I was raised in a family in which the dictum “Finish what you start” was the 11th commandment. This stricture was applied in almost every conceivable situation, whether it was eating my father’s lovingly (I’m sure) prepared soft-boiled eggs for breakfast (yuck!, way too runny for me), keeping up my elementary-school clarinet lessons long after the limits of my modest musical talent had been reached, or sticking it out at a college that, while it had been my first choice, had clearly proved to be the wrong one.
