09.09.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, This past weekend, my son Mason ran in the Twilight XC Classic in Memphis, Tennessee. What a cool event. Junior high, high school, and college races. All at night. Lights, music, energy, and hundreds of runners packed together waiting for the gun. Mason’s race had 434 boys on the starting line. Watch the clip and FEEL the start ----- And they were off. I stood there thinking, I cannot imagine standing on a...
4 days ago • 1 min read
09.02.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, The first four weeks of school have been a lot. We started August 5. Crazy, right? We’re short-staffed, covering multiple areas, solving the normal beginning-of-school problems, and then my daughter slid into second base and broke her leg. There have been moments when my brain has simply said: I cannot take on one more thing. When I get there, I have to bring myself back to the present. I may not be able...
11 days ago • 1 min read
08.19.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, Here’s a phrase I’ve been thinking about lately: Own what you notice. It may be one of the simplest definitions of leadership I know. As humans, we are incredibly good at noticing things. We notice the broken process. The meeting that wastes everyone’s time. The student who keeps slipping through the cracks. The customer experience that could be better. The recurring task nobody has figured out. The little...
25 days ago • 1 min read
08.12.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, I was born and raised on the corner of Center and Guthrie Streets in Ottawa, Illinois. When I was nine years old, I became a paperboy. I started with about 30 customers on Cornell Street, delivering papers six days a week. By the time I was 13, I had moved over to Guthrie Street and expanded to a 60-paper route. This was back in the 1900s, believe it or not. There was no automatic payment, online billing,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
08.05.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! As humans, we love to make plans. We plan our days and organize our weeks. We set goals for the month and create a vision for the year. Then life looks at our perfectly organized calendar and laughs. It is no secret that things rarely go exactly as planned. Barriers appear. Roadblocks slow our momentum. Problems arrive without an appointment. We should expect the unexpected. The question is not if something will...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
07.29.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! To all my friends in education, it is almost time. Ready or not, here they come. That is usually my response when someone asks how I feel about the beginning of another school year. Are you ready? Well... define ready. My wife is a teacher, and I am a principal, so our house lives at the intersection of teacher reality and administrator optimism. We laugh at the social media reels about surviving welcome-back...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
07.22.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Reader, I have fallen in love with kettlebells. They are always there, waiting. No setup, no excuses. You simply pick them up, move them around, and get an amazing workout. And every time I do, I am reminded of something simple. Strength comes from resistance. The weight pushes back. Your muscles struggle. You complete the rep anyway. Over time, your body adapts, and what once felt heavy becomes easier. Skip...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
07.15.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Friends, Every week during our morning announcements, more than 500 students look to me for guidance, upcoming events, and the signal that it is time to start the day. Before I finish, I remind them of one simple truth: Show up and give your best. That may be the closest thing we have to a secret for success. First, show up physically. Be present in the place where you are called to be. Students must be present to...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
06.17.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Friends, I learned something this week that created a connection for me. The compass was invented nearly 1,500 years before the first mechanical clock. Think about that. For over a thousand years, people could answer the question, "Which way should we go?" long before they could answer, "How long will it take?" There's a lesson in that. Too often, we become obsessed with the clock. How long until I reach my goal?...
3 months ago • 1 min read
06.10.2026 IGNITE Where Dr. Tom Webb sparks your curiosity and inspires action! Friends, Summer has a sneaky way of speeding up on us. One minute we are kicking off Memorial Day weekend, and the next minute the weekends are packed, the calendar is crowded, and the list of “we should have” starts getting louder. We should have taken that trip. We should have cleaned the garage. We should have finished that project. We should have done more. But here is your simple summer check-in: Don’t let...
3 months ago • 1 min read