1. An untended garden quickly becomes a field: plant what you want to grow.
2. Have partners, but don’t do the same things: make sure you both do something you enjoy.
3. Hire people for what they can teach you, not for what you can teach them.
4. Everyone should be able to take criticism: creative trust is built on critical honesty.
5. Design is only one part of the puzzle: savor the discussion, development, debate, and dissemination of your work just as much as the making of it.
6. Goals may be arbitrary, but not having them will be maddening when there’s no one else to tell you if you’re doing a good job: set 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year goals at the outset.
7. When you take your favorite clients out to lunch, it’s a good time to propose what you’d like to do together next.
8. Knowing more designers doesn’t necessarily translate into having good clients: spend your development time wisely.
9. Be known for something: it helps.
10. You will never work harder than when you’re building something: find balance. Sometimes the best way to solve a creative problem is to take a vacation or read a book.

If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we’re talking. Both are equally true, but as a member of a self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a remove, I’m inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions as a single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother when we were together. We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.

As a veteran journalist, I decided to report the story. For two years on and off, I pulled medical and legal documents and engaged in a series of interviews with people I used to run with. By turns, it became a kind of journalistic ghost dancing, trying to conjure spirits past, including mine.

Some people I interviewed wanted me to say I was sorry — I am, and I did. Some people wanted me to say that I remembered — I did, and I did not. And some people wanted me to say it was all a mistake — it was, and it was not. It felt less like journalism than archeology, a job that required shovels and axes, hacking my way into dark, little-used passages and feeling my way around. It would prove to be an enlightening and sickening enterprise, a new frontier in the annals of self-involvement. I would show up at the doorsteps of people I had not seen in two decades and ask them to explain myself to me.