The Power of Incentives

“You’re staring.” Wally elbowed my arm.

I’d just finished my sandwich, and my eyes had wandered over to Christy’s table. Where Monica Gray sat. My attention quickly found its way back to the apple in my hand. “No, I’m not.”

“Kelvin, who do you think you’re kidding? She doesn’t even know your name.”

“Sure she does. We had lab together last year.”

“You had lab with who?”

“Monica.”

“You mean the girl you weren’t staring at?” Wally slapped his leg and chortled. He was the only kid in school who could program as well as I could, and he always looked for opportunities to outsmart me.

“Ha ha,” I said, wanting to bring the conversation to an end as quickly as I could. I also enjoyed one-upping Wally, and of the two of us, I had the sharper wit. But Monica was turning in our direction now. It was bad enough that my face was breaking out worse than ever today. Being seen hanging out with Wally Hoster, whose hair was so greasy he could shape it without gel, was enough to earn social exile. Mind, I was already sitting next to him, but that was just because it beat sitting alone. Barely.

“There’s no point anyway.” Bits of egg salad sprayed out of Wally’s mouth as he spoke. “It’s not like she’s gonna follow you to MIT.”

When Jarod sat down in the second to last row, I knew my message about Mr. Griffin had piqued his interest. Christy sat in the desk in front of him. Even Darnell made a special effort to get to class before the bell, which left him sweatier than usual.

Mr. Griffin sat at his desk reading his notecards. When the bell rang, he put them down and stepped to the front of the class.

“Darnell, tell us about your homework.”

Darnell was still huffing when he said, “I asked my folks what math they used, and the only things they could think of were addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions, all of which they learned by the 5th grade.”

“Interesting. What do—?”

“Wait,” he put up his hand, “there’s more. Then I called my uncle. He couldn’t think of any time he used advanced math either, but my aunt said she uses it in her job every day.”

“And what does she do?”

Darnell grinned. “She’s a high school math teacher.”

Mr. Griffin raised an eyebrow. “So what do you take away from all of this?”

Darnell huffed out one final breath. “I’m mostly confused. Usually, teachers try to get us more interested in their subjects, you seem to want us to be less interested.”

“Not at all. I just want you to understand the limitations of the curriculum alone.”

I broke in. “The school must consider the curriculum valuable. Otherwise, they wouldn’t require it.”

Jarod scoffed. “The curriculum is like a hundred years old. It’s not like they update it for the times.”

“Don’t discard something just because it’s old,” Mr. Griffin said. “The techniques I use every day are more than a hundred years old, and I’ve still never found anything more potent. Nonetheless, I agree that mastering the material in your classes is no longer the ticket to success or even employment that it once was.”

“Does this mean you’re not going to teach us math?” Christy asked.

“I’ve been hired to be your math teacher. Despite what others may think of my techniques, I always live up to my obligations. Speaking of which, I’d like hear how all of you expanded on yesterday’s assignment.”

I bit my lip. Despite my late-night efforts, I hadn’t added a word to my page. Judging from the silence in the room, I wasn’t alone.

After a painfully long delay, Mr. Griffin said, “I see.” He slowly paced down one of the empty aisles of the classroom, rolling a pen between his fingers. When he reached the last desk, he punctured the air with the pen. “I’ve got it. I know why you’re all struggling to put effort into yesterday’s assignment.”

“Because it’s ridiculously easy?” Jarod suggested.

“No, because it’s ridiculously hard. It was unfair of me to give you such a task on day one. Indeed, I see now that I violated one of my core principles.”

“Which is what?” Christy asked.

“To always start with vision. I tried, but I defined my question far too narrowly to get you there.”

Jarod stretched his hands out before him and moved them around an imaginary orb. Speaking with the thick accent of a fortune teller at a fair, he said, “I envision passing trigonometry so I can get out of this school.”

“Precisely,” Mr. Griffin said. “All you want to do is leave school because you have no compelling vision of what you want to get from school.”

Jarod’s hands dropped. He stared back, silent.

“Does that mean,” Darnell said, “that you want to change the question from what we hope to get out of trigonometry to what we hope to get out of school?”

“No, no, no Darnell, it’s still too narrow. How can you know what you want to get out of school without first knowing what you want out of life?”

Mr. Griffin was practically bouncing, but I couldn’t share his enthusiasm.

“I totally know what I want to do,” Christy said. “I want to become a physical therapist.”

“Very good. If you know what you want to do for a living, you’re already ahead of most. But I don’t just want a vision for your job—I want a vision for your life. That includes a vision for your home, family, and community. For how you spend time outside of work, not just in it.”

“Ugh.” Christy rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Why is it that whenever a woman brings up career, the automatic response is that she has to think about family?”

“As a woman, it’s more likely that you’ve at least given it some thought,” Mr. Griffin said. “Most men never give family a moment’s consideration until it’s too late.”

“How’s it ever too late?” Darnell asked.

Mr. Griffin sighed. “I can’t tell you how many of my peers spent a fortune in tuition and years of their lives pursuing careers that only lasted two or three years because they suddenly had a family and found their jobs incompatible.”

Christy’s arms unclenched.

I thought about my own plans. I always dreamed of working for some hard-core start-up. The programmers I met who’d gone down that path didn’t just work 80 hour weeks, they bragged about it. Somehow, I’d never given any thought to having a family at the same time. Did I really want to have kids but never see them?

“So how am I supposed to get a vision for my life?” Darnell asked.

“Here’s a very simple exercise. Close your eyes. Go on Jarod—I’m not going to throw anything at you. Good. Take three slow, deep breaths.”

My body sank deeper into my seat.

Mr. Griffin’s voice grew softer. “Now, imagine yourself twenty years in the future. You’re happy. Life has been good to you. You feel tremendously grateful that everything has fallen into place. Look around you.”

“All I see is an empty math class,” Jarod said.

“Eyes closed, Jarod. I want you to visualize your future. What does your life look like?” He paused. I immediately saw an image of working at a startup. “Are you married?”

My initial thought was yes, but I couldn’t envision that.

“Do you have 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:

“You run marathons?” Christy asked.

“I’m starting to. I want to compete in Ironman as well, but one thing at a time.”

“So you’re just supposed to let this piece of paper dictate what you do?” Jarod asked.

Mr. Griffin walked straight to Jarod’s desk and slapped his notecard down on it. “Who wrote the note, Jarod?”

“I guess you did.”

“And who developed the steps on the card?”

“Looks like the same handwriting to me…”

“Good to see you’re paying attention,” Mr. Griffin said. “So, who is dictating to whom?”

“I get your point, but still….” Jarod flicked his hand in the air. “It’s like school—just having to follow more directions. Why should you have a notecard at all? Can’t you just do what you want without it?”

“Yes, but I’m hardly consistent. Some days I want one thing, other days it’s something else. That’s why most people make such little progress in their lives. They never build momentum.”

“This is ludicrous,” Christy said. “Say one day I think I want to study law, and the next day I change my mind to medicine. You’re saying that because I wrote law down on the notecard that I should stick with it?”

“Truthfully Christy, how often do you waffle between two burning desires?”

Christy shifted in her chair. “It happens sometimes.”

“If you have even one burning desire, you’re well ahead of the pack. Most people simply focus on getting through the day, the week, the semester, or whatever it is. To use your example, you’d be more likely to waffle between a vague idea that you’d sort of like to study law and another vague idea that you kinda think medicine would be better.”

Jarod picked up Mr. Griffin’s card and flapped it back and forth before him. “And these notecards are supposed to change that?”

“Absolutely. The present moment is like twilight. The past behind you is bright and clear, but the future ahead is a masked in darkness. Making an Outcome Card is like shining a beam of light into that darkness.”

“You’re telling me this card is going to predict my future?” Jarod asked.

“Your future is not set—there are infinite possibilities before you. The card helps you hone in on the future you choose to pursue.”

“What if we make the card at the wrong time?” Darnell asked.

“What do you mean, the wrong time?”

“Well, like Christy said, sometimes you want law, other times medicine. What if you make the notecard during a time when you’re thinking law, but you’re better suited to medicine?”

“Excellent question, Darnell. That’s why we make the cards during times of clarity.”

“Like when?” Christy asked.

“Clarity most often comes at the extremes: when you’re on top of the world and want to stay there, or when you hit rock bottom and want to pick yourself up. The problem is that these moments are fleeting.”

“So we make the cards to remind us of the goals we made during those times of clarity?” I asked.

“Exactly. Then they keep us on track during the blah moments. For me, sometimes I want to train for the marathon; other times I’d rather sit on the couch with a beer and watch football. The notecards may be my voice, but they’re my voice of vision. Any time that I think of skipping my workout, I read my card, and it’s like my higher-self whispering in my ear.”

“But isn’t it possible,” I asked, “that you can have a moment of clarity and still be wrong? Can’t you have a rock bottom moment, say when you’re struggling in biology, and suddenly see that it would be so much better to study law. What happens if you make my notecard and law isn’t for you after all? Maybe you’re best off sticking it through with medicine, or switching to engineering?”

“The notecards help you clarify that as well. Just because you write them doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with them for life. When I read my cards, I normally hear the voice of my higher-self. I know the goals on my card are what I want, and reading them helps me to refocus my energy. But periodically, when I read a card the goal doesn’t move me at all. I don’t hear the voice of my higher-self, I hear only delusion.”

“What do you do then?” Christy asked.

“I tear up the card.”

Christy’s brow creased. She’d never given up on anything. “Just like that?”

“Normally I’ll wait a day or two to make sure the feeling is consistent. Otherwise, I’d be in danger of trashing all my goals every time I get into a bad mood. But if nothing shifts, I tear it up.”

Darnell picked at his cuticles, something he usually did during tests. “So if you keep not liking what the card says, you know you’ve set the wrong goal?”

“Or the wrong steps or the wrong date. Once you learn how to interpret your emotional reactions, they’ll guide you toward your true goals as well as the ideal path to manifest them.”

The next day, we rehashed our questions from the day before, even though we knew the answers. I wasn’t the only one still trying to get my head around the concept. One thing that had become clear, Mr. Griffin said, “is that you guys aren’t ready to work on a greater vision for your lives. At this point, it’s best to choose one small goal to focus on.”

Late in the class, Jarod raised his hand. “Mr. Griffin, perhaps if there were some grade incentives tied to the cards it would help us try them out.”

“Grade incentives?” Mr. Griffin asked.

Darnell perked up. “Yeah, like if we got an automatic A in math if we made these cards and stuck to them.”

Mr. Griffin raised his eyebrows. “For the opportunity to help you get your life on track, I have to give you an automatic A?”

Jarod said, “It doesn’t have to be an A. but an incentive would certainly help us stick to it.”

The bell rang. “I’ll think your idea over, Jarod. See you all tomorrow.”

“Remind me, what were we talking about yesterday?” Mr. Griffin asked with a grin as we took our seats the next day.

“Grade incentives,” Jarod said. “You said you’d think them over.”

“And I did. Do you really feel that an incentive would help you make and stick to the cards?”

“Yes,” Jarod said.

“Does everyone feel this way?”

The rest of us said, “Yes.”

“It’s not enough to just read them in math class. The most important times to read your cards are first thing in the morning to set your intentions for the day, and immediately before bed, so they truly penetrate your unconscious mind. To see their effectiveness, you’ll have to commit to doing this for at least 30 days. Are you all willing to do that?”

We all said, “Yes.”

“The problem is, how will I know if you’ve done them? If there’s a grade incentive, then there’s also an incentive to lie.”

“We can use an app,” I suggested. “Each time we read our card, we check off the app. You’ll get a notice with the time we did it.”

“Interesting idea, Kelvin, but what if one of you claims you read the card but forgot to check off the app?”

Christy said, “We can put a note on the bottom of our cards saying ‘check off the app.’ Then if there’s no check on the app, you’ll know we didn’t do it.”

“Does everyone agree that if the app does not report that you read off the card, you won’t get credit for reading it that time?” Mr. Griffin asked.

We agreed.

“Very well. I found an app that would work last night. I’ll send you the link after class.”

“Wait,” I said. “You already thought about an app?”

“Once you brought up grade incentives, it made sense to have a way to keep track.”

“Then why didn’t you tell us about it?”

“I’m not here to give you answers, but to help you work them out. Didn’t it feel better to come up with the solution on your own?”

I was annoyed at his ploy but had to admit that it had felt good when I made the suggestion. “I suppose great minds think alike.”

“In my experience, it’s the opposite,” Mr. Griffin said. “Extraordinary minds are original. Ordinary minds think alike. Or perhaps I should say that those who don’t actively grow their minds think alike, for every human mind can be extraordinary.”

Was he calling me ordinary? Or insinuating that I wasn’t growing my mind?

“Does this mean you’ll do the grade incentives?” Jarod asked.

“I’m willing to give them a shot. But on two conditions. One, I’m only going to offer them to those students who genuinely feel the grade incentives will help them. Intrinsic motivation always trumps incentives in my mind. But I will give it as a tool for those who need it. How many of you feel you need this?”

At this point, I was already curious to try out the cards. While I understood his point about intrinsic motivation, I wasn’t dumb enough to turn down a grade incentive. I eagerly raised my hand with the rest of the class.

“Fine. It can apply to all of you. Second, I will only do it for students who will commit, right now, that once you have a card, you will read it twice a day for 30 days. Even though you don’t have your cards yet, once you commit, there is no backing out. Whoever doesn’t wish to commit can still participate at their own pace, but will not qualify for the grade incentives. Who is ready to commit right now?”

Again, all of us raised our hands.

“Very well, then I have a contract for you all to sign. Get in line and sign one by one.”

Mr. Griffin brought out a bunch of papers from his desk. “I’ve already signed my name and dated these. You just need to sign and print your names below.”

The pages he held were full of text, written in what looked like 8 point font. Darnell got up to the desk first and signed his name in the tiny space between the end of the text and the bottom of the page. I was next. The text began, “This is a contract between Mr. Griffin (herein “Mr. Griffin” or “teacher”) and the students in his fifth-period trigonometry class (herein “student” or “students”)…”

It would take me a full ten minutes to read the entire thing; maybe more, as it seemed all written in legalese. Sensing Jarod’s impatience behind me, I quickly signed my name at the bottom as Darnell had. Neither Jarod nor Christy wasted their time with even trying to read over the text, just signed and returned to their seats.

Darnell seemed particularly pleased. “This is going to be the easiest math class ever! I can’t believe I get an A for just reading this notecard twice a day.”

“An A?” Mr. Griffin placed the signed contracts in a drawer, locked it, and dropped the key in his pocket. “That wasn’t the agreement.”

“Sure it was,” Darnell said. “We talked about it yesterday.”

“You suggested that yesterday. But the grade incentives weren’t your idea—they were Jarod’s. He was clear that the incentive didn’t have to be an automatic A.”

“So I’ll still have to study math?” Darnell asked. “Bummer. But at least it should help. What do I get, another ten points on my average or something?”

“You don’t get anything, Darnell. You lose points if you don’t follow through.”

“Lose points?” Jarod said. “That wasn’t our deal.”

“Of course it was. It was written very clearly on the contract you all signed.”

“But we didn’t even read the contracts.”

“I noticed. Would you like to read them now?” Mr. Griffin handed around unsigned contracts, keeping the signed ones safely locked in his desk.

“Wait.” Christy’s eyes bulged over her copy. “I lose five points on my overall grade every time I forget to read my card?”

“Even if you remember to read the card, but forget to check the app,” Mr. Griffin said. “Remember, that was your suggestion.”

Heat rose to my cheeks. “If we forget more than five times we fail math?”

“Correct. Remember, I only gave this option to those who asked for a grade incentive. I always prefer intrinsic motivation. But you thought this would help you, so I offered it as a tool.”

“A tool?” I said. “It sounds more like a punishment.”

“Punishments, or the threat of them, can be great tools. You’re all old enough to drive. How many of you try to stay within the speed limit?”

Silence.

“How many of you regularly go more than 20 miles per hour over the speed limit?”

Jarod raised his hand.

“The rest of you, what keeps you from driving that fast?”

“Over 20 miles an hour the tickets are like $160,” Christy said.

“Yeah,” Darnell said, “and my dad would take away my driving privileges if he ever caught me going that fast.”

“None of you reduce your speed out of concern for safety?” Mr. Griffin asked.

No one responded.

“Teenagers.” Mr. Griffin shook his head. “Do you see why society holds the threat of punishment over your heads? That’s how they keep the roads safe.”

A teacher intentionally tricking us into signing an agreement not in our interests? Who does this guy think he is? “I don’t think it was fair putting it on the contract and not telling us,” I said.

“Kelvin, do you remember what I told you my goals were for this year?”

I clenched my jaw and mumbled, “Something about helping us lead extraordinary lives.”

“Precisely. Fairness was not among my goals.”

We all groaned.

“Let this be a lesson to you. You must think hard about what you put on your cards because they’ll give you laser focus toward these goals. Elements left off of your cards can get squeezed out.” Mr. Griffin sat back on his desk. “Like fairness in my case.”

“So now we’re stuck?” Darnell asked.

“No, you’re not stuck.”

Darnell sat straighter. “You mean you’ll let us take the contracts back?”

“No. That’s another lesson I wanted to teach in a way that you’d never forget. You’ll each sign hundreds, if not thousands of contracts in your life. Those who give them to you will primarily be looking out for their interests, not yours. Always be aware of what you bind yourself to.”

Darnell’s eyebrows pinched. “But you said we’re not stuck?”

“You’re not. You’re welcome to transfer to another math class or drop math altogether. It all goes back to your vision for your life, and who you think can best help you get there. Care to transfer, Darnell?”

Darnell exhaled loudly. “No, I’ll stay here.”

“Anyone else?”

So far, I really couldn’t say that I liked Mr. Griffin—he was like a mosquito that kept buzzing in my ear. Yet, he was intriguing. I doubted he’d ever bring us to the profound life transformations he promised, but no other teacher had ever attempted to. And…what if he did? Images of my nightmare in the cubicle wafted through my mind. My future vision could use some refining. It was worth a shot.

When no one said they wanted to transfer, Mr. Griffin said, “Just remember that you’re not trapped. You’re choosing to stay here.”

“I still feel stuck to this contract,” Darnell said.

“Yes, I know. It’s written in your posture. The more ownership you take over your decisions, the straighter you’ll sit in your chair. Besides, being stuck is not the worst thing. Sometimes I intentionally get myself stuck.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“I do it for motivation, and to force myself to find new answers.”

“How can getting stuck motivate you?” Christy asked.

“It’s like when Cortez burnt his ships upon landing in Mexico in 1519. The message to his men was clear. You can’t back out. Succeed or die. I’ve used that technique on myself, though with less dire consequences.”

“Like when?” Christy asked.

“I used it in college when trying to lose weight.”

Darnell’s head tilted up. “You, lose weight?” He scanned our lean, muscular teacher with cold eyes.

“You might not guess it looking at me now,” Mr. Griffin patted his stomach, “but I used to be over 100 pounds overweight.”

“Really?” Darnell was easily that overweight himself. “How did you lose it?”

“I tried diet after diet. I must have lost the same five pounds ten times, but I always put them right back on.”

“So how’d you keep them off?”

“I backed myself into a corner. I made sure that I had two options, weight loss or a fate far worse than hunger.”

“Like what?” Darnell asked.

“I made a list of all the foods I knew I needed to avoid, and I gave a copy of the list to all of my friends, plus a few people who were anything but my friends. I told them all that if they caught me eating anything on that list, they could make me eat whatever they wanted.”

“Anything?”

“Anything that wouldn’t injure or kill me. One day I was walking with my friend Andres, and we passed some fresh dog poop on the ground next to a hamburger stand. Andres asked them for a paper plate and a spoon, and scooped the poop onto the plate.” Mr. Griffin cringed. “He waved it in front of me, telling me how much fun he was going to have watching me eat it all.”

“Gross!” Jarod pretended to puke behind his desk.

“You never did, did you?” Christy asked.

“No. I lost the pounds, and Andres wound up with stale dog poop in his fridge. A couple of times I came close to cheating, and each time all I had to do was think of that plate of dog poop. Just knowing it was there, waiting for me, was enough to keep me on my diet.”

The bell rang.

“I trust you’ve all had a memorable day. Next week we’ll start working on your cards. And don’t worry. The 30 days haven’t even started yet.”

“When do they start?” Christy asked.

“Everything will be just like it says on your contract.”

“Where?”

Mr. Griffin’s smirk returned. “On the other part you didn’t read.”