Month: June 2018

Your chances to make a difference in this world, to live the life you deserve are finite.

Fortunately, for all of us, the amount of possibilities from the choices we make are endless.

Your first album is never your greatest hits.

The greatest hits come after you create a body of work—years of songs that didn’t work with a few that did.

Art is a series of choices:

What color?

Which font?

Tilt left or right?

This word or that?

Which is why people find it so difficult to do—you don’t know which combination of your choices are going to work.

In a sea of choices, we find ourselves too often waiting to be told where to go.

The message is clear: you are pretending to be somebody you’re not. You are not super. You can’t fly, don’t even try.

Except…

Except human beings can fly and break the sound barrier.

We live in a culture that insist (at a very early age) to be average, to stay low, to fit in, be and do like everyone else.

What we need, now more than ever, is more people to dare to fly higher.

How high will you go?

Everyone is right.

Everyone is right because of how they were raised, the choices they made, the environment they lived in, what they were taught, the circumstances they lived through…

And if you lived exactly the same way as someone else, you would probably make the same decisions they would make.

The important thing to remember about people is they don’t believe what you believe, they don’t want what you want, they won’t choose what you would choose.

We see the world through our lens, walk in our shoes, not in someone else’s.

Yes, you were wronged. Justice was not served. The bad guy got away.

The question is: does it help?

Does it help holding on to this narrative that you’re the victim of circumstance? That you have no control, no agency in what others do?

Our first instinct is to react with fear to a tantalizing situation.

But when we learn to respond, we learn to love.

Instead, write a page.

And then another.

That’s how big projects finish.

“Congratulations! It’s a genius.”

Said no one.

If you look back in history, the Greeks believed that a person’s genius came from a divine entity, an outside source called daemons.

The Romans had a similar view called a genius.

It turns out, no one ever referred to themselves as being a genius but rather having a genius.

This all changed during the Renaissance period when human beings began to place themselves at the center of all things.

And overtime, creativity is now seen as coming from within. Something that only an elite few have. Someone with a high IQ. Something you are born with.

Let’s be clear: creativity is not something you are born with. No one is born understanding Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Everyone is capable of having a genius. Everyone is capable of making something that needs to be made, helping someone who needs to be helped.

For year, scientists were stuck on how to tame the extremely volatile and violent substance nitroglycerin.

It wasn’t until 1867 when Alfred Nobel discovered that by combining a stabilizer of clay with nitroglycerin you would get dynamite.

Our passions are the same way, they can be extremely volatile.

But it is only useful when we learn to combine it with stabilizers like patience and discipline to make the impact we seek to make.

The music industry was perfect until Napster was invented and changed the way we listened to music.

Encyclopedias were perfect until Wikipedia took over how we looked up information.

Travel agents were perfect until the internet.

The first person to try improv wasn’t perfect. In fact, it was awful.

The problem with perfect is that it leaves no room for surprises.

The magic of opening night isn’t that it is perfect, the fact that it might not work is what makes it fun to go see.