Would you walk away from multiple social media accounts with over 10,000 followers?

This is the story of my friend Whitney who did just that.

She started doing nail art back in 2012 and quickly got really good at it, which is how she does most things. She has an obsessive attention to detail and the ability to focus intensely — plus, she works very quickly and has excellent fine motor skills. The combination is powerful.

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Doctors and nurses recognize the limitations of human beings and incorporate that into their treatment plans.

That means that a patient might be prescribed a treatment that is less effective but is easier to stick to.

I think that’s a bit paternalistic. As a patient, I’d want all of my options and all of the information whenever possible.

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Sometimes, the emotional weight of what we’re trying to do is too heavy.

We might be burdened by the shame of past failures.

We might have waited so long to do the thing that now it feels like too big a deal.

We might be scared of what will happen after we do the thing.

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Over the holidays, a family member mentioned that he’s been learning to play guitar.

Or, he had been learning, but it turned out to be more difficult than he had thought, so he gave up in frustration.

He used an app that showed the sequence of notes to play as the recording of a given song played in the background. The notation moved along, conveyor-belt style, sort of like the game Guitar Hero.

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As a music teacher, I used to get a lot of calls from parents who were trying to foster their child’s budding interest in an instrument.

It was often a bit of a dance to figure out how to best support these families. Though a two-year-old might be fascinated by seeing someone play the drums, enrolling that tiny person in formal lessons on the drum set is not necessarily developmentally appropriate. I needed to find a way to convey that without damaging the parent’s eagerness to help their child explore music.

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