I received a jury summons, and it’s looking an awful lot like I’m going to be spending a lot of time at the courthouse in the near future.

This is much better than receiving a court summons, but still.

I went in last week for the first step in the jury selection process, rescheduling all of my meetings so that I could sit in an overheated, high-ceilinged room and stare out the window at the fading sunlight on the bare trees and the hills beyond as a patient judge gave us an eighth-grade civics lesson. Tomorrow, I have to go in again.

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At one point, I set a goal to have 500 students at my music school. We didn’t hit it.

Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t hit it. That sounds like too many students to manage. The goal was divorced from its context and the necessary infrastructure to support achieving it. It was arbitrary.

I know that lots of people are motivated by big goals like that. If the goal is designed to be too ambitious to reach, it pumps them up and they end up achieving more than they otherwise would have.

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Even as a college student, the only practical career I could visualize for myself was to be a teacher.

I didn’t know much about other careers, and my obsession with music precluded my pursuit of even learning about them. So when I went to college, it was to study music education — a worthy compromise.

I never could have imagined where I’d end up. After all, when I was a kid, there was no Internet.

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How do you move forward with a project you care about?

With my first three-month group program concluding and another about to begin, it a good moment to share what I’ve learned. How do we ensure progress toward our goals? And do our goals even matter if we wind up heading in a different direction from where we thought we were going at the beginning?

Early in the summer, I struggled with putting a group together and what to call it. I decided to follow my own process and start with what I had, raw and unpolished.

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