Yesterday I introduced you to Miss Ardis Krainik. I thought I would share another lesson I learned from her and her fantastically successful reign at Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Yesterday's lesson was on the importance of selling when you are busy. Today's, the importance of building new audiences when you are busy.

You see, when I worked at Lyric, we were considered somewhere on the scale between fantastically and monumentally successful. We were an arts organization that ran in the black. I don't think most arts organizations even know what the opposite of red is, in a fiscal sense.

And yet, in the midst of this glory glut, Miss Krainik mounted what she called her "Toward the 21st Century" initiative, spending scads of money to commission a bevy of avant garde, in-your-face operas that her most stalwart-y of supporters were surely going to hate. Those supporters, the ones who bought every ticket and attended every event, loved the dusty old chestnuts like Madama Butterfly and Turandot.

But Miss Krainik knew that they were likely not the future. She knew that the aging opera crowd was, in fact, literally dying off. And even if they weren't, she knew she had to push her opera forward if it was going to succeed beyond the day.

At a time when laurel-resting was certainly an earned right, Miss Krainik pushed forward. Which I guess reinforces yesterday's lesson: When you are up, you actually have to work harder than you do if you are down. That way, you'll never really know how hard you'd have to work if you were down.

Something tells me you needed another reason to work hard if you are up.