Over the years, I got really used to not knowing how I was going to make it to the end of the month.

It was a terrible financial habit that became a bit of a superpower in terms of learning to manage anxiety. When I had no choice but to keep going despite the uncertainty, I learned to deal with the uncertainty and work around it. This has proven to be a useful skill lately.

On the other hand, I’m no longer willing to compromise the financial well-being of my business or household for further growth in this area. In other words, I wish to have a financial cushion that’s much bigger than I had in the past.

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Amateur guitarists often get stuck on strumming.

They can teach themselves the basic chords, but they end up with a tense, hooked wrist that yields an equally tense, unpleasant sound.

This is the kind of thing that people chalk up to lack of talent—and it is. The aspiring musician just doesn’t have the natural ability to strum. However, all that means is that the player wasn’t able to figure it out by herself. The problem is easily solved:

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Explaining is not teaching, but it’s usually a tool that teachers rely on anyway. It comes in handy in some situations, like giving multi-step directions.

But what do you do when you can’t explain something because you don’t speak the same language? It’s one thing to tell a group of kids what’s expected of them in an obstacle course, but what about a mouse?

In that case, you rely on shaping. Essentially, you reward any steps in the direction (sometimes literally) of what you want the training subject to do, even if they bear little resemblance to the desired behavior.

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These days, I’m learning how to manage projects.

This is not a well-developed skill for me. I’m good at managing a process — something repeatable that can be refined over time — and I’ve had a lot of experience dealing well with novel situations and improvising on the fly. My weakness is one-time, short-term endeavors with a beginning, middle, and end. Projects. Yeah, those.

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“The bottom of the nose belongs down here, and the eyebrows should hit here. You can improve the perspective on the house in the background by incorporating these lines. Also, why is the sky a strip of blue at the top?”

We know that there are developmental stages that children’s artwork goes through as they learn, so we don’t expect kids to draw like adult professionals. Dena Luchsinger makes the case that it’s just as unhelpful to a growing writer to point out all of their mistakes.

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