A good friend of mine is trying to find her way out from under mountains of clutter.

“I just hate to put more things into a landfill,” she said. Meanwhile, she took issue with the practices of one of her local charitable organizations and the politics of another.

The result is that she isn’t able to find a suitable place to discard anything, and the piles remain in her home.

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Suppose I wanted to write an entire album of songs inspired by Reddit posts.

(I am picking this idea at random, but it’s kind of awesome, actually.)

One option is to think about it and obsess about it, then tell everyone that I’m thinking about it and ask their opinion or advice.

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Early on in The Marketing Seminar, participants are asked what change they are trying to make and who they are trying to change.

Seth Godin’s definition of marketing is to make a change happen. Therefore, your marketing needs to change somebody. Who? And how?

Faced with these questions, a lot of us go big. “I want everyone to participate in this initiative!” “I’m trying to end loneliness forever!” “I want to change the world!”

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For so long, I didn’t create things on a consistent basis.

All I did was look at other stuff and get frustrated with how bad it was.

Bad music, bad Instagram posts, bad YouTube videos. You name it, I judged it.

I even judged other people for liking it. “Why does this person have so many followers?”

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I was generally a patient music teacher, but there was one thing that always tried my patience like nothing else.

It was when a six-year-old, on her very first piano lesson, would resist the basic technique I offered.

“No, I like to do it this way,” she would say, flexing her hand along the edge of the keys like a hungry starfish.

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