When I was in high school, a teacher I deeply respected sat me down and told me I was like a duck. Not sure where he was going with it at first, I twitched uncomfortably but kept listening. A duck, he explained, can walk, swim, and fly. It doesn't out-swim a shark, out-run a cheetah, or out-fly an eagle, but it does all three competently. It survives, adapts, and gets wherever it needs to go because it isn't trapped in a single element. It was a complement. For a long time,

I was speaking to a business owner recently - smart, experienced, building something genuinely interesting - when he mentioned, almost in passing, that his web developer had told him his website would go offline if he stopped paying the monthly fee. He had believed it. For two years. I explained that he owns his domain. That the site sits on a server he can move. That none of what he had been told was true, and that the fee he had been paying was, at best, for services he had