I enjoy taking courses on platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, and Kejabi. Seeing those little checkmarks appear after you watch a video or click on the buttons of a virtual worksheet is very pleasing.

However, these checkmarks probably aren't the best measure of whether I did the work I was supposed to have done. If there's no teacher who's going to give me a grade, how do I measure whether I've actually gotten out of the course what the creator intended? What I intended?

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In studying early Dylan songs, it's interesting how many of them were adapted (or stolen) from hymns and so on.

He would take melodies and write new lyrics to them, or copy the structure of existing lyrics and create a new melody. He also mimicked Woody Guthrie's singing style.

This tactic obviously worked out pretty well for the guy. Taking the long view, all that copying was a shortcut to developing his own creative voice.

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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.

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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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