Taylor Swift was in town this week. According to the dozens of Facebook posts I saw, everyone who is anyone (with daughters) but me knew this and they were all at the show. Of course, my girls are too little now to go to a concert like this but it made me look forward to bopping and gushing along side of them over future pop stars.

All in all, it was a good week. How about you?

I made progress on a couple of big client assignments, hit "save and send" on series I'm writing on management consulting for another publication (more on that to come), and tried a bunch of simple, new recipes with all of this summer produce.

One big downer midweek was receiving some scathing, poke-in-the-eye feedback on a piece of writing I'm doing for a client. The piece itself is a nothing special little memo on an uncontroversial topic communicating a deadline far in the future. So at first I wasn't sure why it got any attention-- positive or negative-- at all. Who would really care so much that they'd take the time to write a page of comments in an email, then (as if totally exasperated) dramatically suggest a complete re-do in their closing line?

The feedback came a bit out of left field from someone not directly involved in the project. As I tend to do, I first took it personally and got defensive. Check. I felt picked on. After all, what did he know? It was fine.

It took a day or so to calm down and 4 times reading through the comments (which stung less with each reading) before I could effectively process them. In the end, I decided that, while the tone was harsh, some comments were fair so I worked them in. Actually, I would have had to do this step anyway because that's what's they're paying me to do.

Taking a little advice from Ms. Swift, I'm going to shake it off. With that, the week is almost done. Have a great weekend!