I’ve just begun listening to My Beloved World by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and am already enthralled. I wanted to share a quote from the preface that I believe will engage you and make you want to read this volume as well:

The idea of my becoming a Supreme Court Justice–which, indeed, as a goal would inevitably elude the vast majority of aspirants–never occurred to me except as the remotest of fantasies. But experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire [bolding and emphasis are mine]…And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you’ve closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you’ve done today.

When I recently coached a group of artists and inquired about their goals, one at a time I probed them for the value, the ‘thing’ that would create the ‘will to aspire.’ It was exhilarating to be a part of this exercise, asking questions, noticing the responses and digging deeper for that big wish–the large format camera, the light-filled studio space, the time to focus just on jewelry-making–that would fuel the artistic process.

Once that stirring is identified and acknowledged, the next steps become self-evident and the day’s quality is being fulfilled.