I have always felt so uninspired by the term “College and Career Ready!”

It seems so empty

George Martinez - chief of staff for anchorage mayor spoke at the African American Student Leadership conference

The term he used was Path to Passion.

That is much more inspiring.

Why passion?

Because we all need something more than a JOB!

We need our own personal mission statements.

Much of what I believe comes from my spiritual approach

I am a child of god. If I believe that I am a child of God, that must mean that I believe others are children of God as well. It makes it so much easier to be kind and nice to people.

It also makes it easier to have high expectations of people. Because they truly are more than they can ever believe.

I Discovered my passion at about 16 years old.

I learned that I had skills in teaching others, and leading others.

I could have chosen many other professions besides teaching and education, but because of my not-so-great educational experiences, I knew I could impact kids in a powerful way.

So, that’s what I do.

I inspire teachers and leaders to be their best. That’s why I do this podcast. Because I am living out my purpose for my life.

This is more than just me sitting in front of a microphone in my basement!

The mastermind is more than just me hanging out with some really cool leaders.

The TLS is more than just a Leadership Summit.

These are extensions of me fulfilling a purpose.

An educator could not have told me at sixteen that I would be doing this now.

But a visionary man helped me understand way back when I was 16, that right now, I am exactly where I need to be and that I am doing exactly what I need to be doing!

The real challenging part of understanding our passion is that it is admittedly pretty frufru as someone recently said.

I don’t think you’ll be able to find a guru that says “Find a deadend job, and stick with it until you retire, when you can finally do what you want.”

I think about some of the recent college grads that I know that are basically doing anything because they need money. I understand that, I’ve been there, but I was very much aware that that was not going to be my future.

They’re using the time after college to figure out what they love. How tragic for them.

In this day and age, with technology, I have a hard time believing that someone cannot make money from living their passion.

A career is something old people talk about. To the younger generation, it is just life.

But again, it is challenging, especially for educators, to inspire kids with an unknown. We like clear, specific answers. We don’t know what to do when we can’t predict the future. Which is funny, because we can’t.

So, how do we reconcile this? We understand that we can’t possibly know what the future holds for kids, and inspire them to find what they can do all day and love for their whole lives.

Some might say they love playing call of duty all day, but most of them don’t. Most of them prefer that to boring drudgery of getting college and career ready.

Let’s inspire them to something more noble than a JOB and help them find a fulfilled life by finding their purpose for being here.

We’re thrilled to be sponsored by IXL. 

IXL’s comprehensive teaching and learning platform for math, language arts, science, and social studies is accelerating achievement in 95 of the top 100 U.S. school districts. Loved by teachers and backed by independent research from Johns Hopkins University, IXL can help you do the following and more:

• Simplify and streamline technology
• Save teachers’ time
• Reliably meet Tier 1 standards
• Improve student performance on state assessments

🚀 Ready to see why leading districts trust IXL for their educational needs? Visit IXL.com/BE today to learn more about how IXL can elevate your school or district.