I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free. That was Michelangelo talking about how he approached his work as a sculptor. He didn’t build the statue, in other words, but got rid of the unnecessary stuff that was surrounding it. I suggest that you try this approach in 2009. You have the potential to create a great thing — maybe even two great things — by chiseling away the extraneous material that’s obscuring their unique beauty.
This article appears in Dec 24-30, 2008.