My little cousin and her family released their Painted Lady butterflies from their butterfly garden recently.

One of the butterflies alit on the three-year-old’s wrist and contentedly remained there for a few minutes, to the child’s fascination and delight.

“I’m being very gentle with him,” she said, because it was true.

She wasn’t reassuring her parents. She wasn’t being defensive. She wasn’t even boasting. She was affirming herself, saying the words her mother might have said.

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Working with fellow business owners, I see patterns arise in the concerns and insecurities we share.

It is common for these leaders, be they entrepreneurs or freelancers, to believe that they aren’t real business owners for one reason or another.

Their website still needs work. Their social media accounts are placeholders. They haven’t figured out how to file their quarterly taxes. They’re just winging it when it comes to sales.

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As an adolescent, I adored the Beatles, individually and collectively.

A proper obsession began around the time I was twelve. Fortunately, we had crates full of old LPs and a bunch of books that allowed me to become a scholar of Beatles music and lore by the age of fourteen. I learned the story from start to finish, like a fairy tale.

But though there was a romantic beginning, full of ambition and beautiful leather-clad musicians and artists in seedy Hamburg rock clubs, there was no happy ending. Lawyers and acrimony…and later, a gunshot. Forty years ago today, in fact.

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As a teenager, Claire Danes starred as Angela Chase in the short-lived American TV series My So-Called Life. She lives with her attentive parents and her sister in a nice house in a nice neighborhood; naturally, she eschews them and is drawn to the miserable kids with miserable family lives.

In one episode, Angela’s best friend, Rayanne Graff, gets dangerously intoxicated. Rayanne’s mother, previously established as cool and laid back compared to Angela’s very square, anxious mother, is dismissive: “You are too drunk, young lady. Way too drunk.”

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I came across a plaintive blog post by a struggling entrepreneur. “God,” she said to the Internet, “Why won’t you send your blessings to my business?”

Yesterday, I wrote about how we can succeed with something if we stick with it and refuse to entertain the possibility that we don’t have what it takes. But that’s about our own skill and persistence. We run into trouble when we think we can control what other people do if we just try hard enough or show up long enough…and if that is the case, controlling the actions of an almighty deity would seem to be to be off the menu as well.

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