Biggest Takeaways You Don't Want to Miss:

• We’ve romanticized student struggle because it lets adults be the hero. But in doing so, we’ve normalized systems that require kids to suffer before they succeed.
• If you expect struggle to be the norm, you build systems that tolerate it. If you expect turnaround to take years, you don’t feel urgency to fix the conditions producing it. If success is defined as “eventually,” then “not yet” feels acceptable.
• What if the goal wasn’t to help kids recover from failure, but to prevent unnecessary failure in the first place?
• For Builders, the real work isn’t creating better comeback stories. The real work is building schools where kids don’t need one.
• Buildership is not about positioning adults as heroes who save kids after years of struggle. It’s about building systems that don’t require saving in the first place.

We all love a good redemption story in schools—the students who struggle for years and finally turn things around. Those stories make us feel good.

They also let us avoid a harder question: why did success take so long in the first place? During Coaching Week, that question kept coming up for me, and it forced me to look at how deeply we’ve normalized struggle and delayed success in the systems we call “good.”

In this episode, I challenge the idea that suffering is a necessary part of learning, examine what our favorite stories reveal about our expectations, and explore what changes when we stop centering heroics and start interrogating design, #LikeABuilder.

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