At the time [after the car accident] a friend of mine, Mary Ellen Miner, took me around to visit some schools for Gifted and Talented children and I would sit down and talk with them. Doing this I always left with such a great feeling. It was so cool to see the kids perceiving things and understanding what you're talking about. This made me more interested in getting involved in education. It made me start thinking , while I still enjoy a lot of the stuff I'm currently doing I want to go back to school and get my credentials to teach elementary school, 2nd to 4th grade. That's what prompted my writing of my second book [Children and the Internet]. I wanted to go and sit down and try to address all the concerns that parents have and that teachers have.

Reaching a point where day to day you feel you've accomplished what you want to accomplish. Your making some difference in the world that you wanted to make. I don't think financial or material goods necessarily mean success. Getting to grow is important too. You should never reach a point where you have no longer have anything to seek or anything to aspire to. As long as you have a set of goals and you think what you are doing is helping you grow as a person you are successful.

I don't know if I would ever rate myself as successful because that is like limiting yourself, like saying that is as far as you can get. The fact that these books are there is cool, it still blows my mind that they even exist, and that other people are reading them is really nice. The fact that I have a job that I enjoy, and it pays well enough that we don't freak out when the bills show up. The fact that I'm very happily married is nice. So I would say I have succeeded in many of the things I wanted to achieve, and now I can only hope that I will succeed in the other ones as well.

Try to learn more about things as they present themselves. For instance I'm now learning cooking. Keeping things diverse is really key. If you keep things at a good enough rate of change that you don't get stuck down in the mire. If you feel you have a nice broad range of things in your life, a little bit of many different things, you don't feel you are going to miss out on things or feel less by your own measurements because you didn't take advantage of something.

Set very high limits on what you would accept in terms of changing your life. There are folks where they know this is the one thing they want to do or place where they want to get to - this completely other thing than what they are doing now - but they set these really high bounds on what it would take to get them to the point where they would really be willing to make that kind of a change. But they can go and say they are going to do it, and they just have to make sure that they feel driven enough so that they follow it through. As long as they try and as long as they realize that things are going to work out in the end, they have a way of doing it.

If they want to be a teacher for instance, its just a matter of deciding at some point that regardless of the impact on a lifestyle we're trying to maintain, the connections they made in some other field, they come up with the decision this is what I really want to do and they then just do it. Don't hold back just because it doesn't have this that and the other thing.

Concentrate on yourselves to some degree. Don't always live you life for other people too much. Its always good if you do to some degree, but at the same time don't forget that you are the one who is going to have to finish this game so you're going to have to make sure you end up in a place where you feel ... not confident, not necessarily happy. You just feel good about where you are and what you're doing.

Try to find a route for your life so you can explore the things you want to do at some point. Its never an immediate thing, you can hope to do it and then 20 years later you achieve it. Just always remember, maybe in the back of their mind, what is it you are really trying to get.