As part of the marketing for the The Carbon Almanac, which will be released next month, the volunteer team launched an email series called The Daily Difference on May 1.

I participated in writing and editing the Almanac, but I’ve been a bit too busy winding down The Little Middle School to work on the marketing phase of the project. However, I’ve kept an eye on what the team is doing, and one message that Seth Godin sent to the team prior to the launch of the Daily Difference series caught my eye.

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It’s good to steal helpful tactics from anywhere you can find them.

So many of the interesting solutions I’ve come up with were adapted from other industries or disciplines for application in my own.

One example is the “couch to 5K” concept that gets beginning runners into action to the point at which they are able to run and walk continuously for long enough to complete a 5K race.

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When I finally clear the decks to begin work on a creative project I’ve been dreaming of doing, I quickly discover why the project hasn’t made it past the dream stage.

Faced with a blank page or blinking cursor or whatever, I have no idea what to do or where to start.

The time that I had so lovingly set aside ticks by with zero visible progress. It’s like I’m wandering around in a desert with no recognizable landmarks.

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I am participating in a longitudinal study: What happens if a person doesn’t worry about whether they’re smart or not?

Granted, I'm the only one participating in this study. But that doesn't mean we can't learn something from the results.

I'm not saying that I don't care if I'm smart. It's just that, at a very early age, I developed enough confidence in my intelligence and capability to carry me through pretty much the rest of my life.

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Even though most of us have computers in our pockets, it's still entirely possible to get stuck.

A million things have changed since I was twelve (for instance, there's now the Internet), but today's twelve-year-olds are often just as helpless as I was to find a solution to a problem or an answer to a question.

In order to solve a problem or find an answer, you have to know what to search for. You have to know what questions to ask.

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