The Kick | Issue 58
What John Maxwell Told Me That This Industry Needs to Hear
I spent a day with John Maxwell last week.
Two hours of teaching. An hour of live Q&A. Lunch. About 15 pages of notes.
If you don’t know who Maxwell is: 92 books. Multiple New York Times bestsellers. Five decades studying and teaching leadership at the highest level. Sitting across from him for a few hours is a reminder that the fundamentals never change, and most of us are ignoring them.
Here’s what stuck.
1. How great leaders show up on their worst days
I asked him directly during Q&A: it's easy to lead when everything is going well. What do great leaders actually do when they're having their worst day and don't feel like a leader at all?
His answer was immediate.
"When you stop loving people, do everybody a favor and stop leading those people."
Then he said this: "One of your worst moments is to act like you never have a worst moment. We all have loneliness, we all have questions, we all have failures. That's part of the humanness of life. We are not ineffective because we're human. We're ineffective because we act like we're not."
Your students are watching you. Your staff is watching you. The most powerful thing you can do on a hard day is not fake it. It’s okay to let your team know when you are having a hard time leading, they will step up more than you know.
2. Success and failure are not opposites
We treat them like they are. Do it right. Don't fail. Win or lose.
Maxwell flipped the whole thing.
When you keep failure close to your success, it keeps you humble. Humility keeps you teachable. He quoted Bill Gates: success is a lousy teacher. It makes people think they can't lose. Remove failure from the equation and arrogance fills the gap.
On the other side, when you keep success close to your failure, it gives you resiliency. Reminds you that you've done it before. That you can do it again.
The most important lessons any of us have learned always have adversity at the center. Not a win. A hard season, a bad miss, a year you'd rather forget. That's where the real growth lives.
Stop treating a bad enrollment month like a crisis. Start asking what it's teaching you.
3. Your response to failure matters more than the failure itself
Maxwell drew a line between what he called a good miss and a bad miss.
A good miss: you fail and you make adjustments.
A bad miss: you fail and you make excuses.
"It's impossible to go from excuses to success. Nobody has ever reached their potential by making an excuse of why they didn't reach their potential."
That progression, from blaming to adjusting to rerouting, is the difference between school owners who stay stuck at the same revenue for years and the ones who break through.
4. Prepare your people for failure before it happens
This one doesn't get taught enough.
Maxwell said one of the most important jobs a leader has is having honest conversations about failure before anything goes wrong. Three reasons: the fear of failure is highest at the start of anything new, the probability of failure is also highest at the start, and the wrong response to failure is most likely to happen when someone has no reference point for what to do.
His line: "You're never good the first time. And to be honest, you're not too hot the second time either."
Set the expectation. Tell your team it's okay to fail. Tell them you've failed. Tell them what you learned from it. That conversation alone changes the culture of your school.
5. Uphill goals require uphill habits
Maxwell referenced the opening line from Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled. Life is difficult.
His point was simple. Everything worth building is uphill. A school that runs without you. A team that performs without being managed. A culture that retains students long term. All uphill, all the way.
The problem isn't having uphill goals. The problem is having downhill habits.
Entitlement is a downhill habit. Expecting it to get easier is a downhill habit. Waiting for momentum instead of creating it is a downhill habit.
He said something I wrote down and circled: "You've never read a book called Accidental Accomplishments."
Nobody accidentally builds something great. If you got there, you know exactly how you got there. Because it was hard the whole way.
The owners who are growing fastest are not the ones with the most information. They're the ones who stopped making excuses for their misses and started doing the harder thing, especially when they didn't feel like it.
WORTH STEALING
Maxwell made a distinction that sounds simple and isn't.
He said most leaders try to eliminate failure from their culture. What they actually eliminate is honesty. And once honesty is gone, the only feedback you get is the kind people think you want to hear.
The better move: normalize failure early. Not as a message of low expectations, but as a setup for the real conversation, which is how you respond. The goal isn't to make failure feel fine. It's to make talking about it feel safe enough that your team actually tells you when something's going wrong, before it gets worse.
One practical version: next time you bring on a new instructor or launch a new program, open with this. "Here's what typically goes wrong in the first 30 days, and here's what I want you to do when it does." That's it. The conversation you never have is always the one that costs you the most.
SEEN IN THE WILD
The performance trap nobody talks about out loud
Via Adam Kifer on Instagram. A reel about the entrepreneur's quiet burden — the feeling that your worth is tied to your output, and the moment you stop performing you stop being enough. It hit. The engagement said so. Most school owners are running their schools and running from that feeling at the same time. Nobody puts that in their bio.
Zig Ziglar is still right
Dave Kovar shared his favorite Ziglar takeaway this week. The fact that a post about a man who died in 2012 is still generating engagement in 2025 tells you everything about what happens when someone actually has something to say. Most content chases trends. Ziglar just told the truth. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
What healthy cultures do differently
Adam Grant posted on what separates healthy teams from struggling ones when the workload gets heavy. The short version: in healthy cultures people ask for help. In unhealthy ones they hide the problem until it's too late. If your instructors are drowning and not telling you, that's not their failure. That's a culture you built.
Leila Hormozi on AI and the line most people are crossing
A reel this week on what you should and shouldn't use AI for. The distinction she draws is worth sitting with. AI for leverage. Not for replacement. The school owners using it to avoid thinking are going to find out the hard way that efficiency without judgment is just faster mediocrity.
THE STAT
82% of employees say poor leadership makes them want to quit.
69% say they'd work harder if their leader simply recognized their efforts.
Teams with strong leadership see 23% higher profitability. Companies with strong leadership are 2.3 times more likely to outperform their competitors financially.
And the number that should probably bother you most: when people were asked what they need most from a leader, 56% said hope. Not strategy. Not systems. Not a better curriculum. Hope.
Most school owners have spent years mastering their art and almost no time studying how to lead the people around them. Maxwell has been saying this for five decades. The data has been confirming it just as long.
Your school is only as good as the culture you're building inside it. And culture starts with how you show up when it's hard.
Sources: Gallup; markbaglow.co.uk — 25 Leadership Statistics That Reveal What Makes Great Managers
CLOSING THOUGHT
The best thing Maxwell said all day wasn't in any of his books.
It came at lunch. Someone asked him if he ever got tired of teaching the same fundamentals for 50 years.
He said: "I don't teach the same thing. I teach the same truths to people who are ready to hear them for the first time."
Most of your students have heard "discipline" and "respect" a hundred times. The question isn't whether you're teaching it. It's whether they're ready to hear it. And whether you're making it worth hearing.
