It's been more than three years of intense work in The Marketing Seminar as both a student and a coach, and I'm still learning new things.

Part of it is because of the way the course is set up. With open-ended prompts, there are many directions in which the work can go and many ways for people to bring their own ideas to it. This creates infinite variation and endless opportunities for learning and going deeper, even if you are familiar with the material.

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It's taken some time, but I finally understand that the act of knitting is only part of the process of knitting.

It's possible to spend dozens of hours knitting a sweater only to find that it is about five sizes too big (it's happened to me). If you want to avoid that, you swatch.

A swatch is an opportunity to see how a given stitch pattern is going to look in a given yarn, using a given needle size. You can sometimes get away with skipping this process if you are knitting a scarf or something where the size doesn't really matter, but that's short-sighted.

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Today, I got over the pain of a project I had been procrastinating on.

I started a timer and got to work on it. Within just a few seconds, the pain was gone.

I had built the project up in my mind as something worse than it was. I kept bumping it forward on my to-do list, as though my future self would be pleased to see it there tomorrow.

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Our friend Tyler sets sail today on a round-the-world trip.

Having acquired a vessel suitable for the journey, gathered all of the gear, and plotted his course, he’s ready to go.

Many people have a dream of circumnavigating the globe. Tyler is actually going to do it. He has the skill and resources to make it happen. Just as important, he has the mindset.

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I try to build my plan for each day based on a realistic expectation for what I’m going to accomplish.

Despite my good intentions, though, there are a lot of days when I have to, as David Allen calls it, “renegotiate my commitment” to myself. I have to accept that there are a bunch of tasks I’m not going to get done and shunt them all over to the next day or the next week.

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