Why fourth time’s the charm

And a line from Mary Oliver to crack open your world.

Oh, hi friends!

I can tell I’ve learned something important when I start to repeat it incessantly to the people around me. 

So here’s this week’s most repeatable something, which came in my musical theater workshop. One of our moderators played a song on the piano—nice melody, awful lyrics. He played another version with different lyrics. Bad. Then finally a third version. The words still didn’t sit quite right. All three were written by the famous collaborators Rodgers & Hart. They couldn’t give up on the song because they know it had potential, but it took years and years to finally get it right. When they did get it right—on the fourth try—it became “Blue Moon.”

(The story I heard left out the controversy that alleges they didn’t write the song—this woman says her father did. THEATER DRAMA)

Two things stuck with me…

You rarely see other people’s first drafts. And they might look a lot like yours. 
And that project you’re thinking of abandoning might just be waiting for the right words.

This red panda wants you to put something on your weekend calendar that makes you happy—and then do it.

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

From Mary Oliver’s poem “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches”

“People who achieve real greatness don’t fit the formula at all. In fact, they break the mold.”

I want to see this sports documentary In Search of Greatness after reading about it in Tim Ferris’s 5-Bullet Friday newsletter, but can’t find any info about it in theaters. (I wish everyone made it easy for you to find their work!!) Meanwhile, I’ll just watch the trailer again.

“The way I visualized it, the way I dreamt about it…it happened that way.”

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Thanks, as always, for reading.

Love, Kara