You can't please everyone

I know how actors feel when they read the reviews the morning after opening night and find one scathing assessment of their work. The performance was bad; the script was worse; and the actor was beyond awful. Struggling to find something positive to write, the reviewer notes, "She did remember her lines." The actor travels from dumbfounded to disappointed to depressed in the space of one paragraph. She doesn't even recall the other reviews. THIS is the only one that matters.

The feelings are much the same when the review is about one's book. I know because I received one. It was just an e-mail, so the rest of the world didn't see it—or at least I hope not. The only good thing the reviewer had to to say was that I had "a way with words."

Today, a colleague sent me a review she had posted on-line. It was thoughtful; it was glowing; it was all over the Internet. I'm going to blow it up and have it made into a poster. The best part was how quickly it obliterated the preceding withering critique, which by the way, is the only one I've read.

Finding New Meanings

Every experience has a lesson in it. The lesson might be startling, painful, ego deflating, or life altering. It could be a tiny aha moment or a giant revelation, but it always seems to be worth learning.

When one of my friends read my new book, Words To Live By, she got an entirely different meaning from the title than the one I had intended. I thought of the book as a memoir on how I earned my living; she thought of it as lessons learned during each phase of my career. When I viewed it in that light, I could see all the events and experiences that had shaped me as a person.