Who knew that an artist would have the advice I needed to hear this week. 

My girls and their friends went to a Cape Cod stripes art workshop with an incredibly talented local artist, Carolyn Mackin. During the workshop the girls picked any colors of their choosing to make some fancy horizontal stripes. Anything goes for stripe thickness, amount of stripes, the way to apply the stripes onto the paper and number of colors. 

Basically, there are no rules. 

I came back towards the end of the workshop and one of my girls was looking particularly upset about her stripes. Carolyn and I asked her what she was thinking and she said she didn't like the bold, thick stripes she had put on her papers. Carolyn gave her some suggestions, but my daughter was still looking unsure, upset and a little frozen. 

Then, Carolyn gave the mic drop speech. 

She said, art isn't about being fearless. There's no such thing as being fearless. We all have our...

Our son burst in the car from school with an exciting parent assignment. He was to construct a vehicle with homemade ingredients that would travel twelve feet via balloon power. An instruction sheet, one balloon, two thin wooden sticks and one plastic straw was included in the “starter” kit.

With two days left until the due date we did what every good parent would do…..we got to work googled. 

From what we found, this vehicle assembly looked easy enough thanks to a few gatorade bottles and caps we had leftover from a marathon basketball Saturday. 

Guess what, it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Needless to say my son was getting extremely mad. 

“Ok, buddy. Instead of getting upset, let’s just get curious. What part is working? What’s not working? What could we change? Did your teacher give you any ideas?” I questioned. 

He paused. Silence. He walked away. An hour later…..

“Dad, let’s try another plan...