Tag: inspiration comes from strange places

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What Do You Have To Show For It?

Ask me what my favorite college basketball team of all time was, and I’ll tell you: The 2011-12 Missouri Tigers. I loved that team. They could pass. They could shoot. They were insanely entertaining.

With a few weeks left in the season, I remember a conversation I had with a buddy of mine, a fellow Mizzou fan. Our Tigers had only lost 1 or 2 games all year. They were ranked as one of the four or five best teams in America.

We were watching a truly great team playing in a special season. The only question left was:

When it was all over, what would they have to show for it?

Success in a sport like college basketball is a pretty strange thing. Only one team gets to win the championship, but even winning three or four games in the NCAA Tournament is considered a pretty big accomplishment. Our Tigers didn’t have to win it all — to be considered one of the great teams, just making it to the Elite 8 or Final 4 would do.

Then Mizzou lost its first game, a monumental upset at the hands of Norfolk State. And that’s what fans remember about that team. Not the huge highs. Not the Big 12 Championship.

Two years later, fans remember what Mizzou had to show for it: A big “L” when it mattered.

Because this is how it goes. You have to find the right people. You have to put in the work. You have to put in a lot of it.

But at some point, you need to go out there and show the world what you’ve got. The end product matters — it’s what they remember about you.

So when you’ve put in the work, you have to ask yourself: What do you have to show for it?

Better make it count.

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Knowing When To Tear It Down.

Wireless Router and Cable Modem

I’ve had a lot of trouble with Time Warner this year. They service internet at my apartment, and — somehow — they’re the only provider who offers internet on my block.

Which is a problem, because, 1) I work on the internet, and 2) Time Warner’s internet is wildly unreliable. I’ve had seven visits from Time Warner this year to fix my internet. SEVEN! And it still goes out every two weeks.

But what I find interesting is what the repair staff for Time Warner has told me about why the service is so unreliable. The fault, they say, lies almost entirely with a bad infrastructure of cables that was first laid out in New York. The repair team can make little fixes, but ultimately, the infrastructure needs to be redone, and until it’s fixed, Time Warner is going to remain unreliable.

So here’s where I bring this back around to the work we all do.

There are times when you discover that small fixes are enough to get the job done. When a few changes can make a difference.

But there are other times when the infrastructure of a project or a team is fundamentally broken. You can’t just duct tape things together in those cases. You have to tear it down and build it all over again.

The difference between those who get the work done and those who don’t is often understanding where you stand. Does this require a little fix? Or is this a total do-over?

It’s hard to the work if the thing you’re working from is broken. Time Warner is proof of that.

That photo of a router comes via.

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What Happens When You Add Up All The Work.

me-younger

That’s a photo of me in 7th grade. I’m in the center, wearing the fireman’s hat. I was shorter then. When I went for a checkup in 8th grade, the doctor said I’d probably top out at 6′.

Then I grew 6 inches in a year. And kept growing.

But a funny thing about that: No one really noticed. Not my family. Or my friends.

Growing 6 inches in a year is a lot, but it happens incrementally. A quarter of an inch here, a half an inch there. The change happens so gradually that you don’t notice what it’s all adding up to.

So we didn’t notice anything — until some cousins from out of town visited, and noticed that I had obviously grown a lot. The news came as a shock to everyone I knew. (Even me, kind of — I had spent the winter complaining about how my entire body hurt all the time, but I wasn’t quite sure why.)

We go through these changes all the time. Little things and alterations that add up, tiny changes in the way we work and the types of work we do. Eventually, they add up to something big.

But when we wake up in the morning, we don’t feel like we’re making big changes. We don’t notice what’s happening all around us. We look at the little picture, and never the big.

Often, it takes an outside force for us to take stock of what’s been going on.

But if you’ve been doing great work, and you’ve been putting in a lot of work, you start to notice what you’ve been building all along. It could be something really great.

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Celebrating The Big Moments.

I saw a show at Carnegie Hall on Friday. The band was The Lone Bellow, a really exciting group in the Mumford & Sons/Lumineers vein that’s just starting to get some national attention. The Carnegie Hall show was one of their biggest ever.

The band invited their family to the show. During a break between songs, they told the crowd that the first four or five rows were all family. The mandolin player, Kanene Pipkin, had her dad front and center, and he spent most of the set dancing and waving his arms and cheering.

The best moment of the show came during the encore. After the band had finished a song, the room went dead silent. And then we all heard the voice of Pipkin’s dad, turning around and loudly asking for one of his relatives.

“Dad,” Pipkin said, embarrassed, “we’re trying to play an encore here.”

It was one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen at a concert.

And it was also a really amazing reminder: Getting to a stage like that isn’t easy. The Lone Bellow began as a side project. They played shows to tiny crowds, and a few years into their existence, they still haven’t broken through to a huge audience.

But on the night they played Carnegie Hall, they chose to share the evening with the people who’d supported them and believed in them all along. We don’t always take time to celebrate the big moments and breakthroughs, but it was pretty amazing to see the band do just that on Friday night.

They’re a heck of a band. Here’s to many more big nights for you and yours.

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The Words You Need.

A few years ago, I saw Florence & the Machine in concert. I was getting over this girl, and I really wanted to hear Florence sing this song of hers, “You’ve Got The Love.” I wanted to hear her sing:

Sometimes it seems that the going is just too rough
And things go wrong no matter what I do
Now and then it seems that life is just too much
But you’ve got the love I need to see me through

I wanted to hear it, and know that maybe the door hadn’t closed on that relationship after all.

Instead, Florence closed with a new song, “No Light, No Light,” which went:

A revelation in the light of day
You can’t choose what stays and what fades away

Which was something I needed to hear. I didn’t want to hear it, but somebody had to say it.

The thing about music is, it has a habit of doing just that. You’re in love, and every song is a love song. You’re heartbroken, and every song reminds you of how hard things can be. You’re in need, and there’s a song to help.

Sometimes, when I need to find that center, I pull out the iPod and go looking for the right song for the moment. Maybe it’s not always what I hoped to hear. But some of the answers are almost always there.

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What One Thing Would Screw Up Everything?

So a question I like to ask myself:

Could one single thing screw up everything I’m doing?

If a key part fell through… if a plan didn’t work… if the modem at my office crashed: would that mess with everything?

Right now, I’m dealing with Day 5 of an unexpected internet outage at home. It crashed, and the internet company sent a guy, and he kinda fixed it, and then it crashed again 24 hours later.

Of course, I’m still writing this — because after years of watching the internet crash at inopportune times, I wisened up and bought a backup 4G card.

What I’m saying is this: Plans go to shit rather quickly. And if one little cog in the machine can cause everything to stop functioning, that’s a dangerous thing. Having a backup plan really matters when you’re doing the work.

There’s no excuse for being caught off-guard by a small failure. Have a plan, and then know what happens when that plan goes bad.

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The Colbert Message.

me at colbert

I got to see a taping of “The Colbert Report” this week, and I’d never been to a taping quite like that. I’d been in studios for TV morning shows, and for high school quiz shows, but nothing like “Colbert.”

There’s something different about “Colbert.” When you’re waiting to get into the show, a woman comes out and tells you how important it is that you get excited and loud, because the crowd is the show’s soundtrack, and the show depends on you.

And then a guy comes out a few minutes later, and says the same thing.

And then they seat the audience, and a warm-up comic comes out and says the same thing.

And then the stage manager comes out and says the same thing.

And then Stephen Colbert himself comes out and says the same thing:

You are the soundtrack, and the show depends on you.

And then right before the show starts, just in case you weren’t sold on your role in this, Colbert looks out from behind the desk and shouts, “Have a great show, everyone!”

And after being reminded for 45 minutes straight that I needed to be loud and cheer like a maniac, what happened? I laughed really, really hard. I laughed like I was seeing “Colbert” perform for the very first time.

Yes, the show was very funny. But what was amazing to me was how well the show’s staff conveyed a simple message: You are the show’s soundtrack, so laugh your ass off, and then they spent a ton of time getting us into a great mood so we could do just that.

I was so impressed by how simple and direct the message was. They took an otherwise mundane thing — watching a guy read a teleprompter for 20 minutes — and turned it into a performance that we were excited to be part of. And it’s that simple message allows them to create a fantastic atmosphere for the show every single night.

Of course, I woke up the next day and watched the finished episode. I was looking for myself, sure. But more than that: I was listening for myself. Were we loud enough?

We were. And we really did make for a great soundtrack, and a really great show.

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What Can Happen When You Put Things Out There.

So here’s what I love about that story, above, from the very talented Kishi Bashi:

Sometimes, you stumble into amazing things. Sometimes, you make a snippet of a thing, and people like it, and they ask for more. Sometimes, you unintentionally put something amazing into the universe.

Our world is full of happy accidents, of the times that you stumble onto something great. But the only way to get there is to put something out into the world first.

Go. Make. Share. It’s the only way to really know.

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The Next 10.

Two nights ago, I saw Lorde, a 16-year-old singer from New Zealand, play a sold out show here in New York. Yesterday, her first single hit no. 1.

Lorde is very good, and very talented, and also — she’s a decade younger than me. Which makes my head hurt a little.

And all I could think about at the show Tuesday was this: What’s she going to do with the next decade? What choices will she make? What moves will she make? And will she be able to put the right people in her life to make some amazing music?

But it occurs to me, too: There are 36-year-olds out there who’d like at someone my age and ask the same questions. (Minus the music part.)

I don’t know what the next 10 years hold for me. I don’t know what happens next. But I’m trying to put the right people in place, and I’m trying to get into rooms where smart conversations are happening. With that and work, I’m optimistic that things will work out.

I wish the same for Lorde — and everyone else trying to do something amazing with the decade ahead.

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A Quick Lesson From Vine.

A thought about Vine, the social media video platform that everyone I know is obsessed with:

The reason Vine is so freaking great is because it has constraints. At 6 seconds per Vine, you don’t have enough time to make something big. So people are often turning to Vine not to capture the important moments in life, but the trivial ones, the goofy and the mundane and the silly. (Which, for what it’s worth, also happen to be the moments that are most universal.)

This is a wonderful thing about limitations: It forces us to be creative in new ways. It forces us to approach our work differently. And with Vine, the limitations have spawned some really amazing little videos.

The same thing can go for your work. Enforcing limitations — faster deadlines, stricter word counts — can force you to work in new ways, and sometimes, that leads to some amazing results.

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