Five years ago, I took a trip to a resort on the Andaman Sea, in the south of Thailand.

My intention was never to have a beach vacation. I have very pale skin and burn easily. Instead, I planned to spend my time writing a book.

Once I got there, I realized that I may as well have been at a Motel Six five miles from my home — I was just sitting at a desk, typing.

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At one point, I set a goal to have 500 students at my music school. We didn’t hit it.

Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t hit it. That sounds like too many students to manage. The goal was divorced from its context and the necessary infrastructure to support achieving it. It was arbitrary.

I know that lots of people are motivated by big goals like that. If the goal is designed to be too ambitious to reach, it pumps them up and they end up achieving more than they otherwise would have.

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“If you have any questions, please reply all and we’ll start the discussion,” he said.

Not me, I thought. My question won’t apply to everyone.

But of course it did. And after I sent it to him, he asked if he could forward it to everyone else anyway so that he could share his answer.

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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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In the journey of entrepreneurship, there are a few leaps to make.

One is to go from working for someone else to working for yourself.

Another is to go from being paid directly for the work that you do — often, by the hour — to being paid out of the proceeds of the business.

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