A friend’s five-year-old has taken to calling the time of coronavirus “The Season.”

She doesn’t like The Season: No school, porch visits only, masks and physical distance. Right there with ya, kid.

It’s important to me to have a sense of ease in my work — but discomfort is also a key element of growth. The harmony between these two states is what keeps us learning effectively. We want to see juuuuust the right amount of discomfort melting into ease again and again, little by little, like adding flour to your eggs and butter.

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It’s difficult for many of us to make behavior changes that will benefit us in the long term.

From sticking to an exercise routine to keeping a healthy diet to saving money, we must prioritize the future ahead of our immediate circumstances in order to follow through. This can be very uncomfortable and unnatural, but the payoff becomes evident down the line.

After awhile, we’ve built a new habit and gotten used to this cycle. We learn to associate eating healthy food with feeling good. We come to enjoy the feeling of virtue that comes with following our budget or our exercise plan.

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Ambitious music students always have a “dream” song that they want to learn to play.

There’s usually a piece of it that the teacher can introduce early on, but mastery is sometimes a long way off. The student could spend the next six months practicing that piece of music every day and working on it at every lesson, and it would still sound awkward and amateurish.

As the teacher in such a situation, I guide the student to spend those six months playing a bunch of other, easier songs. Instead of putting all of our effort into one song that won’t showcase the student’s growing ability very well, we play dozens, refining some to a high level of polish and allowing others to stay works-in-progress.

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In the early days of my business, I was doing all of my own marketing, sales, customer service, and operations.

That meant that I lived in my email. Each weekday, I would start around 8 AM, crank through as many emails and phone calls as I could, and then start teaching music lessons at 3 PM.

Hiring help was necessary as the business grew, but the volume of email didn’t go down. If anything, it expanded. But I was committed to processing it all, based on what I had learned from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology, a painstaking process that required making a decision about what to do with each email, phone call, and piece of paper I received. And once everything was processed, my reward would be an empty inbox, an empty voicemail box, or an empty actual box. Everything would be filed, archived, put away, and dealt with.

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I have always enjoyed card games and board games, from the long summer afternoons spent playing Spit and Spite & Malice with my siblings and cousins to the more recent winter evenings engaging in Euro-style games like Dominion, Catan, and 7 Wonders (again with siblings and cousins, plus friends and in-laws!). Within a game, you create a little world that is continually subjected to outside forces you must reckon with — a cozy version of actual life.

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