Jason Schreier

But anyway, his punishment was to kick me off the newspaper.

He was like, I'm going to take away the one thing you love most.

And since then, my career has just been driven by spite for this one.

You joke, but I feel like maybe part of it is.

Kirk, I gave the same high school reunion I just mentioned.

I gave a speech at that reunion, and I talked about how I told two stories.

I told that story, and then I told a much more positive story about experiences in the high school journalism world.

And I was like, so my career has been driven by love and spite.

Like, equal parts love and spite.

Fairness.

That was my big takeaway.

My big takeaway was that, wow, I thought that if you follow the rules, if you do good work, you will just kind of... I was lucky enough to live a comfortable life.

I never had to worry about not being fed or whatever.

I lived in a house, etc., etc., etc.

And I always was just kind of taught, like, you work hard, you can make your way, you can succeed in life.

And this was my first experience of, like, oh, wow, okay, sometimes you just do something and the consequences are completely unrelated.

And I'm not saying I should have, like, done that blog post with teachers, but, like, the consequences were so disproportionate.

It's a good lesson, though it is one that can be overlearned as well.

I know some kids get betrayed by an authority figure like that when they're young and come to believe that you just can never trust that there will be reasonable outcomes from something that you do.

It was actually a very irresponsible and harmful thing that your principal did, even though it in part fueled your career.