Yesterday, while driving, I came up with a new way of visualizing the relationships between the programs I’d like to offer.

I held it in my mind and committed it to paper later that day. It’s starting to make sense. However, the diagram I drew made me realize that there are still some pieces missing. And what is the overarching theme?

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Recently, I had a doctor’s appointment to go to in another city because we live at the edge of the earth.

In preparation for this three-hour round trip, I took my car to the shop.

The mechanic came back with a list of codes so long that he didn’t bother to check all of them. “This car is not safe to drive,” he said. And the implication was that it wasn’t worth fixing.

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One of my pet peeves over the years has been the way adults fawn over talented children.

“If he’s this good at the piano at age eight, imagine how incredible he’ll be in ten years!”

First of all, I’d like to see us, as a culture, respect kids as human beings in the here and now. What about the accomplishments they’ve already made? And what can they contribute today? We don’t have to put pressure on them to live up to the future that we imagine for them.

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Did my self-delusion waver when I was climbing up the ladder and onto the plexiglass platform in my evening dress and heels?

Or was it when I was playing the white grand piano on that plexiglass platform, suspended eight feet over the bar of a downtown Atlanta restaurant?

I think neither. I think that the entire time, I believed that the fact that I was making money playing music meant that my career was headed in the right direction.

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It’s pretty hard not to care what people think.

For deep, evolutionary reasons, we humans associate rejection with death. No one wants to be abandoned by the tribe and left cold, hungry, and alone in the forest.

But caring how many people are paying attention -- that’s a modern phenomenon. Our ancestors, living in small groups, probably wouldn’t have been able to conceptualize metrics like Amazon sales rankings, subscriber count, or ticket sales.

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