In an online course I'm involved in, as in many self-paced online courses, some participants find themselves feeling behind when they have let a few weeks go by without getting started.

However, instead of getting into the meat of the course, they begin with the warmup lessons -- the lessons that contain no new material and are there mostly for people to get to know each other prior to the release of the "real" lessons.

Back when I was director of Eclectic Music, I worked into the evenings.

The busy hours at the music school also ran into the evenings. Lessons generally began around 3:00 PM and continued until 7:30 or 8:00 PM for our older students.

That meant that whenever I finally left the office, there were people around. People I knew, because these were my clients. It was often a bit of an obstacle course to find my way to the front door and out.

I got a great question this week from a friend. I love questions!

He wants to know if his reluctance to follow through on a business idea is due to a lack of courage.

Not at all, I’d say. To me, it sounds a lot more like an abundance of wisdom.

Pop culture loves stories of people who quit their jobs and took big risks, betting everything on one idea. Personally, I find these stories unsettling.

Would you like to know my pricing strategy for when I expanded my music school to multiple teachers?

I took the teacher’s rate of pay for a thirty-minute lesson and added $5.

There was no thought to my own costs or the market rate or anything. It was a random number.

These initial mistakes in pricing compounded over time as I expanded my business.