Practice Perfect

PREFACE: WHY PRACTICE? WHY NOW?

The three of us are first and foremost teachers. And though this book is for readers in a wide variety of fields, it began some time ago as a book for and about teachers. Still, if you are a parent or a manager or a coach or a mentor or a leader in your organization, you’d have a hard time convincing us you weren’t a teacher anyway, so perhaps the book was always destined to become something broader. But in the end, because we are teachers first and foremost, this book tends to see the world from an educator’s perspective.

So forgive us if we begin by saying something strange about teaching, which is that we are optimistic—humble, but optimistic. We are optimistic not only because we still believe that the greatest, ...