There are things far more important than work. There's always going to be more work. There isn't always going to be more LIFE.

These deaths -- the first of people close to me -- were a terrible shove into adulthood. We weren’t indestructible, life was precious, fragile, and short, and there was no sense to any of it.

Over the coming decades, I would lose more friends to illness, misadventure, and the challenges of living. Shock eventually gave way to resignation.

Public shaming is cruel and bad, which is why we stopped pillorying people in the public square 150 years ago.

Kenny G might be popular, but is he any good?

What differentiates “good” art and artists from “bad”? Why are critics and their opinions frequently so far apart from what the people like? How do creative people like us figure out what makes our work good and/or bad? How do we improve?

I couldn’t figure out why I hurt all the time physically, mentally, and emotionally.

In the early 2000s, I read about Olympian Dara Torres. She is the fastest swimmer in Olympics history. And in the 2008 Olympics, at age 41, she was the oldest person to make the swim team.

She won 3 silver medals in 2008, with two of the races separated by only 35 minutes.

I read about her with interest -- by 40, I was starting to feel the cumulative effects of my constant grind. Here was someone my age, obviously gifted, obviously hard-working, and able to be the best even though she was competing against people decades younger.

Dara’s trainer noted that at 41, she still went hard occasionally, but most of her workouts were moderate intensity. And for every hour she spent training, she spent an hour in recovery -- resting, stretching, getting a massage, rehabilitating. Not going harder. Taking care of her body.

This blew my mind.

Artists I like and people I know were going to pull their music, or delete their Spotify accounts, or both.

But the situation is more complicated than you might think…

Additional references for our episode on lucky breaks!

Dee, Michael, and Anu talk discuss the dilemma of being almost done with a project, what being done means, Charles Ives, and more.

…you should always be trying to open doors of opportunity. If the one you thought you wanted won’t open, go find a different, easier door to open. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find. The hard work and unrewarding preset goals you had for yourself will always be there, should you wish to go back to them.

… the frame is a box around the work, and it says “the work is inside this box, and everything outside is not the work”.

The frame tells you where the world stops and the art starts.