People are sometimes surprised that I can spend hours talking about how systems work—how organizations develop habits, how incentives change behavior, and how complex problems rarely have simple answers.
They hear that I spent time in special education and assume that means I couldn’t understand complicated ideas.
That’s one of the biggest misconceptions people have about special education.
Not everyone in special education is there because of an intellectual disability. Some students are there because of speech impediments, anxiety, emotional regulation, learning differences, or other challenges that make the traditional classroom a poor fit. The support is about helping people succeed, not defining what they are capable of understanding.
Some of the most valuable lessons I ever learned didn’t come from textbooks. They came from the people around me.
One of those lessons was about budgets.
I learned that many public organizations live by a philosophy people often describe as “use it or lose it.” If a department consistently comes in under budget, the next question isn’t always, “How did you become more efficient?” Sometimes it’s, “Why did you need that money in the first place?”
That creates an interesting incentive.
Instead of rewarding efficiency, the system can unintentionally reward spending everything that was allocated because the fear is that next year’s budget will be smaller. Add inflation to the equation, and suddenly today’s savings can become tomorrow’s shortfall.
That wasn’t a lesson in accounting.
It was a lesson in incentives.
Another lesson came from conversations with my father.
He had watched recovery programs evolve over the years and believed that many people weren’t dealing with a single addiction. Alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling, work, food, or something else—often the addiction wasn’t the root problem. It was the way someone had learned to cope with a deeper one.
Whether you agree with his perspective or not, the larger lesson stuck with me.
People don’t just develop habits.
They develop systems for surviving.
Some of those systems are healthy.
Some are destructive.
Some start out looking harmless until they’ve quietly become routine.
That’s one reason I’ve never been particularly impressed with the college tradition of starting the party on Thursday, keeping it going through the weekend, and only stopping on Sunday so there’s at least a chance of being functional on Monday morning.
People laugh and call it “Thirsty Thursday.”
I look at it and wonder how quickly a routine becomes a lifestyle.
Working rideshare only reinforced that lesson.
One of my personal rules has become simple:
I’ll take you to the party.
I usually won’t pick you up from it.
Getting people to the party is usually easy. They’re excited, they’re looking forward to the night, and they’re generally still making reasonable decisions.
The trip home is different.
That’s when the Russian roulette starts.
Maybe they’re perfectly fine.
Maybe someone’s about to get sick in the back seat.
Maybe two friends have suddenly become enemies over something that happened three hours earlier, and now they expect the driver to sit through an argument that has absolutely nothing to do with getting from Point A to Point B.
I’m not a referee.
I’m not a therapist.
I’m not there to determine who was right or wrong at the party.
My job is transportation.
If I decide that the risk isn’t worth the fare, that’s not because I dislike college students. It’s because experience has taught me that every job has a point where the odds stop making sense.
Looking back, that’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned over the years.
Whether it’s education, government budgets, recovery programs, or rideshare driving, people respond to incentives. Organizations respond to incentives. Entire cultures respond to incentives.
If you want to understand why something keeps happening, don’t just look at the people.
Look at the system they’re operating in.
Very often, that’s where the real answers are hiding.