Author: Lancelot Schaubert
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Whoever got you here won’t get you there. Or will they?
Last year, I was having a nice conversation with a communications executive about my frustration working for a second time with a former collaborator. Her response was: Well you know what they say: whoever got you here won’t be the one to get you there. It’s brutal, but true. For months after her advice, I…
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A Life of Learning :: Striving for the Striver’s Life
“When am I ever going to use this in real life?” Remember asking that in sophomore Algebra? Here’s the best-kept secret in education: this inevitable question pokes a hole not only in algebra but also in every other subject. Through that hole, a light leaks in from a land much deeper and higher: from a…
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Lone Wolf Artist: On Bad Myths, Guilds, and Societies
Some idiot along the way started lying to us. The lie was this: that genius, that true genial power, can only happen when some dude or dudette cordons themselves off from society to spend the next decade crafting his masterpiece. Lone wolf artists. It has many sources, frankly, but the lion’s share of the burden of the lone wolf artist…
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The 2016 Worbemusties — Worst, Bests, and Musts of the year behind and before
A few years back, I did these Worbemustie awards on my site. It was a way to look backwards and forwards — backwards to the bests and worsts of the previous year (did I accomplish my goals?) and forwards to the next year. The bests, worsts, and musts. You know, The 2016 Worbemusties. We start…
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Novels Like Babies Don’t Need Perfect Parents
When Tara and I still lived in Joplin, I witnessed one father’s transformation from a mediocre parent into a good parent. He’d been the kind of tiger dad, the ruthless victor, who pushed his kids towards success and integrity at the expense of their joy (his words, not mine). He and I were walking through…
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Writers Retreat and Going Off-Grid
Last week, I took a midweek writers retreat up to Salem, Massachusetts (of witchhunt fame) by way of Boston bus and train. The retreat was organized by those who organized the Writer Unboxed Uncon (the writing conference I won the scholarship to last year). It was informal and available to everyone who went to the conference, so…
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Mosaics Fix Potholes
Thanks to Jeff Youngblood for this one. In a stunning work of culture care, Jim Bachor started fixing Chicago’s abandoned potholes with mosaics: Go see the rest here.
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Will My Alma Mater Save 9 Million Dollars ?
Tis the season for phonathons — political, religious, and otherwise. Got a call from my alma mater and I was unfortunately unable to give to their phone-a-thon cause this year, but I figure I can give something better. Something that has me REALLY excited, hopeful, and proud: together, we could generate over $ 9 million in savings…
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Dead Guest Post — Areopagitica
Today’s Dead Guest Post comes from John Milton. Milton delivered this originally as a speech. I’m rehosting this pubdom article (also part of the Harvard Classics) because of the recent article in The Spectator that shows how students want comfort in their classrooms. The classroom is for many things, but your comfort is not one of them, friends… This…
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Dear Future Lance: The Project is Ash — and that’s what makes it beautiful
The best things I ever accomplish always immediately follow me: getting to my wits end, realizing that I am nothing, I am finite, I will die — meditating even on the circumstances that will attend my death and that I will only die in one of the many billions of ways that exist for man…
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How Fred Danback Saved 12,000 Lives on September 11th
From Makoto Fujimura’s Culture Care :: In the early 1960s, Fred Danback came home from the Korean War to work at Anaconda Wire and Cable, a copper wire factory in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, thirty miles north of Manhattan. It was a booming enterprise. But he soon became troubled by what he saw at the factory. To…
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Dead Guest Post — The Imagination: its Function and its Culture
Today’s dead guest post comes from George MacDonald. It was first published 1867 in a Dish of Orts :: THERE are [those] in whose notion education would seem to consist in the production of a certain repose through the development of this and that faculty, and the depression, if not eradication, of this and that…