I remember my mother teaching me to prune trees when I was a child.
I loved the trees and didn't want to cut off any of the beautiful branches.
My mother taught me that pruning keeps the trees healthy, encourages strong growth,
and improves the tree's structure. Like trees, our lives need regular pruning. Sometimes we have too
many good things going on and not enough room for the best things. It can be hard to cut back and
remove really good things from our lives—prune our lives—to establish strong family structures
and to encourage stronger growth of the most important and lasting things in our lives.
The Good and the Beautiful has grown into a wonderful tree that offers fruit, beauty,
and shade to hundreds of thousands of children.
Even though it's hard, it's time to do some pruning at The Good and the
Beautiful so that we can remain healthy and strong, and have the
structure needed to do the most important things that we can do.
Hey everyone, I am here in my homeschool room today and we have some announcements
here at The Good and the Beautiful. Some of them are a little hard, and it's kind
of breaking my heart, but at the same time we have some really good things to share.
Everything we do at The Good and the Beautiful is designed to bring goodness into the world.
Everything we do does good for others, so it's hard to make changes. It's hard to
stop doing anything good, but we want to focus on what our highest contribution to
the world can be—what parents are needing the most from us. Since we can't do everything,
we have been asking, where can we do the most good? Thus, we are making two changes today.
First, The Good and the Beautiful has discontinued goodandbeautifulstorytime.com. While I know a lot
of you use that website, others of you might not even know about it. But we have actually
promoted this website a lot, and we are just not seeing the interest and growth that we
have seen with other resources and projects which, to us is an indicator that it's not
what our customers need the most from us. In addition, because we use public domain books
for goodandbeautifulstorytime.com, we have not been able to add the diversity that we
want our resources to have. So, overall, when we realized that we needed to do some pruning,
we decided that discontinuing Good and Beautiful Storytime would be a good place to do so.
The second piece of information is much harder to share. It's something that has meant so much
to me personally, and is so close to my heart. But we are discontinuing all of the republished
books in our library that are not correlated with our curriculum. We have realized that we can't do
all things and we have made the difficult decision not to be a book republisher. While interest in
our curriculum and our original reading books has grown in really a crazy way, out of control way,
interest in our republished books has not seen that same kind of response and growth. And again,
that's a signal to us that it's not what the majority of our customers need from us the most.
And yet, these books take up a large amount of our time and our warehouse space. This has been a
decision that we've been considering for about two years. It's not a decision that has come easily
or that we have made quickly, but it really has become clear to us that it is the right decision.
So, starting today, we are permanently closing out all of the republished books in our library that
are not correlated with the curriculum, and this is about 200 titles. In the description below,
you will find a link to a page that lists all of the books that we are discontinuing that are
still available right now for you to purchase, and they are all 20% off while they last. If you want
these books for your home library, I strongly suggest you getting them before they are gone!
Pruning is hard. As we say goodbye to beautiful branches of the tree, branches that we have
loved—that I have personally loved—but we believe that there are more beautiful,
stronger branches ahead of us as we continue to focus on what our customers are needing the most.
For example, the response to our original books has been incredible, books that we write,
The Good and the Beautiful writes, and the exciting news is—and I know a lot of you are
going to be really excited about this—that you are going to start seeing a lot of original book
series coming from The Good and the Beautiful! We are deep in production of many new book series
right now and they will start releasing next year when we release a new bookshop on our website. And
we've been having children pilot these books and read them and give us reviews on them and um, it's
actually really made me laugh, because parents are telling me that the kids are crying when the books
are done. Literally crying because they just want to keep reading about the characters and their
stories and adventures! And that to me is, it's just powerful to see how our original books are
connecting with children and filling their hearts and minds with goodness and beautiful writing.
In addition, we are now putting more effort into goodandbeautifulbooklist.com. My daughter Kate
is now 21. If you have heard her story, you will know that it is actually because of her that the
booklist even began, and then that's what kind of launched The Good and the Beautiful in the
first place! There's a video about her linked In the description below. Recently she started
working full-time managing the booklist with a team of wonderful reviewers that are committed
to wholesome literature as well. And we haven't posted very many new books on our booklist for a
long time, but that is now changing. You're going to see a lot of activity on that booklist. We
actually just posted around 70 new books on our book list and I'm really excited about them. We
have a new sorting feature as well that lets you see just the newly added books, so at any
time you can come and see what books were newly added. So go to goodandbeautifulbooklist.com to
see all the new books on our list. Let others know about this great resource! And you'll be
hearing and seeing a lot more about our booklist. It's something that we feel so passionate about
and that so many people utilize. It's really a place that we want to put a lot of effort.
In addition, we really want to turn more attention to high school curriculum. I know
that so many of you have been asking about that, and I will do another video about that very soon,
so stay tuned for more information. I also soon will be talking about language arts:
which levels still need updated versions and where we are in the process on those.
So the one last thing that I want to talk about is videos on this YouTube channel.
We are going to be taking a new approach to our YouTube channel, and we hope you'll love it. There
is so much harshness out there on social media. There's a lot of meanness and vanity and honestly,
a lot of time wasting material. But I do believe that this platform, like everything in life right,
can be used for good, and I feel like we have the potential to do something really good on this
platform. You might know that I got my college degree in English. I worked as a professional
editor and writer after college, but I started college going into a different major. Can you
guess what it was? It was actually film! I started out as a film major, and this is because I believe
that music is so powerful, I believe that the spoken word is incredibly powerful, and
I believe that images can be incredibly powerful. So what happens when you combine those things?
When I was 17 starting college, I wanted to create movies that would really change people.
And I'm not announcing that we're starting a Good and Beautiful movie company, although I
wish I was! But that was my dream back then when I was 17, to make clean movies that would inspire
people in profound ways. But I was uninspired by the industry and the classes I had to take,
and I got discouraged. I didn't really think that there was a place for me in the industry. One day,
who knows what we might do with movies. But for now, we want to create some videos that we hope
are inspiring and encouraging in ways that we have not approached videos before. And as you know,
you haven't seen me very often on the videos because I'm frankly a lot more comfortable just
not being on videos. But I also feel like there is a lot in my heart that I want to share and a lot
of experience that I have gained that I feel like can really help. We need a lot of encouragement.
We need a lot of light in our lives and in our journey, and we will be starting to share these
videos very soon. So please stay tuned! We will have videos posting soon that will give you a
little sneak peek into our new YouTube channel direction and if you like it and you want to
see more, please share these videos with others. It's not easy to do what we do here at The Good
and the Beautiful. I've talked a little bit about that before. It's not easy for me to do what I do,
and putting myself out there with these new videos, you know, it's hard. People sometimes
behave in a mean and critical way, and I've shied away from doing videos honestly because it's
just safer and easier. But I have realized that darkness really wants to shut light down and a lot
of people in our world today are afraid to share that light because of the criticism that they
receive. I have made the decision to not be afraid to do all the good that I can do in the world.
We have one beautiful life to live and that is what we are going to be talking about: living
your one precious life in the most beautiful way possible. And I don't know how long we'll do these
videos. It may be only for the rest of the year, but I am excited through these new videos to open
my heart and life to you. I wish that every one of you could be at our meetings that we
have here at The Good and the Beautiful when we talk about you. We really hold you and the work
you are doing with your families in reverence. Thank you for all the work you do to bring light
into your children's lives and into the world. May you be blessed. I will see you very soon.