit of doing it right when no one’s checking.

That’s the pillar. Not trades instead of thinking.

Trades as a forge for the kind of mind and character that can be trusted with freedom.

Share

It’s About Who We Become While Do It

But none of this is only about what we can do with our hands, or how ready we are for what’s coming. It’s about who we’re becoming while we do it.

Every day is a chance to move closer to the person God had in mind when He made us — not the version shaped by convenience, or fear, or what the culture around us rewards. He didn’t design us for dependence, and He didn’t design us for despair. He gave us a way to live — joyful, abundant, whole — and it was never meant to be complicated. Do the work in front of you. Build what’s needed. Tell the truth. Take care of the people in your charge. Trust Him with the rest.

That’s the whole shape of it. Capable hands. Clear minds. Free spirits. People who can fix what’s broken, think for themselves, lead when it’s needed — and who are becoming, day by day, who they were made to be.

That’s not a curriculum. That’s a generation. And it starts in a trade school with kids who learn to dial indicate the OD.

If you read this and felt it — if you know what it means to hold a standard nobody's checking, or you've watched a kid learn a trade and come alive doing it — I'd like to hear from you. I'm not looking for spectators on this one. I'm looking for the people who are supposed to be teaching in that shop when the doors open: master tradesmen, instructors, families who want their kids trained this way from day one, anyone who's built something with their hands and wants to help build this.

Leave a comment

And if you see something here that could be sharper, truer, or built better — I want that too. This isn't finished. Tell me what's missing, what you'd challenge, what you'd add. Reply to this post or reach out directly. Tell me what you know how to do — or what you think I'm missing.

People hear the list and assume I’m describing a menu. Trades over here. Classical education over there. Agriculture, martial arts, culinary, business, all separate boxes a student picks from like courses on a cafeteria line.

That’s not what I saw in 1973, and it’s not what I’ve built since, on purpose or not.

What They Showed Me

In the dream, the guides didn’t walk me through ten rooms and tell me to pick one. They walked me through one operation. The martial arts terraces fed discipline into the boys in the woodshop. The woodshop fed a production operation.

The production operation needed a sharpening and grinding department — the one that turned out, eight years later, to be very similar to what I built in Montana, before I’d ever consciously remembered the dream had shown it to me. The farm fed the kitchen. The kitchen had a window facing the mountain the martial arts terraces were cut into. Every piece could see the piece next to it. Nothing stood alone. That was the whole point of showing it to me as a tour instead of a list.

Subscribe now

I didn’t understand at nineteen that I’d just been handed the actual architecture of my own working life, not just the school’s. Look at what I’ve done since. A motorcycle parts counter that taught me inventory and customer trust.

A tooling shop that taught me precision and how to call on three thousand operations and read what each one actually needed instead of what they said they needed. An espresso operation that taught me hospitality and brand. A foodservice brokerage — a hundred calls a week — that taught me persistence disguised as routine. Real estate, seventeen deals with no bank standing behind me, that taught me risk has to be carried personally or it isn’t real.

How It All Fit Together

None of those were the same trade. All of them were the same skill, worn differently each time: build the relationship, understand the material, deliver something that works, do it again tomorrow.

That’s the Kolbe result talking, if you want the technical version. 7-2-7-4 — Strategize, Adapt, Innovate, Restore — is not a specialist’s profile. It’s a profile built to move across a whole system, not sit still inside one lane of it. For years I assumed that meant something was wrong with me, that I couldn’t hold one job the way other people held one job.

It took the second Kolbe test — the Transition result, 6-3 blank 6, taken during the hardest stretch of my life — to show me what actually happens when a mind built for the mix gets forced into a single lane. It doesn’t get calm. It gets quietly wrong, working against its own grain, producing less of everything even while trying harder. I’ve watched that happen to good people my whole life. I’ve watched schools do it to children on purpose, sorting them into one track by age fourteen and calling it guidance.

Share Built From Scratch

The Pillars in This Curriculum

The pillars in this curriculum are built to prevent exactly that. A student who studies Madison’s letters in the morning and who welds in the afternoon is not doing two unrelated things. He’s learning that precision with a torch and precision with an argument are the same discipline pointed at different material.

A student working the farm and then walking into the kitchen an hour later is watching the whole chain from ground to plate, which is the only way anyone actually understands what food costs, what work it represents, what it means to waste it.

A student who spends a season on the internal arts terraces isn’t there for exercise. She’s there because a nervous system that’s been trained to be still under pressure makes better decisions everywhere else — in a negotiation, in a crisis, in a marriage, in a business that’s about to fail unless someone in the room stays calm enough to see the way out.

And the business training pillar is where all of it gets tested for real, not simulated. Every trade a student learns, every hour on the farm, every negotiation practiced in a classroom, eventually runs through an actual operation the school runs — the same way I learned by being handed a parts counter, then a shop, then a company, not by reading about one.

Accelerated Learning System

Blair Singer and Marshall Thurber taught a version of this at Peak Potentials that stuck with me two decades later: you don’t learn business by studying it separately from the trade. You learn it by running the trade as a business while someone experienced is still close enough to catch you before a mistake becomes expensive.

That’s the accelerated learning piece — audio, visual, kinesthetic, all three engaged inside one real task instead of three separate lessons about the task.

Leave a comment

Most Organizations Have A Single Core Product

I ran into resistance explaining this to people who’ve only ever worked inside one box. Not long ago I sat across from someone I respect, laying out the ten pillars, watching his eyes do the thing eyes do when they’re waiting for the actual pitch to start. Halfway through he stopped me and asked which pillar is the “main” one, which one the school will really be known for. I understood the question.

He’d spent a career inside organizations built on a single core product with everything else as support. That’s not what this is, and I told him so. Wrong question. Ask the guides who walked me through the dream which room was the main room and you’d be met with the same silence I’d get asking which organ is the main organ. The heart doesn’t outrank the lungs. It just fails without them.

This is also the hardest part of the school to explain to a philanthropist or a founding family in two pages. Trade schools are easy to fund — there’s a labor shortage, here’s the fix, done. Classical education academies are easy to fund — there’s a values gap, here’s the fix, done.

A school insisting the fix only works as one integrated system, farm feeding kitchen feeding character feeding trade feeding citizenship, takes longer to explain and asks for more trust up front. I’m building the two-page prospectus and the pitch book anyway, because the alternative is pretending the dream showed me ten separate rooms when it showed me one building.

Fifty-two years since that night, and I still can’t find a way to build any piece of this alone. I’ve tried, more than once, in more than one business, and the results always taught me the same lesson the dream tried to teach me the first time.

This is not a plan you will manage a piece at a time. It’s a system, and systems only work whole.

If you read this and recognized yourself in one of these rooms — a trade, a kitchen, a farm, a dojo, a boardroom — I’d like to hear from you. I’m not looking for spectators on this one. I’m looking for the people who are supposed to be standing in those rooms when the doors open: founding faculty, early advisors, families who want in on the ground floor, anyone who’s built something real and wants to help build this. Reply to this post or reach out directly. Tell me which room is yours.

Between the two I’ve noticed gaps in their education.

They were gaps in the questions underneath the questions — why the country was built the way it was, what makes one system of government different from another, why the freedom to think for yourself is not automatic anywhere else on earth and never was.

Not ignorance from a lack of effort. Gaps left by a system that never got there. Or worse — got there and taught the opposite.

Subscribe now

I’ve spent fifty years building things that had to work in the real world — a motorcycle parts counter, 50 sales calls a week to foodservice distributor clients, a tooling shop, an espresso deli, seventeen real estate transactions that put bread on the table..

Every one of those had a scoreboard. If the work wasn’t good, the money didn’t show up. Nobody bailed me out.

Education in America Today Has No Scoreboard

The system educating our children has no scoreboard. It runs on a never-ending supply of tax dollars regardless of what it produces. It doesn’t have to close a sale, satisfy a customer, or prove a result. It just has to secure next year’s budget.

That is not a school system. That is a subsidized monopoly, and monopolies — subsidized ones most of all — do not improve. They calcify.

And calcified is generous. What it’s calcified into is closer to a propaganda operation than an education. Ask a young adult leaving that system to defend the American experiment — not recite a slogan about it, defend it — and watch the silence.

Ask them to explain why the founders were so afraid of concentrated power that they split it three ways on purpose. Ask them what capitalism actually is, versus what they’ve been told it is. Most can’t, not because they’re incapable, but because nobody ever gave them the material and then trusted them to think it through for themselves.

I don’t say this as an outsider throwing stones. I’ve watched what a results-based scoreboard does to a person, because I lived under one for fifty years.

When grinding shops do a poor job, a competitor gets the business. When the coffee isn’t good, the line doesn’t form. There is no fallback, no next year’s budget to fall back on if this year’s doesn’t work.

That kind of accountability makes you better every single quarter or it puts you out of business. A school system insulated from that pressure by a permanent river of tax dollars has no reason to get better, and — thirteen-plus years running the same young people through it — it hasn’t.

The Founders Were Explicit About This

The founders were explicit about this. They didn’t believe a republic could survive on good intentions.

James Madison wrote it plainly in 1822:

“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy...

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Not a slogan.

A warning, from the man who helped write the Constitution, about what happens the moment the citizens stop being informed. Take that knowledge away and you don’t get a republic anymore.

You get a population that votes on feeling and follows whoever is loudest. That is exactly what an education system built on indoctrination instead of truth produces.

It’s not an accident. It’s the design working as intended.

What Education Is Supposed To Do

I had one teacher who refused to let that happen to me.

James Kirchanski — the man I wrote about a few weeks ago, the Serbian immigrant who ran the school I attended from fourth grade through tenth. He loved this country with a ferocity I never saw in anyone born into it, because he’d seen what its absence looked like.

He taught history straight, no polish, no apology, and the system eventually broke him for it — but not before he put something in me that never came out. That’s the proof this is fixable.

One uncompromising teacher changed the trajectory of one kid’s whole life. Multiply that by a curriculum, a faculty, a campus, and you don’t just have a school. You have a prototype for what education is supposed to do.

That’s what Phase 1 actually is.

Not just HVAC, electrical, and plumbing. Not just a trade school solving a labor shortage, real as that shortage is. Underneath the trades is the real curriculum — the Constitution, the founders’ own words, the magnificence and the cost of the American experiment, an honest accounting of capitalism against every system tried in its place.

Taught the way Kirchanski taught it. Straight. Trusted into the students’ own hands to sort out for themselves, the way Article 15 laid out — freedom as the engine, not a side value tacked onto the syllabus.

Mornings: Theory Before the Tools Come Out

Concretely, that means mornings the same way I’ve described the rest of the curriculum — theory before the tools come out. Primary documents, not summaries of primary documents. The founders’ own arguments, read in their own words, argued over at a table until a seventeen-year-old can tell you not just what the Constitution says but why it was built to say it that way. Hillsdale’s free coursework gives us a running start on that. The rest is Kirchanski’s method, scaled: put the truth in front of a student, refuse to water it down for comfort or approval, and trust them to arrive at conviction honestly instead of handing them one pre-formed.

A trade school that also produces citizens who can think, argue, and defend the country they live in is not a small thing bolted onto a bigger thing. It is the actual reconstruction — done one classroom, one graduating class, one informed young adult at a time.

Leave a comment

Not a policy fight in Washington that takes another generation to lose. A working alternative, built now, that other founders in other towns can walk through and copy, the same way I intend to walk through this if it means saving what Kirchanski gave me and passing it forward.

This is not a plan I will manage. I said that back in Article 6, and it’s still true. But it is a plan I intend to start — because somebody has to, and the tax-funded version of this isn’t going to fix itself from the inside.

This is the future of our Constitutional Republic.

I’ve asked myself that question more times in the last two years than in the previous fifty.

Rebuilding a body after sarcopenia and years of broken sleep will do that to you. And add to that a fungal epidermal infection on my lower legs that allopathic medicine couldn’t fix for a year.

You find out fast that every plan, every vision, every acre of land in Montana — none of it means anything if you don’t have the strength to walk it.

Imagine living in a place where you get up in the morning and you love being there. Not just because it’s a beautiful place. You’re excited to learn. You’re excited to experiment.

You’re excited to move closer to the quality human being God meant you to be.

That’s the wealth I’m talking about. And it starts with the body He gave you.

Beginning to Wonder…

I know what it costs to lose that. Twenty-four months of broken sleep, caring for foster infants who needed us in the middle of every single night, will hollow a body out. Add sarcopenia on top of it — muscle quietly disappearing with age while you’re too exhausted to notice — and I found myself at seventy-three having to rebuild from a deficit I hadn’t chosen and couldn’t have prevented.

Never before in my life have I ever had the feeling that I could not fend for myself 100%. But about six months ago, it started feeling that way. Talk about foreign to my nature.

No doubt covid, pneumonia and antibiotics took their toll on my immune system in 2021.

But, I took action and it looks like I’m finally on the mend.

Fingers crossed…

I joined a gym. I hired a trainer. I went back to qigong, one twenty-four-minute set at a time, eight postures, three minutes each, rebuilding the practice the same patient way I first built it thirty-six years ago.

There was no shortcut. There never is. There was only showing up again, the next morning, and the one after that.

I got in touch with an old friend, a doctor of Oriental medicine. He looked at pictures of my legs, and we texted back and forth. He sent me some herbs, and a fungal laser unit.

I’ve seen more improvement from his remedies - in two weeks - than 6 visits to different allopathic medical doctors over a year’s time.

And I have yet to see him in person.

Good Genetics

I was dealt a good hand. On my dad’s side, my great-grandparents lived to 105 and 107. Athletes on my mother’s side. Good genetics, no question. But genetics is the starting hand, not the whole game.

I’ve never needed as much sleep as most people. If I get a solid 5 hours and a nap in the afternoon, I’m good to go. Always been an early riser, too.

At twenty I started eating right. Not long after, I quit drinking tap water the day they added fluoride to it. And for thirty-six years I’ve practiced qigong and internal kung fu, almost without fail.

None of that was vanity.

It still isn’t.

Eating well, moving your body, caring for your sleep — these aren’t chores you grit your teeth through so you can look good. They’re a regular act of gratitude. You are caring for the most amazing, complex, deliberately designed machine in the universe, built by the Master Engineer, and handed to you on loan.

Neglecting it isn’t a private failure.

It’s a failure to say thank you.

Self Comparative Evaluation

What I love most about the Chinese martial arts isn’t the fighting. It’s the standard of excellence underneath it — you measure yourself against who you were when you started, not against the person next to you. There’s no ranking against your neighbor.

There’s only the question:

Am I closer to the best version of myself than I was a year ago?

Practiced long enough, that question stops being a discipline you perform and becomes something embedded in you — an intrinsic love of health and strength and vitality that shows up in how you carry yourself, mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually.

It shows up as kindness. Dedication. Loyalty. Honesty. Hard work.

Here’s what that actually looks like, not as a philosophy but as a schedule.

Daily Repetition and Growth

A meditation room and chapel open twenty-four hours a day, for anyone who needs it, whenever they need it.

Forty-five minutes of qigong before breakfast — the body waking itself up on purpose instead of being dragged into the day by an alarm and a phone. A farm-to-table breakfast at seven, food that came out of ground you can walk to.

Classroom teaching until noon. A full hour of siesta after lunch, because rest is not laziness, it’s design.

Afternoons in one of the shops or the garden — hands doing something real.

Strength training or a sports activity at four. Another farm-to-table meal at five. Study time from six to eight. Martial arts from eight to ten.

Lights out by eleven, adjusted by age.

Subscribe now

Read that schedule again and notice what’s missing. No scrolling. No grazing on processed food between classes. No sitting for six straight hours under fluorescent light with the body treated as an afterthought to the mind.

Every single block of that day is either feeding the body, moving the body, resting the body, or training the mind and spirit through the body — qigong, martial arts, shop work, garden work, study.

Health isn’t a separate period wedged into the schedule between “real” subjects. It’s the architecture the whole day is built on.

And when you live that way long enough, people notice. Not because you’re chasing their approval — but because real striving is visible, and it moves people to say so.

What He Told Me

I remember eating congee with my Sifu after class one night. He looked at me and said, “It’s true you are lucky to have found a system like this. It’s also true that the system is lucky to have a student like you. In six months, you have achieved the equivalent of about six years of kung fu with your diligence and hard work.”

This struck a chord of resonance and gratitude rarely experienced in my life.

I remember my son telling me, “You were my hero, Dad.”

I remember a full-page, four-color spread in the Sunday paper in Seattle — the longtime food critic writing up the little espresso deli I’d built, calling it exactly what we’d set out to make it.

I remember one of the partners at the company where I had my first management job, still in college, pulling me aside: “You’re the glue that’s holding this place together. You’re doing a great job. We need you here.”

None of those moments came from chasing them. They came from showing up, every day, and doing the work of becoming. That’s the wealth underneath the wealth — not money, not land, not even health itself, but being seen for who you actually became through the striving.

Core to the Community and School Philosophy

This is what I want built into the community from the ground up. Not a wellness center bolted onto a trade school as an amenity. A place where every person — and especially the kids who’ve never once had an adult look them in the eye and mean it — get to do the daily work of becoming, and get to be seen doing it.

Leave a comment

Where health is practiced as gratitude, excellence is measured against your own past self, and character is the byproduct of both.

What is wealth without health? I already know the answer. I’m living the answer, one qigong set at a time, one restored night of sleep at a time, one rebuilt shoulder and rebuilt habit at a time — grateful, every morning, for the machine I get to keep for one more day.

There’s a feeder creek, to Lake Sawmill, at seven thousand feet in the lower Sierra Nevada I still carry with me.

Sunset on one side, the full moon rising over the water on the other, at the same moment, so I didn’t know which way to look. Indian grinding holes worn into the granite beside me, at least 100 years old.

The forest going quiet as the moon came up. The water not going quiet at all.

I was just a kid.

I didn’t have language for what I felt sitting there but it was mesmerizing. I could feel the energy of the people who used to live there a hundred years before. I was part of the place at that moment and I belonged there - and at that moment, it was part of me.

I still don’t have perfect language for it now. But I know I’ve felt it again, many times, in places that have nothing to do with a creek in the mountains:

• splitting firewood

• running a table saw

• doing Tai Chi alone in the Piedmont Rose gardens at 10:30 every night

• standing across from my Sifu in kung fu class

• pulling espresso shots in my Seattle shop at seven in the morning

• changing my kids’ diapers, every night, when they were small

• looking out over the Bitterroot Range as the sun goes down behind it

• the birth of every one of my children — three of them at home and one at Stephen Gaskin’s Farm in Tennessee.

Subscribe now

That Is The Thing I Actually Want This Community To Produce.

None of those things look alike. A creek at sunset and a diaper at midnight have nothing in common on the surface. But underneath, they’re the same moment, over and over across an entire lifetime:

Fully present, fully in my body, connected to something — the land, God, another person, my own hands doing real work — with nothing left over to be anywhere else.

Not a retreat where you visit that feeling once a year. A place where an ordinary Tuesday — in the wood shop, the metal shop, the kitchen, the garden, on the mat, at a table with people you trust — has a real chance of being one of those moments. And a place where, an hour later, you can walk off by yourself into the actual wilderness and sit by actual water and have the other half of it too — the solitude that doesn’t cancel the belonging out, but completes it.

I Didn’t Invent Any Of This.

My great-grandparents lived it without ever needing a word for it.

Three brothers — a cabinet maker, a blacksmith, a cobbler — homesteaded over two hundred acres in Sutter Creek, California, around the time of the Gold Rush. They built every building themselves, developed their own springs, planted their own orchards, raised and canned their own food, kept their own livestock.

Nobody managed them into that life. They were free to build it, and they built it together, each one’s trade holding up the other two. Two of them lived to 105 and 107. I don’t think that’s an accident of biology. I think it’s what happens when a life is made of real work, real land, and people close enough to depend on — every day, not once a year on vacation.

Here’s Something I Only Just Found Out Writing This.

That creek at seven thousand feet, the one with the moon rising over one shoulder and the sun going down over the other. I just found out that spot is within forty miles of Sutter Creek, where my great-grandparents actually homesteaded. I spent five summers up there, a month at a time, as a kid. I almost moved to Grass Valley once, years later, instead of Montana.

In my mind Sutter Creek was much farther away than it actually was. It wasn’t.

That whole stretch of California always felt like home to me, and I never knew until right now that it’s because it is — that my own blood built something self-sufficient and lasting less than forty miles from the exact spot where I first felt, as a kid, the thing I’ve spent my whole life trying to feel again.

I didn’t invent any of this. I didn’t even know I was repeating it. I was just drawn back to the same forty miles of ground my great-grandparents already proved could hold a life.

Share

Not A Team Player

I didn’t come by being a team player naturally.

For most of my life, I was a loner. Not by accident — by conviction. My mother wouldn’t let me play on the high school baseball team - after I made the team. In retrospect, that was my one chance to learn team and it bypassed me.

After that, I did karate. I played some singles tennis.

I spent enormous amounts of time by myself, and for most of my adult life my real operating belief was:

If you want it done right, you do it yourself.

I had a short fuse with team players. I’d worked with plenty of teams that were slow, political, full of people covering for each other’s mediocrity, and I decided that was just what teams were.

Then I joined the logistics staff at Peak Potentials, at fifty-three years old, and it was the best team I have ever been part of in my life. I used to call it: Seal Team Seminar.

I remember one intensive in Secaucus, New Jersey, in particular. We showed up with fifty minutes before a presentation, and the venue staff wasn’t interested in helping — they’d already decided out loud that it couldn’t be done in time. Twenty of us on the logistics team took the room anyway, against their protocol, and we cleaned it, laid out every chair, and had the whole space fully prepped for the presentation in forty minutes flat.

Fast, smart, reliable people, moving together without anyone needing to manage them. That was the first time in my life I felt at home on a team. Fifty-three years old, and I finally understood something I’d spent five decades assuming I already knew and didn’t.

The School Teaches Teamwork

That’s exactly why this community teaches teamwork on purpose, instead of assuming it’ll happen naturally. I know precisely what it costs to go without it — the short fuse, the isolation, the decades of doing everything myself because I didn’t trust anyone else to do it right. And I know exactly what it produces when it’s real, because twenty people in a room in New Jersey showed me in forty minutes what I’d missed for fifty-three years.

Freedom is what let my great-grandparents build a homestead instead of waiting for permission. Freedom is what let twenty strangers in Secaucus solve a problem the venue staff had already given up on. It was never freedom from other people.

It was the freedom to choose the people you build alongside — and then actually build something real with them, work you can see and touch and be proud of, instead of a life rented from somebody else’s system.

Leave a comment

That’s what I mean when I say this isn’t a school with housing attached. It’s a place built to produce that exact feeling — the creek, the diaper, the table saw, the forty minutes in Secaucus — on purpose, for as many people as will come build it with us.

The school teaches the trade.

The community is what makes the Tuesday real.

I have spent a long time building a list of pillars for this school. Trades. Regenerative agriculture. Classical education. Martial arts and qigong. Culinary. Business. I still believe in every one of them.

But I’m realizing something underneath all of it, something I should have identified first instead of last: none of those pillars matter if the people standing inside them were never taught to love freedom enough to question what they’re told.

That’s not a curriculum pillar sitting next to the others. It’s the reason any of the others are worth building.

Here is the chain, as plainly as I can put it.

Truth withheld is authority unchecked. Authority unchecked is freedom narrowed. Freedom narrowed is critical thought dying with it — quietly, generation by generation, until nobody left in the room remembers what it felt like to ask a real question and not know the approved answer in advance.

Communism and Socialism Killed Millions of People

I grew up hearing the numbers.

Millions dead under communist regimes in the twentieth century — a plain historical fact, taught without apology, because the people teaching it had lived close enough to it to know what it cost.

I don’t see that taught with the same weight anymore. I see the word softened into something that sounds like fairness and equality, stripped of the history that should sit underneath it.

Whatever the cause — and I don’t think there’s only one — the result is a generation further from the truth of what was lost, and less equipped to notice when something similar starts again, dressed differently.

I didn’t just hear the numbers. I knew the faces behind them. A close friend of mine had a great-uncle who disappeared one night in China, never to be seen again — ordinary, during the Cultural Revolution, which tells you something on its own about what ordinary meant there.

In high school, a friend’s father told me about narrowly escaping communism. The only worldly belongings he had when he arrived in America fit inside a single trunk. He showed it to me himself, sitting in his own living room, years later — still there, still real, not a story in a textbook but an object in the room with us.

Subscribe now

Freedom as a Priority in Education

I don’t see the love of freedom taught as a priority anymore. Not as an abstraction. As a trunk in a living room.

This is why the school will not simply teach students what to think about freedom. It will teach them to practice it — the way you practice a stance in Qigong or Kung Fu until physical memory takes over.

A student who has never been allowed to question a given answer, follow an argument somewhere uncomfortable, or hold two competing ideas without being told which one wins, has not been taught to think.

He has been taught to comply. It doesn’t matter what content sits on top of that training. Compliance is compliance, whether it’s dressed as the left or the right, as tradition or as progress.

Question Authority

Questioning authority at every juncture insures the longevity of freedom — regardless of our views. That line has to cut both directions or it isn’t true. A school that only trains students to question the authorities I disagree with isn’t teaching freedom. It’s teaching a different obedience with a different flag on it. If this school is going to mean anything, it has to be willing to let a student question me, question the curriculum, question the vision itself — and come out the other side either more convinced, or convinced of something else entirely, but convinced by his own reasoning and not by mine.

Here are both sides of the argument, you choose for yourself.

Compliance Is a Tool

Compliance is a tool. It redirects an inquisitive mind until questioning stops being a habit the mind reaches for — and in its place grows a different habit:

the quiet acceptance of mediocrity.

That is the opposite of everything I want for a student. I never want anyone here to accept what I say blindly, without weighing its validity against every alternative. If a student can’t do that with me, they haven’t learned anything worth having.

Excellence, properly understood, requires change. We have to be willing to set aside what exists the moment we’re shown something better — not throw it away out of restlessness, but improve it through honest discovery.

Compound Excellence

That’s compound, expanding excellence. It is not a fixed target you eventually reach and then defend. It keeps expanding, as long as whatever replaces the old way is genuinely better than what it replaces. And there is only one method for knowing whether it’s actually better, rather than merely different: critical thinking.

Since excellence has no finish line, neither does the thinking that has to keep testing it. That is how innovation happens, how corrections happen, how real improvement happens — step by step, building on what’s already been proven, never mistaking the current version for the final one.

Leave a comment

None of that is possible without freedom. A mind that isn’t free to question the existing way has no path to the better way. A mind that isn’t free to be wrong out loud can’t discover what’s actually right. Freedom isn’t a value sitting next to excellence. It’s the precondition for excellence to keep expanding at all.

Teach the love of freedom, deliberately, as a practiced skill and not a slogan — and the critical thinkers follow. Skip that step, and no amount of trade skill or classical text will produce a generation capable of noticing when freedom is being taken from them one quiet withheld truth at a time.

I wanted a summer job to get some money in my pocket.

That’s the whole reason. I was thirteen years old, tall and skinny, and I knew if I told them my real age they’d never hire me. So I didn’t. I stood up straight, said what I needed to say, and hoped I could pull it off.

I got the job.

When I cashed that first paycheck I felt something I didn’t have a word for yet. Control. Empowerment. I went and bought myself some new jeans. It’s hard to explain how that felt unless you’ve had that exact moment yourself — the first time you earned something and it was completely yours.

Subscribe now

The place was called Beetleburg. Ralph Gerdes owned it — a German man, a hard worker - like the idea of doing it any other way had simply never occurred to him. I pumped gas. Sold accessories. Showed up and paid attention, because even at thirteen I could tell this was a place worth paying attention to.

There were two mechanics.

Bobby drove a 1970 Chevelle with a 396 under the hood and kept it immaculate. You learn something about a man from what he takes care of.

And then there was Rudi.

Rudi had been trained at the Porsche factory. I don’t know the full story of how he ended up at a VW shop in our town. What I know is what I saw: quiet, solid excellence.

Economy of motion. Total preparation and smooth, intelligent, continuous activity. He never seemed like he was in a hurry.

He put out more finished repairs on Volkswagens than every other mechanic in that shop combined. And in six years, he had exactly one comeback — one car that came back after he’d touched it. When they looked into it, the part they’d sent him was faulty.

Not his work.

Never his work.

By the time I was fifteen he’d taken a liking to me. Let me work alongside him. I watched everything.

At some point — I don’t remember exactly how it came up — he said something I have never forgotten.

If what you are doing is difficult, you’re not doing it right.

I thought about that for about a week. Just turned it over, trying to absorb what he was actually telling me. It wasn’t that the work was supposed to be easy.

It was something else — something about what happens when you’ve prepared completely, when you understand the thing deeply enough that it stops fighting you. The difficulty doesn’t disappear. It just moves — out of your hands and back into your thinking, where it belongs, before you ever touch anything.

Rudi had already done the hard part before his hands moved. That’s why he never seemed rushed. That’s why the record was what it was.

Over the years, whenever I’ve found myself struggling with something — pushing against something that won’t give — I hear Rudi say it. If what you are doing is difficult, you’re not doing it right.

And it makes me stop. Back up. Ask myself what I’m missing, what I haven’t understood yet, what preparation I skipped because I was in a hurry.

That’s what a real mentor does. He doesn’t just teach you something. He moves in. Takes up permanent residence. Shows up at the exact moment you need him, decades later, in a completely different situation.

What Rudi gave me wasn’t just a work ethic. It was an operating system — one I’ve run on ever since, in every business I’ve built, every client relationship I’ve managed, every plan I’ve put together.

Here’s how it actually works in practice.

When I’m assessing a situation or building a plan, I always start with the highest quality result — not the most convenient one, not the most profitable one on paper, the best one. Then I work backward from there.

I put my mind into how the client sees it, what they actually need, what they’re going to feel when the work is done. I set that bar high first, and then I build the plan that reaches it.

That approach has put me in direct conflict with partners more than once. I remember fighting over quality issues — not small disagreements, real fights — because I’d made a promise to the customer and I wasn’t willing to let corners get cut on the back end.

My position was always the same: I’m the one who has to sit face to face with the people who pay our bills. I’m the one whose name is on the relationship. You cut a corner and you don’t just damage the job — you damage something that took years to build and can’t be quickly rebuilt. That’s not a trade I’ve ever been willing to make.

I have lived by a motto for a long time: excellence for the sake of it.

That standard never made me rich. Excellence for its own sake is not a monetization strategy. The market doesn’t always reward the highest quality result; it often rewards the fastest or the cheapest one.

I’ve known that my whole adult life and held the standard anyway, because the alternative — becoming someone who quietly accepts less than his best — wasn’t something I was willing to do. The bar Rudi set in that shop when I was fifteen became my own bar, in every room I’ve ever worked in since.

What I’ve always hoped — and what I’m still building toward — is a brand that actually reflects that standard. Something that makes the connection visible between the quality of the thinking, the quality of the work, and the quality of the result. I haven’t fully built that yet. The Substack you’re reading right now is part of how I’m building it. So is the school. So is every business I’m running today. The standard has always been there. The brand that reflects it is catching up.

Last week I wrote about James Kirchanski — the man who ran my school, who held a line for his students that cost him everything to hold. Kirchanski gave me a love of freedom and the spine to say what’s true regardless of who’s in the room.

Rudi gave me something different and equally permanent. He gave me a standard for craft and a method for achievement — start with the highest result, work backward, never compromise the quality of what you promised. He showed me what mastery looks like from the outside: not loud, not rushed, not making a show of itself.

Quiet, solid, complete.

And he gave me a sentence I’ve heard in my head for fifty years, every single time the work gets hard.

If what you are doing is difficult, you’re not doing it right.

I was thirteen when I lied my way into that job because I wanted money in my pocket and some control over my own life.

I got a lot more than that.

Leave a comment

Napoleon Hill had it right. Whatever the mind of man can conceive - and believe in - it can achieve — but only if you’re free enough and brave enough to actually go build it.

That’s what this whole series is about. A kid who lied about his age to get his first job. A man who held a standard his whole life and is still building the thing that reflects it. If you believe what I believe — that freedom isn’t just a word, it’s the right to put your hands on something and make it real — subscribe. Bring somebody with you. This story is just getting started.

My mother got thrown out of a public school meeting once, in our hometown, for arguing with the system about its approach to teaching kids and what it would cost them down the road. She wasn’t a quiet woman about things that mattered, and education mattered to her more than almost anything.

She lost that fight. They didn’t want to hear it.

So she found another way to win it. She made sure my sisters and I were always placed with kids sharper than we were — never let us coast in a room where we were the smartest one in it — and she found us a different school entirely.

That’s how I ended up at a K-12 school owned and run by a Serbian immigrant named James W. Kirchanski. I was there from fourth grade through tenth.

Kirchanski

He was a big man. Huge hands, a booming voice, a nose like something out of a caricature, and a heart of gold underneath all of it. He scared us half to death when we were small. We grew to love him — every one of us, eventually, the same way you grow to love a mountain you were afraid of the first time you saw it.

He’d worked brutally hard to earn his PhD in education — the hard way, the immigrant way, nothing handed to him. And maybe because he’d come from somewhere else and chosen this country on purpose, instead of just being born into it and taking it for granted the way the rest of us did, his love for America and the Constitution ran deeper than anything I saw in any other adult growing up.

He didn’t lecture us about it. He instilled it — which is a different verb entirely, and it requires a different kind of man to do it. I remember a copy of *The Song of America*, by George Mardikian, sitting on his desk. I didn’t understand yet what that book meant to him. I understand now.

Uncompromising Standards

He held standards for what kids should learn and how they should learn it that the public system, by and large, wasn’t meeting and wasn’t interested in meeting. He didn’t go along with that quietly. From what I understood even as a kid, and understood more clearly once I knew him as an adult, he fought it — mostly alone. A rebel in the wilderness, holding a line nobody else seemed willing to hold, for kids who mostly didn’t know yet that the line was even there to be held.

That fight cost him. The school closed at the end of my tenth-grade year. Financial collapse, as best I understand it — the price of refusing to lower the bar in a system that kept lowering it around him. I had to go finish eleventh and twelfth grade somewhere else.

I think about that closure differently now than I did as a teenager losing his school out from under him. Back then it just felt like the floor dropping. Now I see a man who poured everything he had — his training, his standards, his love of this country, his entire working life — into giving kids something most of them would never have gotten otherwise, and the cost of that fight was every dollar he had to fight it with.

Share

I know something about that particular kind of cost now. I wrote, not long ago, about my own pattern with money — how it’s been a stumbling block for most of my adult life, how trust misplaced at the wrong moment has cost me more than once. Kirchanski’s story isn’t the same story. He wasn’t betrayed by a swindler. He was worn down by an honest fight against a system that didn’t want him to win it. But there’s a thread between his story and mine that I can’t pretend I don’t see: a man can be entirely right, entirely devoted, entirely good at the actual work — and still lose the whole thing if the financial structure underneath him can’t hold the weight of what he’s trying to build.

Financial Intelligence from Day One

That’s not a small lesson. That’s one of the reasons this school is not going to be run the way Kirchanski had to run his, alone, with nobody covering the flank he couldn’t watch while he was busy fighting the fight in front of him. I’m a 7-2-7-4 on the Kolbe index — vision, strategy, relationships, the big picture.

I am not, by nature or design, the man who should be running the books. So I won’t be. A COO and a CFO come in early, before we ever open a door, specifically so the next Kirchanski story doesn’t end the way his did.

The standards stay just as high as his were. The fight stays just as honest. But this time the structure underneath it is built to actually hold.

What he gave me wasn’t just an education, though it was that too. He gave me a love of freedom that didn’t come from a textbook, because he’d had to choose this country instead of inheriting it. He gave me a willingness to stand up and say what I believe regardless of who’s in the room or whether they want to hear it — because I watched him do exactly that, year after year, at real cost to himself, and I watched my own mother do the same thing in a school board meeting before I ever set foot in his building.

Love of freedom. Love of America. Love of God.

didn’t arrive at those three things from a book or a seminar. I arrived at them the way I arrive at everything that’s actually mine — by watching someone live it in front of me until it became impossible not to carry it forward.

Here is what I will not do, and I want to say it as plainly as Kirchanski would have said it: I will not compromise the principles of this school to make them easier to fund, easier to license, or easier for some outside authority to swallow. Not for accreditation. Not for political convenience. Not for a donor who wants the edges sanded down before he’ll write the check. The structure underneath this school will be built to hold the weight — that’s the part I’m responsible for getting right, the part Kirchanski didn’t have. But what the structure holds up will never be minimized by outside influence. Not once. Not by inches.

An unwavering determination to do the right thing

An unwavering determination to do the right thing is not going to be a value statement on a wall here. It is going to be a core element of what every student is trained in, the same way they’re trained in welding or rhetoric or regenerative farming — practiced, tested, and expected.

Subscribe now

Every student who comes through this school is going to leave able to think for themselves, with the spine to say what’s true even when it costs them something to say it. They’re going to leave as leaders. Not leaders in title — leaders in the sense Kirchanski was a leader, standing alone if he had to, holding a line nobody else was willing to hold. I want them to leave as intellectual and spiritual warriors for what is good and what is right, because that is exactly what was given to me, by a Serbian immigrant in a building that no longer exists, and by a mother who got thrown out of a room for telling the truth about what children deserved.

This school is going to carry it forward. Every student who walks out of it is going to know what it costs to stand alone for something true — and they’re going to know we built the structure this time so they never actually have to stand alone to do it.

God bless you, James Kirchanski. And thank you.

Leave a comment

I want to tell you what the recovery actually looked like, because it wasn’t a recovery. Not in the way that word usually gets used.

There was no arc. No bottom, then a turn, then a steady climb back into the light. What there was instead: ground gained, then lost. Gained again. Lost again, a different way. For years.

After the divorce — after the ground disappeared, the way I told you in a previous

piece — I went looking for whatever would actually hold weight. I tried a lot of things. Some of them worked for a while and then stopped working. Some of them I worked at hard and saw real progress, and then I’d find myself flat on the floor again, no clear reason why, like the progress had been borrowed and the bill was due.

Subscribe now

Peak Potentials is what got my attention and held it. I worked at the principles diligently — not casually, not “tried it for a weekend.” I dramatically improved my ability to actually listen to another human being instead of just waiting for my turn to talk.

Taking Action

I started moving in the direction of taking action again instead of just thinking about taking action, which had been most of my life after True Cut. I got drawn toward the speaking business, because for the first time in years I had something I wanted to stand in front of a room and say.

Underneath all of it, though, I was having an identity crisis nobody could see from the outside. The relationship I’d been in for sixteen years had ended right before I found Peak. So I was rebuilding “who I am” and “what I’m worth” and “what happened to me” all at the same time, in public, while also trying to build a business.

Core Health

Then I found Core Health. I immersed myself in it the way I immerse myself in everything — completely, no half measures. In 2009 I moved to Florida to study and certify with Ed Carlson directly.

And in the middle of all that real, hard-won internal work, I kept making the exact same external mistake. I trusted the wrong people with money. Not once. Multiple times, in different decades, with different faces on it.

Massive Loss

2007 into 2008, one of the people I’d met through Peak turned out to be a massive swindler. Cost me $250,000 in cash. Cost me my credit. Cost me my credibility with people who’d trusted my name. Years of work, gone in one stroke — and it landed right as the whole economy was falling apart underneath everybody, which meant there was nowhere soft to land.

I slept in my car for a while after that. I sent my wife to stay with her sister because I couldn’t see a way to keep her safe and fed under what was left of our roof. I put in more than thirty job applications. Three interviews in three months. I kept hearing some version of “overqualified” — which is a polite way of telling a fifty-something man that the world doesn’t currently have a slot shaped like him.

Got Back Up

I got back up. I always get back up. That’s not a brag, it’s just the data — ask anyone who’s known me more than a decade. I went to work for WAWA. I rebuilt, again, from a number close to zero, again.

Then in 2011 it happened a different way. A businessman we’d partnered with turned on us and made an effort to leave me and my wife stranded in Costa Rica. Not metaphorically — actually stranded, actually far from home, actually exposed. My wife and I worked through it. We resolved issues in our marriage — fully, honestly, before anything else happened. I want to say that clearly, because it matters: whatever came next, it didn’t come from something left broken between us.

In 2013, she died in my arms.

I’m not going to write the rest of that scene. Some things belong to the people who lived them and nobody else gets to read them off a page. What I’ll tell you is what it did to the rest of me: it blew everything back open. Every piece of identity I’d rebuilt since the divorce, since Peak, since Core Health — open again, all at once.

Here’s the thing I need to say plainly, because I’ve circled it for thirteen years and I’m done circling it: making money has been a stumbling block for me for most of my adult life. Not earning it — I’ve always been able to work, always been able to build something from nothing, that part has never been the problem.

The problem has been who I hand my trust to once the building starts working. I have a long, well-documented habit of handing it to the wrong person at exactly the wrong moment.

I’m done with that pattern. Not done in the way people say “I’m done” and then do it again next year. Done in the way you’re done with something once you’ve finally looked directly at it instead of around it, which is what writing these last several articles has actually forced me to do.

Leave a comment

But the money pattern was never the whole story, and I’d be lying to you if I let it stand as the whole story. Underneath it, for years, something quieter and worse was happening.

Passion

The passion that used to be the engine of everything I built — it dried up. Not all at once. A slow leak I didn’t notice until the tank was empty.

The motivation that used to get me up before dawn shrank down to just enough to get through a shift at WAWA and not one ounce more. And the self-worth — the thing that lets a man look in a mirror and recognize who’s looking back — that tanked hardest of all. I knew how to rebuild a business from nothing. I had done it more than once.

What I didn’t know, for a long time, was how to rebuild a reason to want to.

The strange part — and I want to be honest about this too, not tidy it up — is that I’m still carrying residue from all of it. Thirteen years out from the worst of it, and there are still mornings where an old financial fear shows up uninvited, still moments where I catch myself bracing for the betrayal before anyone’s done anything to earn that bracing.

That residue is real. I’m not writing this from the far side of some finish line. I’m writing it from inside the work, still.

But here’s what’s different now, and it’s the whole reason I’m writing any of this down in public at seventy years old instead of just keeping it as a private ledger of old wounds:

I haven’t felt this kind of passion since True Cut Saw and Tool. Not since I was calling on three thousand woodworking shops and building something with my own hands that mattered to other people’s businesses. The school — the community — has put that back in me. It didn’t come from a seminar this time, and it didn’t come from a certification.

It came from finally being honest, in front of you, about every version of the man I tried to become and every time that man got knocked back down.

I let my wife down, more than once. I let my children down. I’m not going to write around that to make this story easier to read. But the man the 1973 dream was actually asking me to become — I don’t think it was a man who never fell.

I think it was a man who kept getting back up with the same stubbornness every single time, and who finally, finally figured out what he needed to stop doing to himself.

That man is who’s building this. Not the man before the falls. The man made out of all of them.

one

2 two

3 three

4. four

5. None of the Above

6.

Leave a comment

Share

I didn’t go looking for this work.

I found two free tickets inside a book.

I had just opened T. Harv Eker’s “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” when the tickets fell out — an invitation to a free three-day event called the Millionaire Mind Intensive. I went to the website. There was one scheduled ten days later in my city.

The same day I read that book, I applied to work for the company.

During that first weekend the speaker was Rob Riopel and he was at the top of his game. I had never been in a room like that. The energy, the pace, the directness of it — I was hungry for more before the first day was over.

I got a phone call during the event. An hour and a half interview. They hired me.

The following weekend I was on staff.

Normally you couldn’t work an event you hadn’t attended as a participant first. They made an exception for me. Then they made several more.

Over the next two years I worked 28 events in major cities across the United States and Canada — groups of 250 to 3,200 people. I attended the Millionaire Mind Intensive eight times as staff and several more as a participant. I went through Enlightened Warrior Training Camp and Train the Trainer.

The culture was rigorous. The pace was relentless. And what happened in those rooms changed me in ways I am still accounting for.

Separately, several years later, I found my way to a body of work called Core Health — created by Dr. Ed Carlson, a retired dentist and student of Dr. John Diamond. The methodology was an energy version of Behavioral Kinesiology.

Subscribe now

It was not the motivational work of Peak Potentials — something quieter and more precise. I became certified in Core Health and Heart Forgiveness and became a workshop facilitator myself.

The premise is simple and it is true:

• Energy attaches itself to the e-motion of an experience.

Not the experience itself. The e-motion of it.

A woman attacked in a parking lot. A child told by her mother she would never be enough. A man whose father started abusing him at six months old and didn’t stop until he was nineteen. A girl raped by her grandfather, thrown from a moving car, left for dead on the side of the road.

The event becomes a charge. And that charge runs in the background of everything — every relationship, every decision, every moment of self-sabotage — until something interrupts it.

What I watched in those rooms was that interruption.

When the energy disconnects from the e-motion, the experience doesn’t disappear.

It just becomes what it always was — something that happened. Not a force still running your life. Not a wound that controls you without your permission. Just an event. In the past. Where it belongs.

I watched people walk out of those rooms different than they walked in.

I know how that sounds. I watched it anyway.

Share

During one Peak Potentials event I was on staff, we were cleaning the room during a break — picking up programs, straightening chairs, hauling out garbage. An ordinary moment between sessions.

A woman came up to me.

She told me she was seven years old, picking little flowers in her yard. She gathered them into a bunch and gave them to her mother. Her mother praised her so much that she decided to make more bunches and sell them to the neighbors.

She knocked on the door across the street.

The man inside raped her.

She looked at me and said: you were so kind to me today that I decided you were the one. I have never told this to anyone before today.

I said: I am honored. Thank you for being brave enough to tell me.

She said: I feel so much better.

And then she walked away.

What struck me — what has stayed with me for twenty years — is that I have no memory of the interaction she was referring to. Whatever I did that was so kind to her, I don’t remember doing it. It was ordinary to me. It was everything to her.

You never know what kind of impact you are having on another person. Sometimes you find out years later. Most of the time you never find out at all.

But the work is real. And it matters.

Leave a comment

As a workshop facilitator,for a number of years, I sat with people privately and heard things that most people never say out loud to anyone.

What I learned is this: almost everyone is carrying something. The packaging is different. The weight is approximately the same.

And the weight does not have to be permanent.

That is not a motivational statement.

It is a clinical observation from years of watching what happens when people finally tell the truth in a room where it is safe to do so.

This is why the school will have a formation component that goes beyond curriculum.

Trades training without this is incomplete. Classical education without this is incomplete. You can teach a young man to wire a panel or read Cicero and still send him back into the world running on a charge he doesn’t know he’s carrying.

The interior work is not optional. It is not an elective. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

Because you cannot build a life on ground that hasn’t been cleared.

The year had already been extraordinary in the way that years are when everything is moving fast and nothing is stable. I had walked away from True Cut — a decision I have written about and will carry the weight of for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t done. I was never done.

I found a product at a county fair. An oil additive that reduced friction. I know how that sounds. But I tested it. I watched what it did. And I believed in it the way I have always believed in things — not from the outside looking in, but from the gut out.

Subscribe now

I had a friend in California. An exceptional mechanic. Successful, respected, the kind of man whose opinion meant something. I drove out to show him.

He tested it in his vintage Lola Race car transmission without telling his partner — the driver. The car came into the pits and the driver said something’s wrong with the transmission temperature gauge. It’s reading 20 degrees lower than normal.

That was the product working.

My friend looked at me and said: I love this. What do you need from me?

I said: I don’t know. I just wanted your feedback.

He said: I’m between projects and I have some money. I’ll back you.

My banker backed me too. We set up a company. We went after UPS maintenance contracts, the California Highway Patrol, industrial accounts. We were moving.

We didn’t walk away from the oil additive because it failed.

We walked away because a very smart marketing man helped us see the math clearly. Without exclusivity in Northern California, we’d spend hundreds of thousands to build a market we couldn’t own. The parent company wouldn’t give us that. So we made the call and moved on.

Then we set up a corporation to acquire marketing rights to products and import them. It was a complex, intense year — material for another article entirely. During that time I was studying with Sifu Cheuk Fung, which was its own universe. I was living in layers.

We found a guy building a company around memorable 800 numbers. This was before the internet made that irrelevant. It looked right. We put in a hundred thousand dollars of my friend’s money.

The founder had a gambling problem. Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars gone. A hundred thousand of it ours.

We regrouped. Put together a deal in China. Sent our man over.

The week he arrived, Tiananmen Square happened while he was in Beijing.

I was sitting with all of this — the losses, the pivots, the wreckage of decisions made in good faith that still blew up — when my wife called.

She wanted a divorce.

I have three words for what happened inside me when I heard that.

Internal crash. Mental chaos. Panic. Disbelief.

Not because I didn’t see that the marriage had been strained. Not because I was naive about what a year like that does to a family. But because when the ground goes, it goes all at once.

The business. The partnership. The money. China. And now this.

There is a particular kind of collapse that has nothing to do with weakness. It is what happens when too many load-bearing walls come down in the same season. You don’t fall apart because you’re fragile. You fall apart because you’re human.

I have thought about that year many times since. What it cost. What it revealed.

What I know now is this:

I was not formed for that moment. Not in the way that matters. I had drive. I had instinct. I had loyalty and hustle and the willingness to get back up. But I did not have the interior structure to absorb that kind of concentrated loss without going into chaos.

Nobody taught me that. Nobody taught most of us that.

That is one of the reasons I am building this school.

Not to produce students who never fail. Failure is not the enemy. Chaos is the enemy — the interior kind, the kind that takes over when the external world stops cooperating.

Share

What we are building is a place where young people develop the inner architecture to stay functional when the ground disappears.

Because it will disappear. For all of them. At some point, in some form, the year will come when everything moves at once.

The question is not whether they will face it.

The question is whether they will have something inside them that holds.

I have heard the same sentence from children of different ages, in different years, with tears running down their faces.

We want to stay here. You are our real mom and dad. We don’t want to go.

A three-year-old said it. A six-year-old. A five-year-old. A nine-year-old. An eleven-year-old.

Each time, it costs something that doesn’t grow back the same way.

Three days ago we watched a seventeen-month-old girl — who had been with us since she was two weeks old, who had learned to walk in our house, who called me Dada — carried out the front door. We could not explain to her why. We could not tell her she did nothing wrong. Every child, on some level, believes they are the reason they are leaving.

That one ripped something open.

I have been in a long public conversation this week about education — about conformity, admin bloat, union politics, where the trillion dollars went. Good conversation. Real tension in it.

But here is what none of that conversation touched:

There are children sitting in those classrooms - in primary and middle school - who woke up screaming the night before. Who stood in a hallway trembling, asking not to be sent back. Who have been moved three times in two years and have learned, at a cellular level, that stability is not something the world offers them.

The school didn’t cause that. I’m not blaming the school.

But the school is also not equipped to reach it.

Teresa and I have fostered for four years. Six children in our home as of last week. We have held more children through more transitions than I want to count.

Here is what trauma looks like day to day — not in a clinical report, in a house:

Bad dreams with monsters. Waking up screaming. A child standing in the hallway physically trembling. A child who will not make eye contact because eye contact has historically preceded something painful. A child who eats too fast because, before this house, food wasn’t reliable. A child who is relentlessly compliant — because compliance kept them safe.

What reaches it isn’t a program. It isn’t PBIS or restorative justice circles or a trauma-informed curriculum binder.

It’s the same bedtime every night. A real meal, at a table, with a blessing before it. Being read to. Being heard — not managed, not processed, heard. Being held accountable for making your bed and putting your dish in the sink and hanging up your towel — and being loved at the exact same time. Dance parties in the living room. Matching outfits at Christmas. Ice cream on Fri-yay. A water slide in the backyard. The manatees at Homosassa Springs.

Structure and delight. Both. Every day. Without exception.

That is formation. It is not complicated. It is relentless.

Formation has been a recurring theme in these pages, and deliberately so.

It is the thread that runs through everything we are building.

For foster children, formation is repair work. It is the patient, daily process of rebuilding what trauma dismantled — identity, trust, the belief that the world is not fundamentally hostile. You cannot teach a child who does not believe they are safe. You cannot reach a mind that is still scanning the room for danger.

But formation is not only for the wounded.

It is the foundation of leadership. Of critical thinking. Of the capacity to face what is coming — and something is always coming.

We have drifted far from what once made this culture functional. Our great-grandparents did not have a program for self-reliance. They had no choice but to develop it. They fixed what broke. They grew what they ate. They built what they needed. They solved problems they had never seen before with tools they had made themselves — and they did it without asking permission. That capacity was not accidental. It was formed. By necessity, by mentorship, by a culture that honored the individual who figured it out.

We have traded that for a culture of dependency, compliance, and credentialed helplessness. We have produced generations of people who are educated but not capable, informed but not wise, connected but profoundly alone. We have confused process with formation and mistaken activity for growth.

The cost is visible everywhere.

A nation that cannot produce enough tradesmen to build its own infrastructure. Young men without direction, without mentors, without any clear idea of what they are for. Young women who have been told that strength means independence from everyone — including the people who love them. Children who have never been held accountable for anything and cannot understand why the world doesn’t bend to their feelings.

This is not a political problem. It is a formation problem.

Subscribe now

And the answer is not a new federal program or a revised curriculum standard. The answer is what it has always been: individuals who know who they are, communities that hold each other accountable, and the quiet daily work of building something that lasts.

Unity in this country has never come from agreement. It has come from shared values — freedom, individual strength, the dignity of honest work, the belief that every person carries within them something worth developing. That is what the Declaration means. That is what Philippians 4:8 points toward. That is what Lao Tzu understood about leadership — that the greatest thing you can do for another person is create the conditions for them to discover their own capacity.

A tradesman who cannot think is a technician. A tradesman who can think — who knows who he is, what he believes, why it matters, and how to solve a problem he has never seen before — that is someone the world actually needs.

That is what we are building toward.

The school I’m building is founded on three principles.

• Philippians 4:8 — whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

• The Declaration of Independence — We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

• Lao Tzu, principle 17 — the great leader is one who, when the work is done, the people say: we did it ourselves.

Those are not decorations. They are the operating system.

Because here is what I have watched the school system fail to provide — not out of malice, but out of design:

A solid identity. The understanding that you are made for something. Character as a daily practice, not a poster on the wall. Reading that you love because it opens the world. History that tells you where you come from. The Ten Commandments not as rules but as architecture. Kindness as strength, not weakness. How to regulate your own power. How to think — not what to think.

And for foster children specifically: the knowledge that they are not their story. That what happened to them is not who they are. That the trembling in the hallway is not their permanent address.

Share

The best school teacher I ever had was John Meeks. Seventh grade English. Former Marine. He never once lectured us. He created conditions for discovery and let us think we figured it out ourselves. Decades later I still remember what I learned in that classroom — because I found it. It belongs to me.

That is the model. Not the transmission of content. The creation of conditions.

The school I’m building is not a reform project. I am not trying to fix what exists.

I am building something that starts from the child — from what that child actually needs to become who they are capable of becoming. From the foundation up. From scratch.

Leave a comment

That seventeen-month-old baby girl who walked out our door deserves a world that was built with her in mind.

They all do.

Built From Scratch publishes every Tuesday. If this landed, share it with someone who needs to read it. And if you’re a teacher, a builder, a philanthropist, or a foster parent — I want to hear from you.

The other night I couldn’t sleep.

Our young foster was at her second weekend visit with her biological parents and something in me — not a thought exactly, more like a knowing that lives below thought — would not let me rest.

The feeling had a specific shape. It was the feeling of betrayal.

Not betrayal committed against me. Betrayal I was committing against her.

Because for seventeen months, every time she woke in the night calling DADA, I came. Every time she needed comfort I was there. Every morning she woke up in a house where she was the most important person in the room. Every day she experienced, in her body, in her nervous system and her soul that she was safe. That she was loved. That mom and dad would always be there.

She believed it because it was true.

And next week it will stop being true and she will not know why.

She will wake up calling DADA and I will not come. And she will not understand. And there is nothing — no words, no preparation, no explanation — that I can offer a seventeen-month-old child to make that make sense. She does not have the language yet. Which means the only language available to her is the language of the body. And what her body will tell her is that the people she trusted most disappeared without warning.

I have spent a long time thinking about what that does to a child. The school I am building exists in large part because of what that does to a child.

And now I am the one doing it. Not by choice. Not with indifference. But doing it nonetheless.

That is what I could not sleep about.

She came to us at two weeks old.

She had arough start. We did not know what to expect. We only knew we would be there for her whatever came.

What came was this little magnificent person. A bright light in our house.

She is one of the most creative, inventive, curious minds I have encountered in seventy years of meeting human beings. At seventeen months she applies things she has observed to situations she has never encountered before. She reasons. She experiments. She notices everything. She is kind in a way that is not taught — it is simply who she is, the way some people arrive in the world with a particular quality already present and intact.

She is tiny and she is powerful and that power is grounded entirely in the love and safety she has known every day of her conscious life. My wife is her best friend. She would do anything for her. So would I.

She knows we are her parents. Not biologically. But in every way that a seventeen-month-old human being understands the word.

The reunification is not mine to stop.

I understand the system’s reasoning. I do not entirely agree with it in this case but I understand it. Biological family has legal and moral weight. Reunification is the goal. The goal is not wrong in principle.

But principle and this specific child are two different things. And the gap between them is where I have been lying awake at three in the morning.

Her biological parents are not bad people. But they are self-centered in the way that people are self-centered when they have not yet done the work of becoming someone else’s center.

They have only recently begun to know her. They do not know who she is yet — not really. They do not know the way she picks up a broom twice her size and sweeps the floor with complete seriousness. They do not know the way she puts on a hat that swallows her whole head and turns to see if you’re watching. They do not know what she needs at 2am or what sound she makes when she’s about to fall asleep or what makes her laugh until she can’t breathe.

We know those things. We learned them over seventeen months of showing up every single day and paying attention.

That knowledge does not transfer in a staffing meeting.

I want to say something carefully here because I have thought about it for weeks and I want to get it right.

I do not believe I am a fraud.

I believe I am a man who loved a child completely and told her the truth — that she was safe, that she was loved, that DADA would come — and meant every word of it in every moment I said it. The fact that the 29th is coming does not make any of that a lie. It makes it a gift she received in full even though she cannot keep it forever.

But knowing that does not make the feeling go away. The feeling is still there. It is the feeling of a parent who cannot protect his child from something painful that is coming and can do nothing except be present for every remaining moment before it arrives.

That is what loving a foster child actually costs.

Not the sleepless nights with the bottles and the diapers — though those are real and they accumulate. The cost is this.

You love them completely knowing the timeline is uncertain. You give them everything knowing you may not be able to give them tomorrow. You let them believe they are safe because they are safe — right now, today, in this house — while carrying the knowledge of what the calendar says.

It is one of the most difficult things I have ever done. And my wife has done it more fully and more openly than I have because she is built that way — she feels everything the baby feels, she carries her confusion and fear as her own, she has not protected herself from a single moment of it.

She is remarkable. I want to say that plainly.

Subscribe now

The school I am building is for children like this baby.

Not only children in foster care — though them too, specifically them. But for every child who arrives at the door of their life without sufficient formation. Without someone who showed up consistently enough and long enough to let them believe that safety is real and love is reliable and they are worth the effort.

There are more of those children than the system knows how to count.

I know this because I was one of them. I left home at fifteen and a half because staying had become impossible. I built myself from scratch over fifty years because there was no other option. I know what it costs and how long it takes and what it leaves behind even after most of the work is done.

The baby deserves better than that cost. She deserves a foundation that holds.

We gave her seventeen months of foundation. It is not nothing. The research on early attachment is clear — what happens in the first months and years of a child’s life creates the architecture everything else is built on. We built as much as we could in the time we had.

I have to believe it travels with her. I have to believe that somewhere in her nervous system, below language and below memory, is the imprint of a house where she was loved without condition and a man who came when she called in the dark.

I have to believe it because the alternative — that it disappears without a trace on the 29th — is not something I know how to carry.

Share

To our little love, if you read this someday:

You were never abandoned. You were loved so completely that the leaving broke our hearts. DADA came every time you called. That was real. It will always have been real. Nothing that happens after the 29th can reach back and make it not have happened.

You are one of the most remarkable human beings we have ever known. You were that at two weeks old and you will be that at forty years old and at every point between.

We will think about you every day.

— Michael & Teresa Barrett, Foster Parents of the Year, Marion County 2026

There is a specific kind of conversation that only happens between two people who have known each other since childhood, at the exact moment in life when the future is still completely unwritten.

My college roommate and I had been friends since we were eleven years old. He was athletic, genuinely intelligent, kind in the way that doesn’t perform itself, and loyal in the way that means something when things get hard. We had grown up together through the particular chaos of being young men in the San Francisco bay area in the 1970s — which is to say we had seen a great deal and survived most of it.

One night we sat down on the bare lot adjacent to where the Lawrence Hall of Science sits today. We had a view of San Francisco and both bridges where we were sitting. A spectacular view at night…

We talked until the sun came up.

I don’t remember every word of that conversation. I remember the quality of it — the kind of talking that happens when two people have nothing to prove to each other and enough trust to say the actual thing instead of the comfortable thing.

The city was out there across the water, lit up and indifferent, and we talked about what we were doing with our lives and what we wanted and what we were afraid of and what it would mean to actually commit to something rather than just surviving another month.

By the time the light changed I had made a decision.

I was going to buy a house.

I had $36 in my bank account.

I want to be precise about that number because it matters to the story. Not approximately thirty dollars. Not a little bit of money. Thirty-six dollars. I was working in the parts department of a motorcycle shop, having taken a year off from premed after the physics final that destroyed my 96 average, living in a rented apartment with a girlfriend I had been with for some time.

The apartment situation had become a pattern I was tired of.

Subscribe now

We would find a rundown place, clean it up, make it good, and the landlord would raise the rent. It had happened four or five times - over several years. The last time it happened something in me decided that I was done participating in that cycle. If I was going to put work into a place it was going to be mine.

But the decision that came out of the night on the bay was larger than a housing strategy. It was a life decision. The new life I was committing to required leaving the old one behind completely.

Within the same thirty days I separated from my girlfriend, found the house, and moved in. Three chapters closing and opening simultaneously. The kind of month that compresses years of becoming into a single pivot.

I called my mother at work.

We had been in one of our periods of distance — I had asked her not to contact me until I called her, and she had honored that, which was its own form of progress in our relationship.

I told her I was going to buy a house.

My grandmother helped me. And I found a real estate agent who knew what he was doing and a seller willing to carry a silent second on the down payment.

The banker asked me where I got the extra five thousand dollars for the down payment.

My agent had prepared me for this question. He told me to say I had cashed in a coin collection.

I told the banker I had cashed in a coin collection.

He wrote it down and kept moving.

Share Built From Scratch

The house was on a street in the Bay Area , on a cull de sac off the Piedmont Rose gardens.

It was eleven hundred square feet. A two bedroom, one bath, with a formal dining room, large kitchen, living room.

Gumwood trim, built ins, and hardwood floors throughout. Stucco exterior with a parapet roof.

I knew it the moment I walked in the door. The entry was stunning.

The house was stunning and I loved it immediately. The realtor had signed a listing agreement the day before but it wasn’t even listed on the MLS yet.

I don’t know how to explain that kind of knowing except to say that it is different from thinking something is a good idea. It is a whole-body recognition that arrives before the mind has processed anything. The light in the rooms, the proportion of the spaces, the particular quality of the silence inside — something said yes before I had looked at a single detail.

I have learned to trust that kind of knowing. It has been right more often than analysis has been.

Within thirty days of that sunrise conversation overlooking the bay I was closing on the house and moving in. The girlfriend was gone. The old life was gone. I was twenty-something years old with a mortgage, a salary from a motorcycle shop, and more clarity than I had felt since the dream six years earlier.

By the way, my PITI was $365 a month in a fantastic neighborhood - several blocks away from a commuter stop where you could catch the express to downtown San Francisco and be there in 20-30 minutes.

I think about that night on the hill often when I am trying to understand what actually changes a life.

It was not a plan. I did not sit down with a spreadsheet and calculate the path from $36 to homeownership. I did not consult experts or research the market or develop a strategy. I made a decision in the dark overlooking a city and then spent thirty days doing whatever it took to make the decision real.

The decision came first. Everything else followed from the decision.

This is not how most people think change works. Most people wait for the conditions to be right before they decide. They want the money before they commit to the house, the credentials before they commit to the career, the certainty before they commit to the relationship. They are waiting for the signal that it is safe to proceed.

What I have learned — slowly and through considerable evidence — is that the signal does not come before the decision. It comes after. The decision is what creates the conditions, not the other way around.

I had $36 when I decided to buy a house. I had no client when I decided to start the agency. I had no land when I decided to build the school in Montana. I have never had the conditions that conventional wisdom says you need before you commit to something.

What I have had, at the moments that mattered, is the particular clarity that comes from a conversation with someone you trust at the exact moment you are ready to hear the truth about yourself.

My college roommate was that person on that night. He knew me since I was eleven years old. He knew what I was capable of and what I was avoiding and what it would mean if I kept avoiding it. He didn’t tell me what to do. He just sat there being honest until the sun came up and I figured it out myself.

That is also — not coincidentally — exactly what the school is designed to do.

Not to tell young people what to become. To sit with them honestly, in the right environment, with the right people, until they figure it out themselves.

The house with the gumwood trim and the hardwood floors and the parapet roof was the first thing I built from scratch.

It was not the last.

Built From Scratch is a series about building a school — and the life that made it necessary. Article 8 publishes next week. If this landed for you, share it with one person. Subscribe to follow the series from the beginning.

I was nineteen years old.

I was in my first year of premed — biology, biology lab, inorganic chemistry, chemistry lab, physics, calculus, trigonometry, and a course on the Art and Culture of Asia that was the only thing on the list that felt like breathing. I was pushing myself harder academically than I ever had.

I was also in my first year of Tai Chi practice, working to heal a knee that three years of karate had damaged, learning to move from a completely different place than I had ever moved from before.

That was the ground under my feet when the dream came.

I went to sleep one night and found myself somewhere else entirely.

The best way I know to describe what happened is this. It was not a dream the way most dreams work — fragmentary, symbolic, dissolving at the edges.

This was a training.

A guided tour conducted by a group of highly advanced individuals I could hear but never see. They were never in my line of sight. They were simply present — speaking to me, explaining what I was looking at, answering questions before I thought to ask them. Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually elevated beyond anything I had encountered in waking life.

They took me somewhere.

I was standing on a mountain. On the slope below me, cut into the hillside in a series of steep terraces, were groups of students practicing martial arts. Different teachers on different terraces. Different disciplines, different levels of advancement. Beautiful trees between the paths. I could look down from above and see all of them working simultaneously — a living map of formation in progress.

I was running it. Not observing it. Running it.

The kitchen came next. Commercial, U-shaped, immaculate, designed for speed and volume. A large working island. Walk-in pantry, cooler, freezer. A six-foot slider window at the end above the main sink, facing the mountains. You could feel the warmth of the place before anyone arrived — a gathering center, a nourishment engine, the heartbeat of something larger.

Then a woodworking shop. A man in his forties at a table saw. Across the room, several teenage boys with an older man, learning something with their hands. Behind glass on one side — a sharpening and tool grinding department, immaculate, with clipboards and production schedules on a whiteboard. A grinding shop that looked, I realized later, almost exactly like the carbide tooling operation I would build in Montana eight years after the dream.

A production woodworking operation, larger and fully running. A metal fabrication shop. Welding stations. A regenerative farm with raised beds, greenhouse, no-till fields, an apple orchard, a cherry orchard. Students measuring yield, analyzing soil, designing systems.

The guides explained everything as we moved through it. Not just what each place was — but how it connected to everything else. How the kitchen fed the community and the farm fed the kitchen and the shop students built the equipment the farm needed and the grinding shop kept all the cutting tools sharp and the revenue from the production operation funded the educational side and the educational side trained the people who staffed the production side.

A self-sustaining engine. Closed loop. Every part feeding every other part.

And then they told me something that I have thought about almost every year since.

They said: as your life unfolds and you gather the knowledge and skills each phase requires, that phase will unlock. You will understand what to do when you get there. And if you don’t understand, the right people will appear to help you.

They said: this is not a plan you will manage. It is a plan that will manage you.

I woke up electrified.

The clarity of it was unlike anything I had experienced before or have experienced since. I lay there in the specific way you lie still after something significant, not wanting to move in case moving dissolves it. It was all still there — vivid, detailed, present.

The next night I went to sleep and it happened again.

The second night did less recapping and more explaining. The guides went deeper on how things would make sense to me when I arrived at each stage. They talked about the sequence — how nothing would open before its time, how the design was modular, how the foundation had to be solid before the next layer could be added. They talked about the people who would appear.

I woke up the second morning knowing something had happened that I did not have language for yet.

I told my Tai Chi instructor.

I was so full of it I had to tell someone, and he was the person I spent the most time with in that period. I tried to explain the terraces, the different groups practicing on different levels of the mountain, the way I had been running it — and the fact that in the dream he was there, but at a lesser level of accomplishment than I was.

He got miffed.

Chinese teachers have to be approached carefully. The relationship takes time to deepen. I had not yet learned that. I was nineteen and running over with something I didn’t know how to carry quietly.

But we did become very close friends.

I shared the vision with other people over the years, in smaller pieces. At a seminar in Vancouver in 2006, I described it to a room and there was real excitement — people leaning forward, responding to the specifics of it, wanting to be part of it. But I only saw those people that one time and that was that.

In Montana in 1983, the vision surfaced again. This time with a clear message I received internally: not yet. Not the right time. So I put it back on the shelf.

Again in 2001. Again in 2006.

Fifty-two years of carrying something without yet having the conditions to build it.

Here is what I understand now that I could not have articulated in 1973.

The guides in my dream were right about the sequence. Every phase of my life has deposited something into the foundation. The carbide tooling shop taught me what a real production operation looks and feels like from the inside — and I saw it in the dream before I built it. I also made sales calls on ~3000 woodworking operations over 6 years - personally.

The espresso deli taught me commercial kitchen operations — and I walked through that kitchen in the dream a decade before I stood behind a real espresso bar.

Further expanding my understanding of commercial kitchens, I called on executive chefs and restaurant owners 50 times a week for 5 years selling 27 lines of food products.

The Karate, Tai Chi, then Sifu’s Yi Chuan, then four years of qigong in Seattle, then the qigong institute — all of it became the martial arts terraces on the mountain. The foster children taught me what formation actually requires and what it costs when it’s missing — which is the whole reason the school exists.

Nothing was wasted. Nothing was beside the point. The plan was managing me, exactly as the guides said it would.

And the people have appeared. Not all of them yet. But enough of them, at the right moments, that I have stopped being surprised when it happens.

I am seventy two years old.

The trade school in Florida is the first structure going into the ground. The Montana community is the main campus — the mountain, the terraces, the kitchen with the window facing the mountains, the woodworking shop, the grinding operation, the farm, the orchard.

Subscribe now

The dream is no longer in the future. It is in the process of becoming present.

Fifty-two years is a long time to carry a vision. But the guides told me it would unfold when I was ready. I spent a long time arguing with that timeline internally. I don’t argue with it anymore.

The foundation has been built. One layer at a time, in the sequence the dream specified, by a life that turned out to have been preparation all along.

Now we build.

Built From Scratch is a series about building a school — and the life that made it necessary. Article 7 publishes next week. If this landed for you, share it with one person. Subscribe to follow the series from the beginning.

Karate

I started studying karate for the wrong reason.

A friend of mine had ripped me off on a motorcycle we were buying together. He’d found a way to beat me in small claims court — not legitimately, but effectively. I was furious. He had been a competitive wrestler in high school and I knew I couldn’t take him the way I was. So I found a dojo and I started training with a specific intention in mind.

I was going to learn how to hurt him.

I wasn’t subtle about it, apparently. I worked for a man during that period who ran an oil change business. He was a big, strong guy with quick hands — had been on the kung fu team in the Marine Corps and was a former Golden Gloves boxer. He watched me come in after school over time, carrying my books and my gi, day after day.

One afternoon he pulled me aside and asked me quietly: “What are you going to do if he dies?”

I hadn’t told him anything about the motorcycle or my plan. He had simply watched me and figured it out. And his question stopped me cold.

His question could be interpreted 2 different ways:

1. If he died before I could hurt him.

2. If he died when I did hurt him.

Until recently, I never considered it to mean the second option. Only the first.

I kept training. But something shifted after that. His question was the whole point — I understood that later. A man who has genuinely learned something about violence knows that the question before any confrontation is never “can I win.” It’s “what happens after.”

About a year into my training I ran into the man I had intended to destroy. We were both standing in line at a Payless Drug store. He was with his girlfriend, a woman I liked and respected.

When he looked me in the eyes, I knew. I could see it in his face — he knew it too. His face went bright red. There was nothing left to prove and no fight necessary because the fight was already over.

His girlfriend was warm and friendly to me. And I did not have the heart to take him apart in front of her. Had she not been there, it might have gone differently.

I had won. Without throwing a single punch. And from that day forward, my training had nothing to do with him. It became entirely about competing with myself.

Three years in, my left knee started giving me serious problems. I went to my sensei and told him I was concerned about permanent damage. His response was delivered in his very precise Japanese manner.

“Do harder. Do more. Pain go away.”

The pain in my knee was not imaginary. Something was wrong and my sense was that it could become a permanent injury without addressing it fully. The pain was not from lack of discipline. For 2 years, I trained with the group 6 times a week at school and the dojo. I also did 600 kicks and 600 punches everyday at home.

That was the end of my karate training.

The Internal Arts

I had been reading about the internal arts for some time.

I read everything Robert Smith had written (and anxiously awaited each new book that came out) because I couldn’t read Chinese or Japanese texts.

Tai Chi, qigong, Baguazhang, Hsing-I, and later the trilogy about the Wandering Taoist (by Deng, Ming-Dao). These systems approach the body and its energy from an entirely different direction than hard style martial arts.

So I found a Tai Chi instructor. He was my classmate’s uncle. He was a dedicated man and a good man. I practiced the 106 movement set - morning and night for years.

I can’t remember it today.

Later on I studied with another teacher in Seattle for four years. A very talented young scientist and qigong master. I remember very little of that system either.

Prior to my training in Seattle, I met Sifu Cheuk Fung and his Yi Chuan Kung Fu.

I studied with Sifu four nights a week - for eight months. He taught me more in those eight months than both previous teachers had given me in five years combined. Or the 4 years of qigong training later in Seattle.

And what he gave me, I still carry today. Not as memory. As something deeper than memory.

I spent a long time afterward trying to understand why his teaching was so different, why it stayed when everything else had faded. And eventually it came to me.

He taught through the energy connection.

Yes, he spoke. He demonstrated everything. He explained. But the actual transmission happened at a different level. His energy taught my energy. And energy doesn’t forget the way the mind forgets.

The Cubic Centimeter of Chance

This reminded me of something from Carlos Castaneda’s books about the Yaqui way of knowledge — a concept Don Juan described as the cubic centimeter of chance. Don Juan said that a true teacher must remain alert at all times, because there are brief windows when a student’s awareness opens completely. When that window appears, the teacher must insert the learning before it closes. It closes quickly.

Sifu did exactly this. Whether consciously or not, he caught me every time my window was open. He never missed it.

I came to understand something through those eight months that changed how I think about all teaching, not just martial arts. When you learn in the energy — when the transmission goes that deep — it becomes permanent. The mind is unreliable. It forgets, it distorts, it rearranges.

But energy doesn’t do any of those things. What enters at that level stays.

After Decades of Practice

Here is what I believe about the internal arts after decades of practice and observation.

The hard styles — karate, wrestling, most of what people think of when they hear the word martial arts — can access qi. But they typically use it differently, and over time the result is gradual depletion. The body wears. The joints pay. I watched as hard stylists age. The cost was visible.

The internal arts work in the opposite direction. The more you practice, the more you build. You end at the end of a session with more than you started with. After thirty-six years of 24 minute sets (8 postures for 3 minutes each) of Yi Chuan framework practice, I have more available to me energetically than I did at thirty-five. The capacity grows. It doesn’t diminish.

There is something else. In the internal arts, the attack is explosive rather than muscular. Energy moves faster than muscle. It moves faster than the thinking brain. This is why a genuine internal arts practitioner can be devastating against a much larger, stronger opponent — not because of size or speed or technique in the conventional sense, but because of what’s behind the technique.

Very few teachers in America actually understand how this works. I have met many martial artists over the years. I can count the ones who truly understood internal arts on one hand.

Sifu is the finest martial artist I have ever known. When he eventually dies, there will be no direct replacement. His interpretation of Yi Chuan will effectively disappear unless someone takes responsibility for preserving it.

That is part of what the school is for.

A man once asked me what I was going to do if my opponent died.

He wasn’t asking about the motorcycle or the man I was angry with. He was asking a larger question that took me years to fully understand.

The question was: what are you building this for?

Anger is real. It is sometimes necessary. It is, in the right hands, excellent raw material for transformation. But it is not a destination. The man who is still fighting the fight that started in anger twenty years later is a man who never found the real reason to train.

The real reason, I eventually understood, is not what you can do to another person. It is what you can become. And beyond that — what you can pass on.

The school is going to teach martial arts. Not as sport. Not as exercise. As formation. As the physical and energetic dimension of building a complete human being — someone who knows how to move through the world with presence, restraint, and when necessary, genuine force.

An eighteen-year-old boy standing in line at a drugstore, watching his enemy’s face go red, choosing not to act — that is the graduate I am trying to produce.

Not the fighter. The man who has already won, before anything starts.

Subscribe now

Built From Scratch is a series about building a school — and the life that made it necessary. Article 6 publishes next week. If this landed for you, share it with one person. Subscribe to follow the series from the beginning.

Built From Scratch · Article 4

I left home at fifteen and a half.

Not dramatically. Not with a scene. I packed a few things, wrote a note to my mother, and walked out. The note said: don’t try to find me, because if you do I’ll just leave again.

She didn’t try to find me.

I was not running toward something. I was running from a situation that had become impossible to stay inside. The details don’t matter as much as the fact itself — a fifteen-year-old boy decided that whatever was on the other side of that door was better than what was inside, and he walked through it alone.

For the next months I slept on couches. I was angry and I was surviving and those two things were so intertwined I couldn’t separate them. I was not building anything yet. I was just moving through days, staying out of the way of consequences I couldn’t afford, and being grateful to whoever let me stay another night.

The best friend I made during that time was the boy whose couch I slept on longest. We did things we shouldn’t have done together. We didn’t follow the rules. Neither of us knew exactly what we were supposed to be becoming, so we became something that kept us alive and entertained and out of the worst kind of trouble, most of the time.

He was killed in a head-on car accident not long after. And something in me shifted permanently on the day I found out.

I don’t know how else to describe it except to say that his death made the stakes real in a way nothing had before. I had been living as though the choices I made didn’t have permanent consequences. His death proved they did. I decided that day that I was going to move on with my life, start living right, and become a better man — even though I had no clear idea how to do that, or what a better man even looked like.

That decision is where this story actually begins.

What followed was not a clean arc. It was a series of attempts, some of which worked and many of which didn’t, undertaken by a young man who was making it up as he went because there was no one around to show him the way. No father at home. No older man pulling him aside and saying — here, this is how it works, this is what you do when this happens, this is what a man looks like in this situation.

I enrolled in college at seventeen. Changed majors four times over several years — automotive trades, then accounting, then premed biology and finished up in Business Admin - Marketing.

I graduated with 180 semester units - often referring to my undergraduate work as the best liberal arts degree in history.

I was looking for something that fit without knowing clearly what I was looking for. In my first year as a biology major, I studied hard enough to carry a 96 average into my physics final and failed it. A two-week fast I’d been following triggered a detox reaction that gave me a migraine so severe I couldn’t focus my eyes or recall anything I’d studied.

I went home that day and slept from Friday afternoon until Monday.

I took a year off and went to work in the parts department of a motorcycle shop with zero experience. Within six months I was promoted to assistant manager. The head mechanic — a big intimidating man everyone else was afraid of — walked in one day and announced that from that point forward, nobody pulled parts for his repair jobs except me. Period. Because I was the only one who got it right every time.

My boss told me afterward that he had almost fired me every single day for the first several months because I asked so many questions he couldn’t get anything done. The other parts guys — some with ten and fifteen years of experience — resented me. On Saturdays, customers formed a line and waited for me specifically, even when other parts guys were standing there free.

I am not telling this to impress. I am telling it because I could not understand at the time why it kept happening. I walked into situation after situation with no experience, no credentials, no one vouching for me — and people recognized something and responded to it. It happened at the motorcycle shop. It happened later in the carbide tooling business I built from scratch in Montana. It happened everywhere I went and paid full attention.

What I understand now, at seventy, that I couldn’t have articulated at twenty, is what they were recognizing. They were recognizing someone who had been built under pressure without a mold. Someone who had to figure out how things actually worked rather than being told. Someone who paid close attention because there was no safety net if he didn’t.

That’s what being built from scratch produces, when it works.

What it also produces — and this is the part that takes decades to fully understand — is damage. Specific, quiet damage that doesn’t announce itself but shows up in the places that matter most. In how you handle intimacy. In how you respond when authority figures disappoint you, because they always do and you always knew they would. In the particular loneliness that comes from learning too early that you are essentially on your own. In the anger you carry in your body that you can feel but can barely name, because it formed before you had language for it.

I wrote poetry for two years after my friend died. Every spare moment, I was writing — trying to process something that had no other container. One day the folder was gone. I always suspected my stepfather threw it away, though I was never certain why. I lost touch with that part of myself and never fully got it back.

I studied karate and became capable. But for years I was afraid of what would happen if I really let go in a fight — afraid of what the pent-up anger might do if I stopped managing it. I sparred carefully. I controlled myself. My son watched me handle a confrontation about twenty years ago and told me afterward he was surprised by the grace and technical discretion he saw. What he was seeing was five decades of work on something that started as uncontrolled rage in a fifteen-year-old boy sleeping on couches.

The formation happened. It just took longer than it should have, cost more than it should have, and left marks that a different beginning might have prevented.

Subscribe now

I think about this when I watch my wife with the children in our care. She celebrates every small win. She makes a point of the point — which is that you, specifically you, did something worth stopping for. I watch children who arrived uncertain and waiting for the strings to appear slowly begin to believe that the warmth is real. The ones who came to us earliest and stayed longest show it most clearly — the self-possession, the ease, the willingness to dive straight into a birthday cake without checking first to see if it’s really for them.

What they’re being given is what I wasn’t given. Not protection from difficulty. Not guaranteed outcomes. Just the consistent presence of adults who show up, who pay attention, who make it clear that the child in front of them has weight and worth.

That is what identity is actually built on. Not on credentials or accomplishments or being the best parts guy on Saturdays. On whether someone who mattered looked at you early enough and often enough and said — you. You specifically. You are worth this.

The school I am building is going to do that deliberately. Not as a therapy program. As a design principle. Because you cannot grow a leader out of a person who is still, somewhere below everything, running the belief that no one is coming, that they are on their own, that the warmth will disappear if they move toward it too quickly.

You have to go further back. Back to the couch. Back to the folder of poetry that disappeared. Back to the boy who wrote a note and walked out the door alone.

And you have to build something different there.

That is what this school is for.

That is what I am built from.

And that is why I know it works — because I am the proof that even without it, a person can eventually find their way. But eventually is a long time. And the cost is high. And some people don’t make it to eventually.

The school exists so that fewer people have to find out how high that cost is.

Built From Scratch is a series about building a school — and the life that made it necessary. Article 5 publishes next week. If this piece landed for you, share it with one person who needs to read it.

The planner itself was expensive. The binder, the filler pages, the tabbed sections — the whole system cost more than most people spent on a week of groceries. The course was free, which was the only reason I was there at eight in the morning on a Saturday.

The speaker lost me about ten minutes in.

He was explaining the framework you needed to use the planner effectively. Something about values as the foundation. How you couldn’t organize your time until you understood what you actually valued. How leadership began with knowing who you were.

My conscious mind — the part that shows up to Saturday morning productivity courses — switched off completely.

Another values lecture, it thought. I came here to learn how to use the planner. Not philosophy.

I left that morning with a very expensive binder and almost nothing else.

It took me thirty more years to understand what I walked out on.

The speaker wasn’t talking about time management. He was talking about the only thing that makes leadership possible — knowing what you stand for before you try to lead anyone anywhere.

I missed it because nobody had ever taught me to think that way. Not in school. Not in business. Not anywhere I had been formally educated. The idea that values were the foundation of leadership — not techniques, not systems, not authority — was so foreign to how I had been trained to think that I dismissed it as soft before I even heard it properly.

That’s what happens when leadership training is absent from education. You don’t just miss the lessons. You lose the ability to recognize them when they finally show up.

But here’s what I find strange looking back. I had already seen real leadership. I had watched it up close, in a classroom, when I was eleven years old. I just didn’t have the framework to understand what I was seeing.

His name was John Meeks. He was my seventh grade English teacher.

He was a former Marine. Big man. The kind of physical presence that fills a room without trying. But what I remember most was not his size. It was his kindness. And the fact that he genuinely cared about what happened to the kids sitting in front of him.

Mr. Meeks taught us more about syntax, grammar, and how to write a composition than any teacher I had before or after. Not because he lectured better than anyone else. But because of how he taught. He planted seeds. He asked questions that guided you toward the answer without telling you what it was. He created the conditions for understanding and then stepped back far enough that when the understanding came, it felt like yours.

Everybody loved him. Not because he was easy. Because he was real and he respected us and we knew it.

One Friday afternoon near the end of the year he gave us an essay assignment. The topic was seven words:

“When I see another man debased, I am also debased.”

I was eleven years old. I have been thinking about that sentence for sixty-one years.

That assignment did something that almost no assignment ever does. It asked a young person to think seriously about their relationship to human dignity — not in the abstract, but personally. When someone else is diminished, what happens to you? What are you responsible for? What does it mean to be part of a common humanity?

That is not an English assignment. That is a leadership assignment. It is a character assignment. It is the kind of question that, if taken seriously, shapes how a person moves through the world for the rest of their life.

John Meeks was practicing exactly what Lao Tzu described centuries ago in the most precise statement of leadership philosophy I have ever encountered:

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists. Not so good when people obey and acclaim him. Worst when they despise him. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will all say: we did this ourselves.

Mr. Meeks talked little. His aim was our formation. When it was done we thought we had learned it ourselves. That’s not an accident. That’s mastery.

Modern education almost never produces teachers like John Meeks. Not because the people going into teaching are less capable or less committed. But because the system they work inside does not value what he was doing. It cannot measure it, cannot standardize it, cannot put it on a rubric. So it does not teach it, does not reward it, and does not replicate it.

Subscribe now

What the system does reward is compliance and performance. Students who follow instructions. Teachers who produce measurable outcomes. Administrators who hit their numbers. The entire architecture of modern schooling is built around assessment — around measuring what a student can produce when asked rather than who a student is becoming over time.

Leadership cannot be assessed that way. Character cannot be assessed that way. The things John Meeks was building in his students in 1964 could not have been captured on any standardized test ever designed. They showed up sixty years later in the way his former students move through the world.

I learned this lesson again, years later, in my own business. I had a partner in my tooling company who struggled with our dynamic. He was exceptionally good at what he did — a skilled production man, reliable, meticulous. But he had self-image issues and felt threatened by me. I was the salesman, the face of the business, the college-educated one. He was always trying to compete, always measuring himself against me in ways that created friction neither of us needed.

It took me a few years to figure out what was actually happening. And when I did, I changed my approach entirely.

I started leaving things on his desk. Articles about production techniques. Notes about a problem I’d been thinking about. Suggestions framed as questions. And then I waited.

A few days later he would come to me with an idea. A change he wanted to make. A solution to the problem I’d been thinking about. And I would listen carefully and tell him it was a good idea and we should do it.

Because it was a good idea. It just needed to be his.

The business ran better. He was more confident. The friction disappeared. And the work that needed to get done got done — because the person who needed to do it felt like he had chosen it rather than been directed toward it.

I didn’t know I was practicing Lao Tzu. I didn’t know I was doing what John Meeks had done for us in seventh grade. I just knew that protecting a man’s dignity was more important than getting credit for an idea.

That is the leadership skill most schools never teach. Not because it’s complicated. Because it requires something that cannot be graded — the willingness to disappear into the work and let someone else take the bow.

The school I am building will teach it deliberately. Not as a concept. As a practice. Students will lead projects where the measure of their leadership is not how much credit they receive but how capable the people around them become. They will read Lao Tzu alongside the classics. They will be asked the kinds of questions John Meeks asked — the ones that take sixty years to fully answer.

And somewhere in the process, if we do it right, they will arrive at the understanding themselves.

They will think they figured it out on their own.

That will be exactly the point.

Leave a comment

Built From Scratch is a series about building a school — and the life that made it necessary. Article 4 publishes next week. Subscribe to follow the series from the beginning.