Pathbreaker Playbook · 10 of 10
EQ over GPA every day and twice on Sundays
Why we cared more about our daughters' EQ than their GPA, and the one-year rule that kept a bad week from becoming a bad decision.
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Short, story-first essays on raising self-directed kids, the credential trap, and a working world that keeps changing faster than the advice we hand our teenagers. Published weekly on Substack — every post lands in your inbox.
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Pathbreaker Playbook
I Almost Canceled the Lunch
One of the best hires of my career checked one box on the list I was hiring against. Your kid is being trained to fill in the boxes.
Pathbreaker Playbook
MBA in Finance? Never Used.
Two months from an MBA with no job offer, I wrote a one-page job description for a job that did not exist. What happened after that was luck, and that is exactly the point.
Pathbreaker Playbook
The Pathbreaker Playbook, Part 7: Averages Do Not Apply to Individuals
Georgetown says a degree adds $1.2 million. Harvard says 58% of young adults lack purpose. Both are correctly calculated. Neither one is your kid.
Pathbreaker Playbook
The Pathbreaker Playbook, Part 6: She Aced Accounting the Second It Was About a Dog
She was bored by accounting in school. Then she started a candle company named after her rescue dog, and taught herself the whole thing.
Pathbreaker Playbook
The Pathbreaker Playbook, Part 5: If You're Not Aligned, You Cannot Pathbreak
You will never agree on everything. But there are three anchors you both have to hold before you can free your kid from the path.
Pathbreaker Playbook
The Pathbreaker Playbook, Part 4: We Taught Them to Place Bets
Every decision your kid will ever make is a bet, and almost no one teaches them how to place one.
Pathbreaker Playbook
The Pathbreaker Playbook, Part 3: 'Smart' Is a Label They Fear Losing
The label kids protect versus the effort they're willing to risk. A Stanford study that changed how we praised our daughters.
Pathbreaker Playbook
The Pathbreaker Playbook, Part 2: We told them grades don't matter
What matters is whether they're thriving at 25 — which is why we told them grades don't matter.
Pathbreaker Playbook
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The Pathbreaker Playbook, Part 1: We Had Only Four Rules
No curfew, no phone checks — just four rules, and the long game behind them.
Start here
Why I'm Here and What This Is
When my daughter Brooke was nineteen, my wife and I kicked her out of the house. Here's why — and what these conversations are about.
The Credential Trap
The babysitter test nobody applies to their own kid
You'd never hire a sitter based on a diploma. So why do we tell teenagers the opposite?
Mindset
Happiness = Reality − Expectations
The formula I taught my daughters — and why I taught them to run it backward.
The Future of Work
I mentioned AI exactly once. Then everything changed.
I wrote the book in 2024 and named AI once. Two years later, it's the whole argument.
The Credential Trap
Twice as common, twice as expensive
In 1985, 1 in 5 adults had a college degree, at an all-in cost of about $64,000. Today it's 2 in 5 — at $140,000.
The College Question
We go back to App State every fall
I'm not anti-college. I went. We still go back. I'm anti-sending a young adult out there unprepared.
The Real Cost
The costs teenagers are never taught to weigh
Hard, soft, time, opportunity. We ask kids to make the biggest financial decision of their lives having considered roughly none of them.
Self-Direction
What do you want to try first?
"What do you want to be?" is an impossible question. Here's the one we asked instead.
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