I haven’t taken too many guitar lessons in my life. Though I spent years as a guitar teacher, ironically, I’m mostly self-taught.

Almost every teacher I tried did that thing where you pick up the guitar and do a fast run to show off.

No piano teacher I ever had did this. It must be something about having the instrument in your hand, just begging to be played.

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The way that I’m supposed to do this blogging thing is to figure out who my ideal customer is, and then write a series of articles speaking to their pain points.

What problems are they trying to fix in their life? I can talk about those things (ideally, using search-engine friendly language) and then offer my paid solution.

It makes perfect sense. It’s totally logical. The problem is that it is so boring.

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As many women do, I found myself recently in one of those cocktail party conversations that I didn’t realize until later that I could have ended much sooner.

I was working to maintain a comfortable distance from my conversation partner, who had apparently been drinking heavily. Unconsciously, he closed the distance every time until he had backed me directly into a tree.

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My phone said, “Potential Spam,” but curiosity got the better of me. How did it know?

I answered, and sure enough, it was a guy trying to sell me on a “free vacation” which is code for “forced four-hour in-person time-share pitch.”

He was in the middle of dismissing my first objection when my husband called.

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Listening to Dave Ramsey’s radio show, I got to the point that I could recite by heart all of his “baby steps” for getting out of debt and building wealth.

I could answer listener questions right along with him, and I rolled my eyes impatiently when someone talked about how they wanted to continue to use credit cards due to the points.

I wholeheartedly believed Dave’s message. I understood that if I followed his instructions exactly, I could get the promised results.

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