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Grad school taught you how to run a school. It did not teach you how to create a campus experience worth showing up for.

That’s a big problem …

(if you’re a Ruckus Maker)

Because your #1 job is to create a campus experience worth showing up for.

Simply learning to be a better, more efficient manager of campus resources will not inspire your community. Bell schedules, graduation, teacher evaluation are all important. They are table stakes of running a school.

But to create something legendary?

That requires a Do School Different approach.

The kind that we write about here.

In our view, there are two types of school leaders:

• Play-It-Safe-Principals read what the system assigns them without question. They protect the way it’s always been done.

• Ruckus Makers read far and wide outside of education. Not because they think education is broken, but they prioritize learning from a wide variety of disciplines.

An echo chamber exists in every school system in the world. There is shared language, operating procedures, and other efficiencies that exist to make life easier in any system.

And if you have ever asked, “There must be a better way …” this post is for you.

I made a list of 10 books that will support your Do School Different vision. Books I love. Books that we’ve read in The Ruckus Maker Mastermind since 2016.

None are a book from the K12 industry. You’ve already read those.

This list are my favorites from the last 10+ years supporting bold school leaders. I share the top ten list in the video below. Then I ask Digital Danny, my AI clone, what he would suggest. I’m glad I did because he offered a few gems that I didn’t include originally.

Here’s the list, with one big idea from each text.

1. Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday

Sports psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais says elite performers never talk about effort. Working hard is table stakes.

According to Gervais, what elite performers discuss on the world stage is recovery because when you’re already working hard, recovery is what separates the best from the rest.

There’s a reason every framework I teach starts with taking care of the individual leader first (even before family). You can’t our from an empty cup.

2. The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey

Yes, this book is about sports performance. So how does it relate to school leadership.

Gallwey names the two selves inside every Ruckus Maker.

• Self One is the critic. The voice that says why’d you say that, you’re not ready, this will never work.

• Self Two is the doer. The one who has to walk the halls and build a campus experience worth showing up for.

When Self One talks too much, Self Two plays small. And a principal playing small puts a ceiling on what results a campus can create.

3. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves

Ruckus Makers love this book because it is super practical.

You take an assessment and score yourself across four domains of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management.

Then, you choose your lowest area and get to work. The authors provide 15 activities per area of emotional intelligence. Do the work and your results will grow.

4. The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

As school leaders, we bring people together all the time.

The problem is that we take these gatherings for granted and as a result, they are mediocre.

Staff meetings. Open house. Graduation.

Boring. Boring. Boring.

And here’s the thing …

With just a little bit of intentional effort, you can create legendary experiences on your campus.

The kind of stuff people are excited about.

After reading this book, you’ll never think of Open House the same.

5. Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

According to Fogg, behavior is a function of motivation, ability, and a prompt.

B = MAP

This is a revolutionary framework.

Most school leaders (mistakenly) believe that people when staff doesn’t follow through they either are unmotivated or simply don’t care.

The B = MAP model shows this is likely wrong.

I believe people care deeply about their work (and want to know they are doing a good job too).

What is usually missing is ability (they need training and development) or a prompt (a cue that says it’s time to do “X” behavior).

When you understand this model, people start to do what you want. It’s like a Jedi power 🔮

6. The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

Finite games have winners and losers. Finite leaders think, “In order for me to win, you must lose.”

Infinite games are about abundance.

You don’t have to lose for me to win. And what if the game never ends?

Schools and school systems compete a lot in the finite game zone. Students would benefit for us to figure out how to play a more generous, and infinite game.

7. A Beautiful Constraint by Adam Morgan & Mark Barden

The head of Random House bet Dr. Seuss $50 he couldn’t write a book using only 50 words.

Seuss accepted the bet and created Green Eggs and Ham—his best-selling book ever.

Constraints are beautiful.

The obstacles become the path to greatness once you use them as the starting (and not the end) point.

“We can’t” and “That’ll-never-work” thinking has never produced anything remarkable.

Only “What would need to be true” type of thinking gets the job done.

8. Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

Everyone knows a time they made a very poor decision, but it resulted in a good outcome …

(I’m looking at your college years)

We also know there are times when we have a solid decision making process, and yet, the outcome stinks.

As Frank Sinatra says, “That’s life.”

The problem I see many school leaders make is that they over-value outcomes and under-value process.

And the problem with that kind of thinking is that it elevates what is NOT in your control (the outcomes) over what is in your control (the process).

Annie Duke challenges us to turn that around.

This book is a masterclass on decision making.

9. Radical Candor by Kim Scott

I fear that most educators practice what Scott calls Ruinous Empathy. That’s when you care a lot, but you are not direct. You tend to dance around issues.

But to be a Ruckus Maker you need to care and be direct. This is what Scott calls Radical Candor. It’s also the only kind of feedback that works and helps people be their best.

Gene Park is a sitting principal in NJ and current mastermind coach. He read this book with his staff and trained them on the four quadrants of Scott’s framework:

After conversations with staff, he brings up this grid and asks in the moment where his communication landed. Imagine that kind of feedback loop done every day with staff.

That’s what makes Gene a King of Culture.

10. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

This book is my all time favorite for Ruckus Makers and sits in my personal book Hall of Fame.

My copy is earmarked and the “marginalia” is written everywhere.

Frankl survived Auschwitz, and his core idea is radical ownership:

Life is going to ask you what it means. How anyone else answers doesn’t matter. The only answer that counts is yours, because you’re the one being asked.

School leadership is tough. Frankl’s lived experience was objectively tougher. Learn how to thrive in adversity because expecting anything else is naive.

Introduction

“If, at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, honesty, self-control, courage . . . it must be an extraordinary thing indeed” Marcus Aurelius (2003, p. 30).

Glenn

Stillness in a World of Chaos

The world around us is volatile; it changes constantly. Our schools are a microcosm of that chaos; they are touched by disorder, trauma, and turmoil on a daily basis. All of us have our stories—we’ve seen Machiavellian maneuverings amongst staff, kids suffering in poverty and abuse, unfair policies that hurt the most vulnerable, great intentions foiled by lack of funding or support, and a host of other problems.

Meanwhile, many of our colleagues are jumping ship—and who could blame them? A survey from NASSP (2022) reported that school leaders’ stress levels are so high that over half of them are planning to leave the profession in the next three years.

No matter how noble your intentions, it’s hard to continue when you feel constantly at the mercy of everything around you. Like a ship being battered by the waves, you wonder how you can ever recover your balance, let alone get where you’re trying to go.

Most of us respond reactively. We can’t help it. We’re a product of the people we learn from, and most of us haven’t had great mentoring. At best, we’ve figured out how to be leaders on our own. At worst, we’ve witnessed or been subject to political infighting and backstabbing that’s made us cynical and wary of each other.

Many of us don’t know how to trust our teams and delegate. Our own ego, reinforced by dozens of bad experiences, tells us that we are the only ones who can get a job done “right.” And when we pile up responsibilities on ourselves, imposter syndrome takes over: I’m a fraud; there’s no way I can do all of this on my own. And yet, our ego and fear of humiliation keep us stuck.

We all face challenges in our daily role as leaders in education. We want to meet those challenges with poise, confidence, groundedness, and flexibility. We want to take a stand for our students when we need to, respond to aggravations with kindness and forbearance whenever possible, recognize the good in the people around us, and know what the appropriate actions are for each circumstance. Most of all, we want to feel the sense of inner peace that comes with knowing we’ve done our best and the assurance that no matter what comes next, we have the inner tools needed to navigate these waters.

Thankfully, many leaders before us have faced the same challenges. Our goal in this book is to equip you with the mindset and timeless practices that have served leaders for centuries. We want to introduce you to an ancient philosophy that has provided leaders an incredible foundation of wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice—sustaining them with an unshakeable equanimity through every storm.

This ancient wisdom is found in Stoicism.

Why Stoicism?

When most of us hear the word “stoic,” we think of a person devoid of emotions, someone who represses their natural urges and builds a wall between themselves and the chaotic world. Actually, a Stoic is a person committed to the practice of managing and appropriately regulating their emotions, so that they might respond in the best way no matter what the situation calls for. This ancient school of philosophy was pursued in ancient Rome and developed over hundreds of years by a group of unlikely philosophers, including a shipwrecked merchant (Zeno), a crippled slave (Epictetus), and one of the greatest emperors who has ever lived (Marcus Aurelius).

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Year Three Is Supposed to Be Different

He’s a third-year principal at a massive comprehensive high school. Over 200 employees. The kind of campus where you can spend an entire day reacting and never once touch the work that matters.

Everyone in his orbit keeps telling him the same thing: year three is the year. Systems are in place. Relationships are built. Now you execute.

He believes it. He’s ready. And clarity and focus have been his fight since the day he took the job.

The People Were Never the Problem

Here’s what makes his situation interesting.

Earlier in his career, at a smaller school, his line was give me the people and I’ll do the job. Now he has the people. More than he’s ever had. Two English coaches. Two math coaches. Program specialists for budgeting, testing, pathways, interventions. More than ten fully released teachers on assignment.

And the work still routes through him.

He ran an exercise with his admin team to find out where the hours actually go. Everyone tracked what they actually do in a day (not the job description, the reality).

The answer: reacting.

Referrals. IEPs. Supervision duty. Parents.

Next thing you know, it’s time to go home, and what did you really do that day?

So the problem was never headcount. Something else was jamming the handoff.

He’d Already Done the Hard Part

This wasn’t a leader who hadn’t done the work.

He’d just locked his admin team in an office for three days hammering out strategy. They’d fought their way past a feel-good goal and landed on one thematic priority for the year: instruction. Everything in service of quality bell-to-bell teaching.

He could even name his own lane. Instruction. Relationships. Strategy.

That’s the job.

Everything else, in his words, gets delegated or ignored.

But “gets delegated” is where it stalled.

Delegated to whom? With how much rope? Checked how often? He had the destination and a parking lot full of capable people. He was stuck at the handoff.

Delegation Isn’t a Switch

The first move was naming what delegation actually is. Not a switch you flip. A dial with five levels:

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Year One Revealed Something She Couldn’t Ignore

She’s a high school principal who just closed out year one. She inherited her admin team rather than building it. Relational, observant, the kind of leader whose North Star is simple: are kids happy to be in this building? Year one was for watching and learning. Year two is for the gas pedal.

But before she can floor it, she has to deal with what year one revealed.

One Innocent Question Blew It Open

Graduation went beautifully. Smooth ceremony. No angry parent emails. A win by every measure.

Except one.

The admin team had planned to go out for drinks afterward. A team thing. Then a family emergency pulled her home, so she skipped it.

The rest of the team still went. Almost all of them. They just didn’t tell one AP.

It surfaced days later, by accident. She asked her APs an innocent question — did you guys end up going out? — and watched one face fall.

You didn’t text me?

Then came the tears in her office. Not about one missed night. About what it signaled.

When she talked to the others, their defense was ready: she excludes us all the time. We get it, it’s crappy. But here’s why we felt this way first.

An admin team that isn’t unified. Members who don’t all like each other. A year of quiet resentment, finally out in the open.

And the team stays together next year, so none of it can be waved off.

She Did the Right Things. She Still Felt Like She Caused It.

Guilt, mostly. She’s the one who asked the question. In her mind, the conflict came out because of her.

And she’d already made smart moves. She met with each person privately before they talked to each other. Helped each one see the other’s side. The conversations happened. They went well-ish.

The Question That Changed the Whole Story

The first reframe was about the guilt: don’t feel bad this came out.

For a team to perform at its highest level, buried conflict has to surface.

Was the moment awkward? Sure. But she didn’t create the problem by asking a question. The problem was already there, doing damage in the dark. A portion of the team made a choice, as adults, and that choice had consequences.

She just turned the lights on.

The second beat came from something she’d uncovered in those private conversations. The two who felt excluded all year (the ones with the ready-made defense) got a simple question from her:

“Have you ever told her she makes you feel this way?”

Well... no.

So they wanted her to be a mind reader.

A whole school year of feeling excluded. Zero attempts to say so. Then one night of payback, justified by grievances the colleague had never once heard.

And the standard she set for them is the one worth stealing.

You don’t have to be friends. You don’t have to be friends at all. But you have to have a positive working relationship.

No pettiness. No score-keeping. Talk to each other.

What This Means for Your Team

Surfaced conflict beats buried conflict. The awkward moment isn’t the wound. It’s the start of the repair. If your team looks harmonious because nobody says the hard thing, you don’t have harmony. You have a delay.

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She’s a first-year principal who is anything but new to her building. Five years watching. Five years taking notes. When she finally got the seat, she moved fast. Bold decisions. High expectations. “Guns blazing,” in her own words. The kind of leader who would rather lose positions than people, and who refuses to spend another year waiting and praying for things to change.

The boldness worked. The building is moving. The vision is landing.

But it came with a cost she didn’t see coming.

Her two assistant principals have had a hard year. Tough conversations. Real accountability. Some disciplinary decisions.

All of it necessary.

And some of it counterproductive.

Because now both of them hesitate to make decisions. They’re worried about the repercussions of choosing wrong.

One of them spirals for days after a single mistake. Sky’s falling. Can’t rebound. Replays it over and over.

She doesn’t want her team living in that space. She wants to spend the summer rebuilding the dynamic. Supportive. Safe to take risks. A place where mistakes are okay — as long as they’re not sloppy ones.

And she wants to do it without taking her foot off the gas.

What She’d Already Tried

She’d told them mistakes are okay. “A hundred times,” she said.

And she’d modeled it. Or thought she had.

Every Monday in their admin meeting, she names her own misses. Dropped balls. Things she’d handle differently.

Her APs respond by comforting her. You have a million things going on. You had the best interest in mind. You’ll bounce back.

They give her good advice. They just don’t take it themselves. One of them spirals for days after a single mistake.

The Coaching Conversation

The question that opened the door for her:

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The average principal tenure is four years. The people who work for you spend half of that guessing who you are … and guessing wrong.

There’s one document that fixes it in an afternoon. Most principals never write it.

Before we get into it, here's the five-minute clip from my mentor Eddie Yoon interviewing Clint Carnell. This conversation created this mini-book for you.

Watch it first. Then keep reading.

Everybody Is Lying to You (And They Don’t Even Know It)

Clint Carnell is a CEO who has run several companies.

Recently he said something in a conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about.

He said: “Everybody is lying to you unintentionally.”

He wasn’t talking about principals. He was talking about being a CEO.

But the second I heard it, I thought about every principal I’ve ever coached.

Because it’s the same job.

Your teachers are kissing up a little 😘 whether they mean to or not.

• Your APs are telling you what they think you want to hear.

• Your office manager is softening the truth about the parent who called three times this week.

• Your secretary is guessing at your mood before she knocks on your door.

Nobody is doing any of this on purpose.

They’re doing it because you’re the boss.

And when you’re the boss, people bend themselves around you (your moods, your tells, your preferences) and they do it from the first day you walked into the building.

Clint said the fix is a document.

A User Manual.

He requires every one of his executives to read his.

And he requires them to write one of their own.

Because the people who work for you cannot do their best work if they have to guess who you are for the first 18 months.

Principals have been told for decades that leadership is about modeling, listening, and being present.

Nobody ever told us the most generous thing we can hand a new teacher is a document that says this is how I actually work.

This mini-book is about that document.

The Cost of Being Unreadable

Principals are the most-watched, least-read leaders in their buildings.

Your staff is running an interpretation of you every single day.

• They’re reading your face in the hallway.

• They’re reading the length of your emails.

• They’re reading how long it took you to respond to a text.

• They’re reading whether you said hi back in the parking lot.

• They’re reading the way you sat in the last faculty meeting.

And most of them are guessing wrong.

Because you’re not being unreadable on purpose.

You’re being unreadable because you’re a human being with a hard job and a limited amount of time, and you cannot narrate yourself every minute of every day.

But the cost of that compounds.

It shows up as a veteran teacher who hasn’t brought you a real problem in two years because the last time she did, she couldn’t tell if you were mad.

It shows up as an AP who started CCing you on every email because he can’t tell which decisions are his to make.

It shows up as a first-year teacher who won’t ask for help because she thinks asking for help looks weak to you.

It shows up as a staff that holds its breath when you walk in.

Not because you’re scary.

Because they haven’t figured you out yet.

And they never will, unless you tell them.

Clint said something else in that same conversation that I want you to sit with:

“Usually, whether it’s counseling or a therapist, or you go through one of those group sessions — everybody already knew. But nobody talked about it. So it created the dysfunctionality.”

Your team already knows your worst habits. Your team already knows your tells. Your team already knows what lights you up and what shuts you down.

They just don’t talk about it.

That’s the dysfunction.

A User Manual takes the dysfunction out from under the rug and puts it on the table.

Where it can actually get better.

The User Manual: A Selfmentor Artifact

Here’s the move that matters.

A Ruckus Maker writes a User Manual. A Play-It-Safe Principal lets their team guess.

That’s the fork in the road.

Writing a User Manual is Selfmentorship.

It’s not an HR exercise.

It’s not a personality test.

It’s not an onboarding packet your district handed you.

Credit where it's due — I learned to think this way from my business mentors at Category Pirates. Their work on category design is the lens I use to see the difference between a Ruckus Maker and a Play-It-Safe Principal. The Clint quotes I've been sharing? They come from this episode of theirs. Listen if you want the deeper version. It will change how you think about leadership and category in the same afternoon.

Category Pirates

Win The Customer's Customer: How Clint Carnell Became CEO Six Times By Designing What's In Bounds

Welcome to Creator Capitalist Conversations, a series spotlighting Category Designers who have rejected traditional career paths and built lives around what makes them different…

Listen now

7 months ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Category Pirates 🏴‍☠️

Back to your User Manual — and the work only you can do.

It’s you doing the hard work of naming who you are:

• your scoreboard

• your tells

• your non-negotiables

• your worst characteristics

And handing it to your team before they have to guess.

A Selfmentor can write one.

A Play-It-Safe Principal can’t.

Because a Play-It-Safe Principal is waiting.

Waiting for the district to define the role. Waiting for the superintendent to tell them what a win looks like. Waiting for someone else to do the work of naming them.

A Selfmentor does that work themselves.

And here’s the part that takes the most guts:

“You think I’m giving you this because I’m proud of it? There’s things in there that are super embarrassing. When I read through it, I kind of cringe.”

—Clint Carnell

That’s the Ruckus Maker move.

Not false humility.

Not a résumé in disguise.

Real stuff.

The things the people who know you best would say are your worst characteristics — written down, on paper, handed to your team.

Because when you name your own dysfunction before anyone else has to, you take its power away.

It stops being a whisper in the staff lounge.

It starts being a conversation you can actually have.

That is what Selfmentorship looks like in the wild.

Why Most Principals Won’t Do This

I want to be honest with you.

Most principals who read this mini-book will nod their heads, agree with everything, and never write the document.

So let’s talk about why.

Reason 1: It feels arrogant.

Who am I to hand my team a document about me? Isn’t leadership supposed to be about them?

Here’s the reframe: the User Manual isn’t for you. It’s for them.

Clint tells his executives this directly: “It’s not for me. It’s for you. And it’s for us.”

Every minute your team spends guessing at you is a minute they’re not teaching, not leading, not building. The User Manual is the most generous thing you can hand them. It gives them their time back.

Reason 2: It feels too vulnerable.

Naming your worst characteristics on paper? In writing? Where people can go back and read it?

That fear is real.

And that fear is exactly why you have to do it.

Because if you won’t name your dysfunction, your team will (just not to your face).

Writing it down doesn’t create the vulnerability. The vulnerability already exists. You’re just the only one pretending it doesn’t.

Reason 3: I’ll be held to what I write.

Good. That’s the point.

If you write “I want you to bring me the problem with a proposed solution” and then you shut someone down the next time they do it — your team can hold you to your own words.

That’s not a threat. That’s accountability. And accountability is how leaders get better.

Reason 4: I don’t know myself well enough to write one.

This is the most honest reason. And it’s the one that actually proves you need to.

If you can’t articulate your tells, your scoreboard, and your non-negotiables on paper, your team is trying to articulate them for you every day. They’re just doing it worse than you could.

The User Manual is a mirror.

If the mirror is blank, that’s the problem.

Not the exercise.

The Eight Parts of Your User Manual

Here are the eight sections. Write them in your own voice. Keep it short! A User Manual longer than three pages won’t get read. Aim for one page if you can.

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