One of the fascinating things about learning is that, once you’ve learned something, it’s difficult to see things the way you saw them before. A good teacher changes your worldview so profoundly that you can’t tell where their influence begins and ends — your thinking has been transformed forever.

At that point, it’s easy to dismiss the impact that the teacher has had on you. It’s understandable. As a teacher, I’ve come to accept this reality. Each student is an experiment of one, without a control group. Who’s to say whether things would have turned out the same without the teacher’s efforts? I think I made some kind of difference, but there’s no way to prove it.

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Whenever I’ve struggled to create something — a song, a piece of writing, a meal — the difficulty is not usually a lack of ideas.

Rather, it is found in the resistance to the ideas I already have. Each one is considered and rejected. I’m dismissing possibilities instead of developing them, and nothing is getting done.

The solution I’ve come to rely on: I just choose one of these ideas, no matter how ugly or ungainly, and move forward with it.

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As a young, aspiring singer/songwriter, I dreamed of creating something incredible.

Inspired by The Beatles, Chuck Berry, Smokey Robinson, and Bob Dylan — in other words, world-class, genre-defining, generational talents — I thought about where my music would fit in the pantheon of the greats.

In my “planning,” I completely skipped over the part where I would write, perform, and promote my music, connecting with potential partners and fans one by one, building a career the way everyone has to build a career: day by day.

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When I was a kid, I hung onto things. Candies, stickers, little soaps, fancy erasers and pencils, personalized stationery — instead of consuming them or using them up, I would hoard them and relish the perfection of their untouched, unblemished potential. More often than not, they’d be tossed or lost before I did anything with them.

It became the same with ideas. Rather than create the drawing, song, poem, story, or business offering, I would collect ideas for someday. And like my childhood collections, these would languish, unloved, in notebooks and on recordings until they were lost or forgotten.

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What do you do when you run out of ideas?

Seth Godin has written about the nature of writer’s block and the fact that it is invented. It’s designed to let us off the hook when the going gets rough and we’re afraid to make something new – or afraid that we can’t.

It’s amazing the capacity of the human brain to rationalize and make up excuses for why we are the way we are and why we can’t do the things that we need to do, especially when they’re challenging. Indeed, it is the safer thing to do to not write, to not make stuff, to not put our ideas out there.

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