This past year has thrown a lot at my family and I. I’ve arrived at the start of 2026 feeling like the answer to “how are you?” is not just complicated, it’s a three volume treatise with 6 extra volumes of appendices. In small print. With footnotes.
I keep trying to list all of the blows we’ve endured over the past year and finding I’ve missed stuff. Quite a lot of stuff. But maybe focusing on my injuries, both emotional and physical, is not where I want to be.
It would be easy to define our 2025 by those wounding moments. By the cuts still open, the stitches applied, real and metaphorical, the bruises, both faded and fresh. You only need to look around you, at the landscape, the climate, the nation, and the world, to see reasons why this focus makes sense. The wounds shape us. They instruct our immune systems, and define our responses to subsequent events, whether those future events are actually traumatic or not. They mark our skin, scar our brains, label us as having struggled. I could easily define myself by those wounds.
But if I do that, I am defining myself by loss. By what I no longer have, who I am not, what I am missing. By what I can’t do, who I can’t be. This is a deficit model. “I’m in pain, I’m not as mobile as I’d like, I’m dizzy, I’m grieving.” A natural, human response, but not one that leads to positive growth. I am a human being in crisis, I am enduring crises, but I can choose not to be the crisis.
Similarly, we can define ourselves by what we lack and what’s wrong – as a planet in crisis, a country with a severely compromised democracy, a society with a toxic and dangerous media & technology, a world run for the benefit of billionaires. This is a deficit model.
Or we can choose, instead, a benefit model, and define ourselves by our assets and our aspirations.
WESTLEY: Our assets?
INIGO MONTOYA: Your brains, Fezzik’s strength, my steel.
WESTLEY: It’s impossible.
INIGO MONTOYA: No!
WESTLEY: My brains, his strength, your steel, against sixty men? It can’t be done. I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.
INIGO MONTOYA: Where did we put that wheelbarrow the albino had?
FEZZIK: Over the albino, I think.
WESTLEY: Well, why didn’t you list that among our assets in the first place? . . . now, what I wouldn’t give for a holocaust cloak.
INIGO MONTOYA: There, we cannot help you.
FEZZIK: Will this one do?
INIGO MONTOYA: Where did you get that?
FEZZIK: At Miracle Max’s. It fit so nice, he said I could keep it.
From The Princess Bride – book by William Gibson, film directed by Rob Reiner
What skills and tools do we have? Who do we want to be? What do we value? What do we need? How do we want our society to run? What kind of lives do we want for ourselves, for our children, for our children’s children?
I started ADSEI because I could see a world where critical thinking, data literacy, and STEM skills were an engaging, meaningful, and accessible part of everyone’s education. I work every day to build those skills for both kids and adults. I’m actively working on building a better world. But I still find myself getting caught up in deficit model thinking: how much I haven’t achieved, how many people I haven’t reached, how much there still is to do.
I keep harking back to what Bob Brown said, years ago: you can’t change anything from a position of pessimism. A deficit model only tells us what’s wrong. A benefit model (there may be a better name, if you have one, tell me!) tells us the tools and advantages we have, that we can use to fix the deficits.
Here we are, setting off on an adventure – building the future! What do we have at our disposal, and how can we best use it to change the world?
A much more constructive approach than counting my beatings.