Be an Editor, Not a Writer

My argument of the day:
People think of being a school leader, especially a school founder, as an exercise in creating akin to being a writer. A writer creates something from nothing, taking a blank page and filling it with wonderful, unique writing. In fact, the better analogy is to being an editor who sifts through thousands of ideas, many of them good, before eventually finding the right areas to focus on. 

Tina Brown- ruthless editor

Editing means making the hard decisions between many good ideas. The editors of The Paris Review have the almost impossible tasks of sorting through and selecting about 20 fiction pieces to publish each year from the roughly 15,000 submissions they get each year. In the same way, David Foster Wallace’s editor had to make the hard decision to cut 300(!) pages from Infinite Jest that no doubt contained some genius writing. Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair would regularly kill almost finished pieces, even after having spent tons of a writer’s time and the magazine’s money on it, if she wasn’t convinced it was good enough for the magazine.

School leaders, especially founders, find themselves having too many possible initiatives or tasks to do them all. There are hundreds and thousands of great ideas out there in education, taking place in every conceivable setting and type of school. From great strategies for parent involvement to fantastic arts integration to the use of blended learning technology to the use of video to improve teacher observations, the list could go on and on.  Any of these ideas is working somewhere and could be great for your school, but only if it is the right match for what the school needs, the personality of the staff, and the available resources (time and money especially).

What does thinking like an editor mean in practical terms?

• You can’t pick great ideas if you’re not aware of them, so school leaders need to be constantly on the lookout for new ideas by talking with peers, reading widely (and not just education articles), and talking to your staff who often have the best ideas of how to make the school stronger.

• Awareness of your school and what it needs is key, because you can’t decide which of the thousands of great ideas would work for you and your team without knowing you and your team really well.

• You can’t be afraid to say no. In fact, great editors say no to tons of good ideas so they can focus on the great ones. You don’t have to implement every new initiative that you hear about at a conference or that is working for a peer.

• Don’t feel pressure to invent everything from scratch. That’s thinking like a writer. Instead, spend your creative energy customizing ideas to fit your school’s unique needs. 

Creating and running a school is an exercise in having a keen eye for the quality ideas of others and ruthlessly prioritizing what will have the biggest impact on your kids. Think like Tina Brown, not David Foster Wallace.