I had a dream, and I went and lived it. Sometimes we just need to be okay with going on an adventure because it will be fun and wondrous and fulfilling.

I loved being a barista, and I reveled in working the early morning opening shift. Once the caffeine started coursing through my veins, I looked forward to being that bright spot in the beginning of each customer’s day.

Zack points to an empty desk. “I guess you can sit there,” he says. Instead of a chair, there is a big rubber ball—orange, of course—on a rolling frame. I’m not quite sure what to do. If I ask for a chair, I risk looking like an old fart who doesn’t know how to sit on a bouncy ball or like a prima donna demanding some kind of special treatment. But if I do sit on this thing I’m pretty sure that I will immediately fall off. I imagine myself, age fifty-two, toppling off an orange bouncy ball and onto the floor, as a bunch of young women look on and try not to laugh.

Business is a game, and you can win it. As a matter of fact, women are born to win this game.

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.