My mentor in high school and I would butt heads a lot. He taught me for two full years of high school, because I was constantly taking independent studies or AP classes, that only he had the jurisdiction to teach.

While I was always a good student, I was never the first in the class. He would be hard on me, because he always knew that if I spend a little bit more time studying, I could be.

On one occasion, I remember him telling me that everyone had 24 hours in a day, and I CHOSE not to study in those 24 hours – so the 86 that I made on my test was my own fault. I remember feeling so angry that I wanted to cry— because I had always push myself to do so much. By “so much”, I don’t just mean in my academics.

I started working when I was 14 years old, and only months after I started my first job, I began a second. I took eight hours of dance week, voice lessons, beauty pageants, and was in multiple theater productions a year. I juggled friendships inside and outside of school, volunteered, and was an active member of my church.

I basically wanted to be a 15-year-old Renaissance woman, and he wanted me only to be a good student – how boring is that?

Flash forward a decade later, and it is no surprise that I am somehow incapable of working a 40 hour week, and seem to be focused on about 100 projects at one time.

Some say that I’m a glutton for punishment, while others say that I’m crazy, overworked, and “if I would only focus on one thing I could be very successful at that, rather than spreading myself too thin.”

Maybe I’ll never be the best at any one thing— but I guess that’s never really been my goal. As a multi-passionate person, this is the only way I know how to be, and it simply leaves me feeling unfulfilled to pursue one project at a time.

Sometimes I wonder what my high school mentor would say to me now if I ran into him at the grocery store. I imagine that he would make several jokes about my love life, and somehow find ways to both give me compliments and tease me simultaneously.

But the 15-year-old version of myself also hopes that he would be proud of the fact that I wasn’t just a good student. That I figured out early on that there was a way for me to be good at many things rather than just one or two. That if there was something I set my mind to, there would be a way that I could accomplish it on my own.

When I was in high school I would be ashamed if I ever got a B+ on a test, but now I realize that it helped shape me to always strive for better. If there was something that upset me like a bad grade, I learned that I should focus more attention on my studies the next time to do better, and maybe focus less on my extra curricular activities for a few weeks. That while schoolwork was not always my number one priority, it was important to me, and there is a time and a place for all of my activities.

As an adult, that looks a lot like pivoting throughout my business and focusing on different elements of the company during busy season’s versus slow ones. Adm