You Can't Have a Second Edition Without a First
I didn't plan to start Season 2 today.
I was sitting in the pickup line at the high school, waiting for Kip, when it hit me. Not a decision — a knowing. The kind that doesn't ask permission. The kind that just is.
Earlier that morning, an unsolicited marketing email landed in my inbox. The kind I always delete. But before I could, I actually read it: hey, we noticed you write books. And something in me stopped cold and said — you're right. I do write books. Pretty good ones, actually.
That was all it took. Within hours, I had pulled up the first edition of Easy as PB&J, the book I published in September of 2016 — when Tad was barely a year old, Kip was five, and Chris and I had just cracked open this whole new world of what we could do with a teaching degree, a law degree, and a whole lot of conviction. I've been equal parts proud of that book and cringing at it ever since. I have a list — a long one — of everything I should have done differently. Should have promoted it more. Should have done this. Should have done that.
And then life happened. In 2019, I almost didn't make it. In 2020, none of us did, in the ways we expected.
But this morning, the second edition of Easy as PB&J started to breathe.
I spent three or four hours pulling out what's changed, what hasn't, what the world looks like ten years later, and what I now know with fifteen years of proof behind me. And here's what kept rising to the surface: it still stands. Everything I said then, it still stands. It just needed who I've become to carry it forward.
I was working through it with Claude — feeding in the original, talking through what's evolved, what's the same, what this decade has added. And at some point Claude asked me: you started with PB&J sandwiches and now you have flight metaphors and tail numbers and W2s versus 1099s. How do you connect those?
And I said, it's the scenic route.
That's when I knew.
You can't have a second edition until you have a first edition. You can't have Picasso's cubism without the early paintings — the ones nobody talks about, the ones that look nothing like what made him famous. Tad and I are planning a trip to Barcelona, and I've been ordering Gaudí and Picasso coloring books to get us ready. I keep coming back to those early Picasso pieces. Raw. Unrecognizable. Essential.
The first edition isn't the mistake. It's the proof of concept. And you can't get to two without it.
Season 1 gave me 45 episodes of figuring out what this podcast actually is. I didn't know when it would end. Apparently, it ended the moment I knew it was time for something new — which is how most seasons end, if you're paying attention.
So here we are. Season 2 of The Scenic Route. No wrong turns. Just the road that brought us here.
Come buckle in.
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