I didn’t blog while on a family vacation, and now that it’s my first work-day in over three weeks, I’m not sure where to start. I’m in a mood to tie up loose ends, cross things off my to-do list, and simplify. The Wisdom to Know the Difference is coming out in paperback in less than two months, and I’m trying to discern what I’m meant to do in terms of continued publicity, especially with limited work-time over the summer.

I thought about taking a vacation from the blog (now over five years old), but my friend Lori Tharps gave me what seems like a fun alternative. She pointed out how people love to watch the deleted scenes after they’ve seen a movie and mentioned a writer who posted the deleted parts of her book on her blog. I have literally hundreds of pages that were cut out of various drafts of the book, and at least a few of them are pretty interesting; they just didn’t fit the flow or the page limit. So this summer I’m going to scan through those pages and offer little stories or quotes that didn’t make it into the final book, but which should be interesting anyway, whether you’ve read the whole book, or not. Some will be longer stories from the interviews, and some will be short bits of my own writing. If you’re not already subscribed to my RSS feed, please do so now. These outtakes will probably be shorter but more frequent than my usual posts.

Today I’m going to start with a few lines that were cut from the Introduction:

Writing over two thousand years ago, the Roman philosopher Cicero identified Six Mistakes of Man. Two of them were “The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected” and “Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it.” The other four all boil down to not knowing the difference between what we should and shouldn’t change. 

This shows pretty clearly that seeking the wisdom to know the difference is nothing new.