There Is Always Room for Improvement

To bring our best self, seek improvement. While doing so, seek understanding not validation.

Coach (and former Melrose AD) Sonny Lane set clear priorities for taking care of business:

• Home and family
• School
• Basketball

Elite coach Dawn Staley of South Carolina struggled at the University of Virginia initially. In an epiphany, she realized to do well academically, she had to care as much about school as she did about basketball. 

To capture your best success, here's a little advice. Write better. 

This small book helps...here are a few annotations:

1. Use a thesaurus (I didn't know thesaurus means treasury) to discover the ideal word. 

2. Keep a dictionary nearby to aid 'assiduous' study. Assiduous is a word that appears on SATs and similar tests. 

3. Spell correctly...especially names. Melrose had some brain-teasers this year. 

4. "Read, read, read, read, read." - Werner Herzog   Read widely. Recently I reread Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. 

5. Explore a new class. I'm taking one by former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on MasterClass.

6. Listen and network. As Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot by just watching." 

7. Research. Think critically. We're wired to hear or read and accept as true. "You can't believe everything you read on the Internet" - Abraham Lincoln

8. Think it through. Write in your head. Ideas come from everywhere. Thresh them out. 

9. 0,0,0. Find your coordinates for reading, writing, studying. David Mamet had a cabin in the woods. Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code) had a writing desk. 

Take pride in your accomplishments at home, in the classroom, and on the court. "There is no ability without eligibility." If you can learn volleyball or cooking, you can decipher calculus or American History.