32 / matters magazine / school 2026
O
ne day many years 
past, Ryan O’Dell was 
using his rowing ma­
chine and watching an 
episode of the Netflix 
show Vikings. This par­
ticular episode featured 
a blind fortune-teller who could divine one’s fu­
ture by licking their palm. 
“It would be really cool if you had someone 
that you could just go up to and say, ‘What’s my 
destiny?’ and they’ll tell you,” he says. “In ancient 
times, that’s how people were told their destiny. 
I’m like, what about modern times? How are peo­
ple finding out what their destiny is?”
O’Dell’s answer is a book titled, appropriately, 
The Practice of Destiny: 30 Commitments That Turn 
Intention into Direction. According to its product 
page on Amazon’s website, the book is a “work­
book for people who sense that their life is be­
ing shaped in small, almost invisible ways – and 
who are ready to take responsibility for that shap­
ing.” Structured almost as a workbook, in lessons 
built around “irreversible questions,” the book is 
intended to prompt individual growth without 
imposing dogma – letting people draw their own 
conclusions freely.
The eleventh entry is titled “What You Repeat 
Becomes You.” Its irreversible question is “what 
identity story are you using to excuse a choice you’re 
afraid to make?” In comparison, the 23rd entry, 
“Comparison Will Pull You Off Course,” asks the 
reader who they’re comparing themself to who is 
“pulling [them] away from [their] own path.” The 
expectation that readers will be consistently intro­
spective throughout their reading is made clear 
within the opening paragraph. 
For O’Dell, the key to this is honesty. You have 
to be “ready to put your life and your choices un­
der a microscope. If you’re ready for that, I think 
the book is going to be fantastic for you.”
At the core of The Practice of Destiny is the idea 
of being true to oneself. O’Dell phrases this in two 
questions: “How do you stay to be your authentic 
self? And when you get lost, because we all get lost 
along the way, what’s your pathway back?” 
These questions originated in his tenure as a lan­
guage arts teacher at Maplewood Middle School. 
As Mr. O’Dell, he taught and told stories in an 
effort to better his students, not just academically, 
but personally as well. These efforts were often sty­
mied by the stress of peer pressures and emergent 
anxieties: “You always want your students to be­
come the best version of themselves that they can 
be. It’s hard sometimes to see your students get 
influenced by so many different things,” he says. 
The youth mental health crisis served as an ad­
ditional catalyst for his writing process. “I see a lot 
of our kids coming into school and they’re stressed 
out over things that they don’t need to be stressed 
out about, because they can’t change it. And I 
think that’s what makes us feel helpless.” 
O’Dell believes that this turmoil also stems 
from the stress and alienation of change and tran­
sition: “My kids are 24 and 22. I’ve watched them 
grow up. You know they’re going to stick their toes 
into different things and try to experience differ­
ent things, but you always wonder, are they going 
to maintain who they really are inside?”
Practice Your Own 
Destiny
Local sage Ryan O’Dell is hoping to help people of any age figure out their paths in life
BY NATHANIEL KRAEMER

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