I’ll never forget the day a college professor made an offhand comment that hit me harder than I expected. He didn’t single me out, but he might as well have. As he handed back our graded essays, he made an announcement that hung heavy in the air. "You’ll find my feedback on the front page. For some of you, it's in blue ink. For the rest, it's in red," he said, as if delivering a weather forecast for doom and gloom. Then came the blow: "I’ll be straight with you—some of you will never be writers, and frankly, have no business trying." I didn’t hear much else after that...

The first time I met "Uncle Romy," my 60-something pianist and mentor, he wasted no time and dove straight into vocal training. He was serious about this work. My first assignment? To list twenty songs that I knew by heart—songs I could confidently sing at any given moment without any lyric sheet! Now, I knew a gazillion songs by heart. But I quickly realized how tough it was to create a list of songs when the requirement was “songs I could CONFIDENTLY sing...”

I was just a young girl when my mother branded me as a "Jack of all trades, master of none." While the first part of that statement might sound like a compliment, I was assured that it was not. Those words were often delivered with a sigh of exasperation, not a nod of admiration. A "Jack of all trades, master of none" refers to a person who can do many things but is not an expert in any of them...