Exploring Books

Friendship isn't who laughs the loudest with you—it's who stays when the room grows quiet. Guard those rare ones. 🌿🤍
Book Recommendation: https://amzn.to/4zKcYXE

For Dolly - Who Gave Us the Coat, and the Books
I have to tell you a story, because I've been thinking about it since the news came.
I was in middle school. I'd been sick and missed a test, and when it came time for the make-up, they sat me in an empty classroom to write it alone. And somewhere down the hall, someone had music playing, and it was "Coat of Many Colors." I started humming. Then mouthing the words. And then - I swear this is true - I looked down and realized I'd stopped answering the questions and started writing out the lyrics on my answer sheet instead. A whole make-up test, abandoned, because Dolly Parton's voice had reached down a hallway and carried me somewhere else entirely.
Dolly died this week. She was eighty. And I've been carrying that little coat of many colors in my chest ever since.
If you don't know the song, go hear it today. It's Dolly telling the true story of her own childhood - so poor her mama sewed her a winter coat out of a box of rags nobody else wanted. As she stitched, her mother told her the Bible story of Joseph and his coat of many colors, until little Dolly believed she was wearing something rich. She wore it to school proud as anything, and the other kids laughed, because it was made of scraps.
But the whole heart of it is this: "one is only poor only if they choose to be." Her mama's love was sewn into every seam, and that made her richer than all of them.
That's the woman we lost. A girl from a one-room cabin in the Smoky Mountains, fourth of twelve children, who took the poorest parts of her childhood and turned them into something the whole world would treasure.
But here's why I wanted this tribute to be about books.
Dolly never forgot that little girl in the rag coat. And she never forgot that her own daddy couldn't read or write - that shame sat with her. So she did something about it. She started the Imagination Library: a free, brand-new book mailed every single month to any child who signed up, from birth until they started school. No cost. No catch. It began just for the kids in her home county, in honor of her father.
And it grew, and grew until Dolly had given away hundreds of millions of books to children all over the world. Kids who, like her, might not have owned a single book otherwise. When her family announced her passing, they asked that in place of flowers, people give to the Imagination Library.
Of course they did. Because that was her real coat of many colors - millions of books, stitched together out of pure love, and thrown warm around the shoulders of children she'd never meet.
She wore rags and called herself rich.
Then she spent her life making millions of other children rich the very same way.
Rest easy, Dolly.
The coat was always beautiful. And every child holding one of your books is still wearing it.

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Don't Take Anything Personally.

Don't Take Anything Personally:

Because their path isn’t yours.

You can learn from others, but you can’t become yourself by living someone else’s life. Finding yourself comes from your own choices, experiences, and lessons. Your map is the only one that leads to you.

Know your worth! ❤️💪✌️

6 UNWRITTEN LIFE LESSONS

Never underestimate a person who practices self-education.

Formal education ends. Self-education doesn't.

The person reading on the train, working through a textbook at night, watching lectures on the weekend — they're compounding something the credentialed often stop building the day they graduated.

The self-educators I've known share a few things. They ask better questions, because they've read across fields the rest of us assume don't connect. They're harder to bluff, because they've gone to the primary sources. They update faster, because there's no degree to defend.

The credential gets you in the door. What you read after — every week, every year, for the rest of your life — is what decides where you end up.