Okay, y’all. I’ve been going on about starting a YouTube channel since May.

And guess what? I haven’t done it.

You know that I can ship my work — here it is. But though I’ve made moves toward a YouTube channel, I haven’t actually shared a completed video. And I find myself thinking about why.

And then I realize that, as a matter of fact, I’m on the path. It’s just taking longer than I thought it would, and the progress that I have made doesn’t look anything like a finished product.

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When the brilliant Jennifer Acker first took over as director of Eclectic Music, I probably did a lot of annoying things I wasn’t even aware of.

However, one thing I was aware of and had to really try to tamp down was a tendency to meet any idea with, “Yeah, we tried that back in [year] and it didn’t work.”

I had to get my head around two things:

One, maybe Jen could accomplish something I couldn’t; and

Two, maybe now we had the resources to be successful with something that had once failed.

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A colleague is struggling with what to call his new business.

Really, he doesn’t have a business yet. All he has is an idea.

I used to get stuck there, too. I used to fret about names and logos and office space. I worried about finding the perfect photo and headline for a website, the right software to manage the project. I didn’t want to mess up my thing by doing it wrong.

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Those closest to me know that I learn through talking.

It’s something I have long been self-conscious about. It’s not the narcissism of thinking that everyone needs to hear what I have to say — I just need to say it. I need to make assertions and see how they sound — see how they land. I have to release ideas into the open, airing them out and exposing them to the light.

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It’s a pretty standard assignment: You read a chapter and then answer questions about it.

Most of the time, you won’t remember what you read well enough to discuss it if you read it only once. You have to take notes and refer to them. You might need to read the chapter, or parts of it, more than once.

Yet my students resist this reality. They attempt to answer the questions off the top of their head, as though the knowledge is already in their long-term memory. This results in all kinds of weird, off-the-mark responses that leave me scratching my head in confusion until I realize what the problem is.

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