I hate school.
There. I said it.
I didn’t particularly enjoy it when I was a student, and I’m still not completely convinced that September doesn’t give me a little anxiety when I see a school bus. But there is one thing I’ve always loved about back-to-school season: the reset.
New shoes. New clothes. A clean backpack. Fresh notebooks. And, of course, the greatest writing instrument ever created by mankind: the Ticonderoga 2. Freshly sharpened. Perfect eraser. Absolute perfection. I may not have cared about algebra, but I cared deeply about having the right pencil while not understanding it.
There’s something great about starting over. For about two weeks, everything is organized. The backpack is clean. Every pencil is accounted for. Nobody has lost their $34 HydroJug. You start thinking, “This is our year.”
By October, there’s a permission slip crumpled at the bottom of the backpack, half the pencils are gone, and something in the lunchbox has developed its own ecosystem.
But for a moment, there was a reset.
Over the years, I’ve helped pack a lot of backpacks. And somehow, this year, I went from buying school supplies to dropping my daughter off at college. That one hits differently. You spend years trying to make sure they have everything they need, and then one day you realize the backpack was never really the point.
The kid carrying it was.
The pencils, notebooks, calculators and Chromebook’s were just tools to help them learn, grow and become who they’re supposed to become.
It reminds me of something we say at Glidewell: Insurance is the tool. Health is the goal.
Policies, premiums, renewals and claims matter. We should be really good at all of them. But they’re still tools. The goal is the family that feels protected. The business owner who sleeps better. The employee who feels cared for. The client who knows someone has their back when life goes sideways.
So maybe back-to-school season is a good reset for us, too. A chance to remember why we do what we do and who we’re doing it for.
Sharpen the pencils. Pack the backpack. Get the coverage right.
But never confuse the tool with the goal.
And if you’re buying anything other than Ticonderoga 2’s, I’m not mad.
I’m just disappointed.