Every year, my college has a concerto concert, in which several individual soloists are featured performing virtuosic works (concerto movements or arias) with the orchestra. This year, I was the finale. (I played Cécile Chaminade’s Concertino for Flute.) The concert was last night, and it was amazing. Of course, I was nervous as hell. My mother had driven for seven hours through a raging snowstorm to make it; my girlfriend’s mom had flown across the country to hear her; all my friends were there. By the time I finished, my hands were shaking so hard I could hardly disassemble my flute. But I did great. Not perfectly, of course, but I recovered from mistakes quickly and everyone said I did an amazing job. More relevantly, everyone said I look poised and confident and seemed genuinely surprised to learn that I had been freaking out. So I am marking this goal as done. I think of this as the culmination of my flute career, and it’s very unlikely that I’ll do anything like this again. But it’s deeply satisfying to know I have what it takes to pull something like this off.