The Size of Your Dreams, - [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

children? Where do you live? What do you do? How do you contribute to others?” The questions came faster now, and while visions flashed across my mind, I couldn’t hold all of them. “Open your eyes, and write down what you saw.”

Mr. Griffin paced back to his chair, sat down, and propped his heels up on his desk. He pulled a tattered book out of his briefcase. I tilted my head to get a look at the cover. Think and Grow Rich. He opened to a dog-eared page in the middle of the tome and said, “You have until the end of class.”

The first thing I wrote about was my career. That part was easy. I knew I wanted to create world-changing technologies. Like Tesla. Not Tesla now, with its billions of dollars in income, but like Tesla when they first started out.

As to where I’d live, that was also easy. There were really only a few options for that type of work. Silicon Valley, Seattle, Austin. I’d put down Austin for now; it was more up and coming.

That’s when I got stuck. Marriage? Children? Community?

I put down my pen and looked around the class. Mr. Griffin was still absorbed in his book. Christy was bent over her paper, had already written a full page, and was still going strong. Jarod was leaning back, playing with his Leatherman. His sheet of paper was glaringly white for its blankness. Darnell had his pen close to the top of his page and was staring up at the ceiling, looking for answers.

I returned to my own paper. Why was this so difficult? Not a day went by when I didn’t think about having more friends, and hardly an hour when I didn’t think about having a girlfriend. That’s really all Mr. Griffin had asked us to do, to think about what we wanted in life. So why was I all of a sudden drawing a blank?

* * *

The next morning, I dragged myself out of bed and moved through the house like a soggy mop. My mother eyed me all through breakfast, but she knew better than to ask me questions that early in the day. Megan read her Kindle while she ate, paying me no mind.

I had flitted in and out of sleep the night before, haunted by a recurring dream about living at some high-tech start-up with a blow-up mattress, a nightlight, and a teddy bear stored under my cubicle desk. I spent dark, cold nights there alone with only microwave pizza to keep me company. Everything felt so incredibly normal, but I woke up in sweats each time the microwave beeped that the pizza was ready. Was this my future?

I had a hard time keeping my eyes, or even my mind, open during the first few hours of the day. By the time fifth period came around, I was ready to crawl into the janitor’s closet and use his mop as a pillow. Beside my exhaustion was the uneasy feeling that I’d have to revisit my nightmare during Mr. Griffin’s class. Plus, I hadn’t completed his assignment. I never did that.

“Okay, what have you all got?” Mr. Griffin said as soon as we were all seated. “Jarod?”

“This assignment was lame.” The thick rubber soles of his work-boots drummed against the leg of his desk. “What kinda math class is this anyhow?”

“Lame,” Mr. Griffin said. “I see…So, you don’t have any plans for your future?”

“Just the same crap as everyone else. College, job, wife, kids, house, retire, die. What’s there to write?”

Mr. Griffin looked at the rest of us. “You all have something like this?”

“More or less…,” Christy’s shoulders rose to meet her ears. She’d written a hundred times more than Jarod and ten times more than I had. Did everything she jotted down really get summed up by Jarod in just a few words? Mine didn’t even get that far.

“I thought our visions were pretty lame,” Jarod said, “but you seem mighty impressed.”

Mr. Griffin indeed was practically bouncing at the front of the class. “Impressed? Hardly. I’m excited by their very lameness.”

“You like lame?” Christy asked.

“Absolutely. It tells me that, like most people, you’ve never given much thought to your life goals.”

“And that’s good?” I asked.

“For me it is. I don’t teach for the benefits, and certainly not for the salary. I’m here because I want to create lasting change. Frankly, I’m new at this. I had no idea how easy or hard this would be. But now that I see you’ve all set the bar so low, I do not doubt that I can completely revolutionize your lives this year.”

Mr. Griffin may have been grinning from ear to ear, but we couldn’t share his enthusiasm. Was he really telling us all that we were pathetic and mindless? And this was good news because he was going to somehow fix us?

“You still didn’t answer my question.” Jarod kicked the legs of his desk. “What does this have to do with math?”

“If I do my job well, you’ll find within yourself the ability to go as far as you want with your mathematics. Nonetheless, my core goal as your teacher is not confined to math.”

Christy leaned forward in her chair. “So what is your goal?”

“My goal is to activate your minds, to give you the tools to succeed no matter what direction you take.”

If I hadn’t read the article on him the other night, I wouldn’t have given his words much credence. But this guy was no stranger to success.

Jarod, however, was more interested in what it would cost him. “You’re going to do this by the end of the year, on top of teaching us math? Just how much homework do you plan on giving us?”

“Five minutes a day.”

“Five minutes? That’s it?”

“That’s all it will take to implement my basic techniques. Beyond that, I expect you’ll each want to push yourselves to do more. But those will be your steps toward your goals, not mine.”

“What are these techniques?” I asked. “You said they were a hundred years old?”

“If you dig deep enough, you’ll find variations in use even thousands of years ago. But the first time I know they were written down was in 1937.”

“Who wrote them?”

“Napoleon Hill.”

Jarod scoffed. “That French dude?”

Christy slapped his shoulder. “That was Napoleon Bonaparte. We just learned about him in European history last year. Where were you?”

“Who’s Napoleon Hill?” I asked.

Mr. Griffin sat on his desk. “Ever heard of Andrew Carnegie?”

“As in Carnegie Hall?” Christy asked.

“Wasn’t he a Robber Baron?” I asked.

“You’re both right. He started out as a penniless immigrant, working twelve hour days for $1.20 a week. He worked his way up to become one of the wealthiest men in the world, then spent the latter portion of his life giving most of it away. He built Carnegie Hall as well as countless libraries around the world.”

“What does he have to do with this Napoleon guy?” Darnell asked.

“Carnegie gave the young Napoleon Hill a task, and Hill spent the next 25 years completing it.”

“What was the task?” I asked.

“To study the elements of success.”

“So he studied successful people?” I asked.

“Not only. It wasn’t enough to find commonalities among the successful. He also had to find what distinguished them from those he deemed failures.”

“Those notecards you read,” Jarod nodded to the cards next to Mr. Griffin. “They come from him?”

“They’re my own practice, but I developed them by applying the principles I learned from Napoleon Hill.”

“Let me guess,” Jarod kicked his desk extra hard. “You want to fix our goals, and then I suppose you’ll have us write them down on notecards?”

Mr. Griffin grinned like the Cheshire cat. “No, I want you to fix your goals.” He leaned in toward Jarod. “We’ll go over the steps of creating truly compelling goals for your life, as well as how to reinforce them so that they stick. That’s where the notecards come in.”

“How do they work?” Darnell asked. Was he actually excited by this?

“There are three components of the Outcome Cards. The first is your goal, the second is your deadline, and the third is the list of steps you’ll take to hit that goal.”

“Can you give us an example?” Darnell asked again.

“Certainly.” Mr. Griffin picked up his stack of notecards, pulled one out and read: