Hello from Austin! While I’m here gearing up for a keynote, I thought I’d dust off a fan favorite from the newsletter archives to share with you. Enjoy!
Gillian Lynne was considered a problem child.
She did terribly in school. She couldn’t sit still, let alone focus. She was so hyperactive that people would call her Wriggle Bottom.
This was the 1930s in Britain, and the acronym ADHD didn’t exist. Concerned that her child had a disorder, her mother took her to see a doctor.
That doctor’s visit would radically change the course of Lynne’s life.
What’s important is what the doctor did not do. He didn’t label Lynne as “difficult.” He didn’t tell her to calm down. He didn’t automatically medicate her.
Instead, he decided to follow a hunch. He turned on the radio and asked Lynne’s mother to leave the room with him.
The minute the adults left, Lynne’s body began to move. As the music filled the air, she couldn’t contain herself and danced all around the room, even leaping up on the doctor’s desk.
“What I hadn’t noticed,” Lynne writes in her autobiography, “was that his door was one of those beautiful old glass ones with etched designs through which the doctor and my mother were watching.”
As he watched Lynne dance, the doctor smiled and turned to her mother.
“There’s no trouble with this child,” he said. “She is a natural dancer—you must take her to dance class.”
(Can we pause the story here for just a second? How amazing is this doctor?)
That prescription—Take her to dance class—changed Lynne’s life. When she arrived at dance school, Lynne found a whole room of people just like her—“people who had to move to think,” as she put it.
What followed was a lifetime of dance. Lynne danced in the Royal Ballet and choreographed Cats and Phantom of the Opera—two of the longest-running shows in Broadway history.
Looking back at that moment in the doctor’s office, Lynne says, “I really owe my whole career . . . and I suppose my life to this man.”
Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with this child?,” the doctor reframed the question to ask, “What is right with this child that others aren’t seeing?”
Most education systems—and workplaces, for that matter—don’t ask this question. A system that only asks “What’s wrong?” will always try to fix people (and often fail). A system that asks “What’s right?” will help them find their spark.
When he was a student, Carl Sagan hated calculus. He believed it was invented by ill-meaning educators for “intimidation purposes.” His attitude changed only after reading Interplanetary Flight by Arthur C. Clarke. In it, Clarke used calculus to calculate interplanetary trajectories.
Suddenly, calculus wasn’t just an abstract requirement—it was a tool that could unlock the universe. Instead of being forced to learn something he had no use for, Sagan saw for himself why calculus mattered. He wasn’t just given a lesson—he was enrolled in a journey.
And that’s the shift.
“Attend this” or “do that” aren’t good enough. But when people see how something matters to them, they no longer need to be pushed. They pull themselves forward.
Show your child how learning about geometry and fractions will help them fix their bike. Explain to your employees how mastering AI tools will make them indispensable and give them a front-row seat in shaping the company’s future. Rally your customers by embedding a worthy cause into the heart of what you do.
If you do this, the student will become a learner. The employee will become a team member. And the customer will become a passionate advocate.
Because the trouble isn’t with them.
They just need to go to dance class.
And once they are moved, they will move the world.
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