The first time I taught a piano lesson, I had never taught a piano lesson before.

After I taught that lesson, I was a piano teacher. And then I taught more lessons, until I eventually reached a threshold of being an experienced piano teacher.

I wasn't exceptionally good at the beginning, but I was good enough. And that, in fact, was all that was necessary. I’m grateful that people asked me to teach them piano so that I didn’t have to put myself out there. I’m not sure I would have done it.

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I never should have bought my first house.

It had an awkward floor plan and poor natural light. An ugly apartment building loomed over the backyard, and trains from the CSX rail yard would screech by at all hours of the day and night. Worse, I couldn't really afford it.

But I bought the house anyway because I focused on the upside and figured I could mitigate the downside. I have always tended to say yes to the new.

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The other day, I had a new project launching, plus double my usual number of meetings.

I also had been away. That meant that I had a bunch of bags to unpack, there was little in the way of groceries, and I stayed up too late.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who would be fine with all of that, but a lack of food and sleep easily throws off my equilibrium. I had to figure out what to do to make it work.

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What I love about teaching music is the immediacy of it.

No matter how old you are, you can make a pleasing sound on a drum, ukulele, or harmonium on your first try. Given a few more minutes, you can create an ostinato (a repeated melodic or rhythmic pattern) that you can build into a song. It’s so fun that it makes you want to do more of it.

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You can tell the people who are really super into Instagram by how they display their story highlights on their profile.

Instead of little round thumbnails showing auto-generated images from the videos and photos they’ve shared in their stories, these folks feature brand collateral in the tiny circles: their signature colors and typefaces, custom illustrations, and so on. They’re sending a strong signal that they are devoted to the platform and to thorough branding.

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