Thanks so much for your reply! I had to think about that one for a while before I felt really ready to come back to it.

First my thought on being an expert:

I guess that I was thinking less of “something people will pay me for”, as I know that I possess a rather broad stroke of things that I either have been or feel confident in my ability to be paid for and more in terms of my ability to consistently contribute unique and successful ideas to a subject. Be that in coming up with great ad slogan after slogan or developing the best strategy time and time again or develop a meaningful piece of software.

Really, I see my challenge not as not being able to go deep enough to get paid, but rather not going deep enough to consistently develop meaningful and novel experiences for others.

Re-reading and reflecting — what I really want is the consistency– and the impact that is (generally) only possible with the sustained production. Its the consistency that also really scares me though!

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I need a project. No, I need a small project, so I can make it to a win. I feel daunted by all my projects right now. I suffer from the huge-ambition, huge-idea, paralysis issue. I need to follow your lead and fall in love with small ideas!

I would really love to get into more depth in writing, coding and helping people re-write the stories they create themselves with. And, then I would like to intertwine all three of those things into a singular goal. (See, stupid big ideas!)

I have written a ton in my life — even took six months off predominately to write, it was wonderful!

I loved my sprint of learning HTML & CSS. I'm a bit more daunted by the complexity inherent of taking it up a level.

I coach / mentor several people and almost always have at least one person a week whom I help revise their resume and stories about their last job. I love showing people that they are fully in charge of the way they frame their life and just how much changing their perspective can empower them to move forward.

So, in short, I find all three of those things very interesting… but I find a lot of challenge in finding small intermediary steps, where I can celebrate wins, en route to a very big, very scary goal.

Thanks so much for helping me think through all this – its awesome.

Thanks so much for sharing this, great to know it holds up!

If you find yourself back here, I'd love to hear more about your experiences with learning/teaching music as well as your music itself.

-Nicky