What You Give Away,
You Keep Forever
Lessons in Leadership from a Lifelong Teacher
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Retailer editions are paperback with black-and-white photo insert. Direct orders ship from Vermont with the color edition.
About the Book
What does it actually mean to lead? Not in theory — in practice, in the hallways of a school, in a disciplinary meeting, in the last minutes of a losing game.
Dr. Tom Farrell spent fifty years answering that question — first as a baseball and basketball student-athlete at the University of Maine, then as a teacher and coach in the mill towns of central Maine, then as the principal who turned a struggling Skowhegan high school into a National School of Excellence, then as the superintendent who brought International Baccalaureate to Aspen and raised SAT averages by more than two hundred points, and finally as the director who rebuilt the Kaohsiung American School in Taiwan from a condemned building into a campus the city took pride in.
Along the way he became close friends with Senator Margaret Chase Smith. He brought Project Graduation to Colorado and started the first teen leadership council of its kind in Maine — work that grew into decades as a national voice in drug prevention, consulting for the FBI, the DEA, and Major League Baseball International. He nearly died of cancer in 2014, and writes about what it took to survive — and what the experience taught him about everything he had spent his career trying to teach.
It is told in his own voice — warm, funny, plainspoken, occasionally self-deprecating, and never less than direct. It is a book about leadership, but it is also a book about Maine, about teaching, about marriage, about the difference between doing the big things and doing the little things, and about what fifty years of showing up looks like from the inside.
This edition presents selected writings from his original manuscript — a memoir his family didn't know existed until his son Thomas found it on his laptop while Tom was in the hospital — with a foreword by his sons, an afterword by his wife Debbie, and tributes from students, colleagues, and communities whose lives he changed.
Every copy sold supports the Future Leaders of Maine Foundation scholarship in his honor.