I am not a huge Myers-Briggs aficionado, but one of the things that has stuck with me about NT personality types (of which I am one) is that they don’t like repeating themselves.

“I said ‘I love you’ last week! What, you want me to say it again?”

Actually, I have no problem throwing out “I love yous” like the candy that was tossed all over the street at The Big Parade at the Maine Lobster Festival last weekend.

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Back when I was trying for a career as a singer/songwriter, I gave no thought to what other people might enjoy.

I tried to make my songs catchy and clever because I liked songs that were catchy and clever. But if anyone else happened to like them, that was more or less a coincidence. And that is pretty much the way art works, so that’s fine.

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The Little Middle School began as a Facebook post.

I put up a few sentences asking whether anyone would be interested in a tiny homeschool program for grades six through eight.

The timing was just right. People saw the post and spread the word. Within two weeks, we had eight or nine families ready to commit.

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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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I am changing.

Just recently, I made a series of decisions that were radically different from those I would have made in the past, setting me on a new path.

While I can't trace this shift to one particular source, I believe that it's the result of attending conferences, reading books, having stimulating and challenging conversations, watching videos, and listening to podcasts—in short, encountering a constant stream of new ideas that are altering my mental landscape.

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