For Cooper

• Day One or One Day

  There are two ways to think about the thing you want to do.

  One Day — someday, when the time is right, when I'm ready, when the circumstances line up.

  Day One — I've decided. It starts now, imperfect and incomplete.

  One Day is a feeling.
  Day One is a decision.
  The first one waits. The second one moves.

  You get to choose which one you're in.
  Most people don't realize that's the choice.

• Don't Get Stuck in the Means

  You don't need a $2,000 camera to be a photographer.
  You need a camera.

  The art is the point — the gear is just the path to it.

  I've caught myself waiting for the right setup, the right software, the right moment to have everything in place.
  What I was really doing was avoiding the work by staying busy with the preparation for it.

  The means matter less than you think.
  The thing you're trying to make matters more.

  Start with what you have.
  Upgrade when it's actually holding you back — not before.

• The King Is Still a Pawn

  [ coming soon ]

• The Dash

  [ coming soon ]

• Two Kinds of People

  There are two kinds of people in this world:
  those who say they can, and those who say they can't.

  They're both usually right.

  What you tell yourself about what's possible tends to become true — not because the universe is listening, but because belief shapes what you attempt, and what you attempt shapes what you become.

  Be careful which camp you wander into.
  It has a way of feeling permanent once you're there.

Notes

What I See

Not lessons. Just what I notice.

• The Third Person

  For a while, you referred to yourself in the third person. Cooper is happy. Cooper wants to run. I don't know exactly when it stopped. I should have written more of it down while it was happening. This is me doing that now, late.

• What I See When I Look at You

  When I look at you, I see everything I can no longer see in myself. My trajectory has mostly announced itself — I know roughly the shape of what I am, what I'm good at, where my edges are. Yours hasn't. You could love anything. You could be extraordinary at something that doesn't exist yet. The number of doors still open for you is one of the most beautiful things I have ever been close to. I watch you and I feel it constantly.

• Watching You Play

  I did not expect it to feel the way it did. Watching you compete — the effort, the focus, the way you just play — something in me goes quiet. Just proud. I didn't know it would hit me that hard. I'm still a little surprised by it every time.

• The Worry I Carry

  I think about whether I'm doing this right. Whether I'm too easy on you, too much your friend, whether I joke around when I should be serious. The goal has always been to prepare you for the road — not to prepare the road for you. I believe that. I also don't know if I've threaded the needle. I hope so.

• What I Can't Wait to Teach You

  There's a difference between teaching someone what to think and teaching someone how to think. Most education confuses the two. I want to teach you the second one — how to examine an argument, how to hold a position and still question it, how to tell the difference between a belief and a feeling. The day you make a genuinely good argument against something I've told you will be one of the best days I can imagine.

Worth Your Time

Watch These

Some things are said better by others. These are the clips I kept coming back to — the ones that put words to something I already knew but couldn't quite say.