To her credit, she has been reminding me. I just keep forgetting to buy it. I mean it's not as if we haven't had several opportunities in the past week. So when my daughter asked me—again—if we had any paper she could use for sketching. She got the same answer. No, we don't. I have suggested, more than once, that she use her imagination and find something else until we can get her some.

This morning she asked again. I'm fairly certain she knew what my answer would be. I hadn't left the house since the last time she asked. But I didn't say that. I'm only allowed a certain number of smart-aleck remarks a day and it was too early in the day to throw one away.

I did remind her though—again—that she should try finding something besides paper on which to sketch. 

Twitter, Facebook, Email & Voxer.

Twitter, Facebook, Email & Voxer.

Twitter, Facebook, Email & Voxer.

I couldn't stop. I don't know if it was the dopamine or the procrastination that kept this cycle going. Either way, it was getting out of hand. I had a terrible headache and was able to convince myself that it was okay to lie in bed and just keep going. It wasn't as if there was anything that I had to do.

My daughter is a perfectionist. She does not like making mistakes. Whenever she colors outside the lines or something doesn't look quite right, she will often start over or sometimes, when she is angry, give up.

Not this one day.

I'll never forget the day she was working on her own personal art project. It involved some new paints she had gotten for her birthday and some tape. She was engaged and having fun. What more could a parent ask for? At one point when I was comfortably positioned on the couch watching a movie, she asked me to come look at what she had created. What kind of dad would I be if I didn’t?

I got up and went into the next room to check out her newest creation. It was pretty cool. I loved her use of color and the addition and subtraction of tape made for sharp lines. My duty was done and I went back to watching the movie. After another twenty minutes or so I lost interest in the movie. I couldn’t focus on it and I wanted to do something else. I wasn’t sure what yet.

He wrote the bright orange book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, yet the mistake he shared on My Bad was not considering his audience. Right now, you’re probably thinking, what the heck? I mean, the guy wrote a New York Times Bestseller called Contagious. Am I really buying that he didn’t know what his readers wanted? “He knows more about what makes information ‘go viral’ than anyone in the world,” said Harvard professor, Daniel Gilbert.

So, what happened? He admitted, his first book Contagious did quite well. His second, Invisible Influence, not as well. Even though he believed his second book was better written. But there was a major difference between the two books. Contagious had a clear audience and Invisible Influence didn’t.

Jonah spoke about the curse of knowledge and how it is easy to fall victim to this. He often lectures about the curse of knowledge and yet when it came to writing his second book, he was guilty. During the interview, Jonah quickly explained the curse of knowledge.

Brad Gustafson is someone who celebrates his students and staff like few others. Check his Twitter feed on any given day and you will see what I mean. And that is why Brad’s admission was so powerful. During our interview, I even gave him an opportunity to back out. But Brad is not that kind of leader. Not that kind of person. He said, “Jon that would be too easy.”

He is about as connected as an educator could possibly be. He is always finding new and innovative ways to challenge himself, his staff and his students. Actually, his reach extends much farther than that. Through his book, Renegade Leadership, his 30 second takes, his UNEarthed podcast that he hosts with Ben Gilpin and countless other initiatives, he has managed to challenge the rest of us.

The mistake that Brad made was one he didn’t even realize he was making. As previously mentioned, Brad does all that he can to celebrate the amazing things that are taking place at his school. He tweets out photos and videos so that the rest of us learn from and with he and his staff.

But at the end of the day, what matters most to Brad are the relationships that he forms with his staff, his students and his community. And as he admitted on the show, the way in which he was feeling about people just wasn’t coming through. He was so eager to highlight staff that were trying new and innovative practices that he lost sight of those that were not. Just because staff members weren’t doing things differently, didn’t mean they weren’t doing things well.