"But I am telling you that owl invi­ta­tion or not, you already have this abil­ity within you. That you have the abil­ity to cre­ate magic within your­self. That you just have to imag­ine — and believe in your imag­i­na­tion so much that iyou work hard enough to make it real."

This is really key. SO many people struggle with this brand of magical thinking, i.e. "There's someone out there who will solve all these problems for me." It took me 27 years to stop doing it myself. I see it with a lot of my friends starting companies and trying to get traction for them. They take every meeting with a VC who "wants to chat," they consider uber sketchy proposals from marketing guys looking to "combine my people skills with your product" etc etc etc. And it leads to death.

I spent a solid year of working on Windy Citizen where my hopes and dreams were all centered around getting one of the big newspapers to write about the site and the community coming together there. It was a huge waste of time and energy that could have been so much better spent actually building the community and making the service better.

This idea that special people do special things is proposterous. Anyone can do something special, you just have to put yourself in a position to accomplish whatever it is. Waiting around for some outside force to change your life it the fast-train to loserville. Glad Jenny shared that message with the kids.

It turns out, if you're intently focused on your own mission, if things start coming together for you, people will go out of their way to make things happen for you.