My daughter was having a really sucky day recently. The kind of day that ended in a tearful outburst and a need for something chocolate.  It started with summer school and a collapsed clay project and continued through the day with a telephone incident.  Just sucky.  She was so upset I couldn’t say anything to make her feel better.  What we ended up talking about was the fact that she was a “What If” personality.  She had taken the teacher’s instructions for the clay project and added her own twist to make a real original piece.  When the other kids saw it they wanted to make one like it too, so she showed them how.  The next day, hers collapsed and theirs didn’t, so now they had the “original” and she had nothing.  I explained to her that her being a “What If” is a really cool thing.  It means that she sees possibilities in every shoe box, every piece of colored paper, every empty cool whip container.  This girl constantly creates and her wheels are always turning.  I see so much of me in her, it’s fun to watch her brain work. “What Ifs” have to tweak and test and can’t follow directions worth spit.  They have to take things one step further, fly by the seat of their pants.  The hard part then, is when a what if creation becomes a reject, and it’s bound to happen sooner or later.  That can really take the wind out of their sails, but eventually they have another light bulb moment and the reject is no longer such a horrible thing.  The important thing is to keep “what if-ing”, otherwise we’d all be doing things the same old way forever.  Christopher Columbus was a What If, so was the person that invented rotary cutters, and how about fusible web?  Those are all important moments in history—What if they never happened?