Since I was a freshman in high school, I knew I wanted to be an educator; I wanted to help others see things beyond what was easy and obvious. Every choice since then has been under those auspices. I graduated from Pepperdine University with a degree in English, and spent the next 17 years teaching English Literature, Photography, and Journalism. When the opportunity came to teach a program designed to help struggling students make sense of an educational system that didn’t satisfy them, I was honored to do so. Much of what I have taught in this program has become the foundations of Endeavor.

Over the last 26 years, I have had a front-row seat to the transformation students have gone through at the hands of devices and social media. In my first year of teaching, not a single student had a cell phone. Now, every student has one and is solidly addicted to its presence in their lives.

During this time of such a monumental psychological shift and the altering of our children’s very foundations of identity, our education system has made very little change to qualitatively keep up with this new reality our children face.

The opportunity to learn the lessons paramount to individual success has been replaced by mindless scrolling and identities defined by social contagion rather than the value borne of overcoming adversity.

Today’s classroom isn’t teaching the foundations for success, but success in today’s world still requires them.

This is why Endeavor exists. Our goal is to provide all the lessons that successful individuals today, and throughout history, learned while living their lives instead of scrolling through someone else’s. We have taken these lessons and now present them as challenges to be met and mastered by today’s students.