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Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's tip is that you may have to temporarily pause something in order to pursue something else that is important to you. Or in the words of the song from Sesame Street, you've got to put down the decky if you want to play the saxophone.

You may now have that song stuck in your head, and if so, I am sorry, though I do think it's a very

good song if you want to go look it up. If you haven't watched classic Sesame Street, let me explain.

Ernie wants to play the saxophone, but he doesn't want to let go of his rubber ducky.

This causes all kinds of problems, most notably that his ducky squeaks at inopportune times

while he is playing the sax.

The secret, as his friends explain, is to put down the ducky while he is playing the sacks.

He can always pick it back up later.

Anne Laura LeCunf invokes the song's words of wisdom in her book, Tiny Experiments, How to Live

Freely in a Goal Obsessed World. She uses the song to capture how you may have to pause something,

to free up time to pursue what is important to you. In Ernie's case, this was playing the saxophone. In her case, as she explained,

it was writing the book, Tiny Experiments, while she was pursuing her PhD. She describes how she

committed to spending five hours per week writing the book. To make that possible, she accepted and communicated to her doctoral

advisors that she wasn't going to teach as much or publish as much in academic contexts as she otherwise

would have. She had to put down those figurative duckeys to have the capacity to write her book. Now, I want to pause here,

because I think a lot of the narratives out there on work and life and productivity in general,

lean hard into that hard trade-offs concept. You know how this goes.

If you want to start a business,

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