Seth said he can tell a chapter is over when he can't describe the job in two sentences anymore. I've been turning that over for a week. It explains why he left UCLA for Southern New Hampshire. It explains the ten years he thinks it cost him. And it explains why I can't let go of the thing he told us he hasn't figured out yet.

"The biggest problem with the stories that I tell is that nothing ever changes." An admissions counselor said that to me after a workshop. It's also the best explanation I have for why higher ed websites still wrestle with the problems we had in 1996.

Thirty years of consulting teaches you a particular kind of heartbreak. You hand over the roadmap, and a year later the website hasn't changed. I asked Myla Edmond whether distance makes change shallower. Her answer changed how I count the roadmaps in the drawer.

I've been in higher ed since I was 21. I've never left. I know exactly why. It's just not a thing you say out loud … until somebody I'd never met said it first.

Joel Goodman has been a client, a collaborator, and a friend for more than 15 years. And yet I learned about his origin story I never knew before. The part about growing up around the hospitality industry — a great-uncle who owned a hotel corporation, friends who worked the restaurant floor — reframed everything I thought I understood about where Hospitable Design actually came from. It didn't start as a web framework. It started as a way of being in the world.

Jen Lonchar told me this industry is "150% built on relationships." I've spent 30 years finding out how right she is...