Quote of the Day:

“It’s not how well you play the game, its deciding what game you want to play.”

– Kwame Appiah

I read this quote this morning and my first thought went to my daughter Emilia.

She is 10 and struggles socially, finding it very difficult to make friends.

But when an adult meets her, they are often surprised by this fact because she is both outgoing and easy to talk to.

Amanda and I have tried to help her through this stage, and like most kids, she believes her parents don’t really understand what she is going through.

To our surprise, however, Emilia came to us a couple of months ago with an idea.

She wanted to start a school newspaper.

We told her it sounded like a great idea and that she should talk to the principal about it. She said she already had. Her principal recommended for her to start off with a class newspaper.

So she just started.

We initially helped her with formatting, but now she does it all.

She interviews one of the teachers in the school each week for her featured story, and fills in the rest with trivia, the week’s lunch menu, jokes and comics.

She shared a copy of her newspaper each week with the principal. After six weeks, the principal agreed that Emilia was ready to transition her publication from class newspaper to school newspaper.

It now gets distributed to 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th graders.

It’s a lot of work for her to do this newspaper each week, and while the teachers are impressed and some students are appreciative, there are other classmates still determined to bring her down.

After the newsletter goes out she sometimes receives insults in return, with students telling her they don’t want to read her “stupid paper.” (Tough crowd).

But Emilia continues and perseveres. She hasn’t let the insults deter her from pushing forward with a new paper each week.

Doing the newspaper isn’t easy for her. It takes her a number of hours to put together each week. In fact, we both were working on our newsletters this weekend. It was fun to work side by side. She even wrote a story for my newsletter titled, “Danger: Scorpion in Mother’s Purse!” (See it here).

She is showing fortitude.

You can see a change about how she feels about school again. She changed the rules.

She is playing a different game.

And I’m so proud of her.

Mike Turner

Host: Idaho Speakeasy
Collaborator: Value Drive Approach
Founder: Front Street Brokers
Co-Founder: Impact Club Boise
Author: Agent Entrepreneurs
Voice: 208-340-8399