She wasn’t always skilled and fast. She didn’t always have a winning attitude. This whole experiment was on a path to the bottom. She should have given up. I should have given up. For reasons I’ll never know, I pushed. I pushed and I pushed and I pushed. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year. It went nowhere, in fact I think we went backwards for huge chunks of time. She totally sucked, and finally I told her so. That was the turning point.

Graduates,

Before you head off to college and choose a major know this. There are no safe jobs anymore, there are no fallback professions. Career paths and industries are dropping like flies, and things change so quickly it’s a full time job to simply keep up. The professions that do survive are full of superstars at the peak of their game. If you want to register on the scale of competency, you’d better be ready to take everything a notch up, year after year.

For those who don’t collect art, collecting may seem obscure and out of reach. Like my daughter who won’t taste her perfectly prepared summer squash, art collecting is something that you have to try before you realize how much it enriches your life. And it doesn’t stop there. Appreciation evolves and deepens over time. When you take that first taste you begin a life long process that defines your perceptions, opinions, and moods. You are on your way to becoming a more interesting person!

You know that adulthood has arrived when you stop asking for permission. You start realizing that you are the most qualified person in the room and it's best to own the decision and spare the time sucking drama of debate and consensus. I'm not throwing consensus out the door, it WILL come later if you adhere to the checklist below.

I often say that the ultimate metaphor for life is climbing a mountain, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's no adequate metaphor for life other than itself, or maybe I have it backwards. If you can push your goals to the limits of your resources and ambition, life's long lessons will more than adequately prepare you for any challenge you will find on the side of a mountain. Having just finished a project that took 10 hard years to finish, I look at ongoing projects that have no end in sight until surely my hair is gray. Climbs last a few days, a few weeks, even months. So I ask you this...
How can a mountain possibly be a large enough measuring stick with which to measure the realities of life?