Take a second today to reflect on the last 365 days. Who was part of the story? What role did they play in your story? How are you a more effective person today because of that person? I did that today. I found out that the people who made the largest impact played the smallest roles. Interesting.

I have actively been meeting up with friends and colleagues for coffee. Unplanned, my partners and I generate beautifully creative and absurd ideas out of nowhere. Some ideas include:Get your babies delivered by Amazon - Amazon Deliveries.New music group to tour.Ideas for a cabaret show.Demon children playing guitar to take over the world and how we stop them.How many different forms of vegetation did t he First Nations people of the upper midwest eat and why are we so chicken to eat them?What if we drove through a carwash and never paid?What if your AI consciousness had a conversation with mine? What would they say? Would they argue? What if we sent our AI versions to family get togethers?Weird ideas? Absolutely. But they’re ideas created from almost nothing. Before our conversations, those ideas may never have been spoken before… that we know of. If you want to try something brave, creative, and uplifting - try to create weird and off the wall ideas with your next coffee partner. Is it practical? Perhaps no… unless you think NOT exercising your brain is practical? Imagine a brain exercising… like your brain is in a gym lifting weights made out of “?”. And then, your brain would put down the question marks and go to lift heavier ones. Nobody in the gym notices.

In high school, my friends were (and still are) brainiacs — they have brilliant minds. These friends have gone on to do great work in their chosen fields. What was I like?I was the person who was endlessly curious about many things. I never focused on schoolwork — I still recoil at the thought of it. I threw my mind into ideas that interested me — music, debate, ideas, and having a laugh. Now, decades later, I haven’t change. I am not a scholar. though I love to learn. I am not an exceptionally skilled musician, though I love understanding music theory and creating music. I am not a debater, but I love exploring and exchanging ideas with to hers. I still love a laugh. I played my part — the explorer.The Explorer is the best role to play - and if you don’t play that role, you should be jealous. As the Explorer, I spend my time on endeavors. I’m never quite settled and never quite home. I feel that way as a person, and interestingly, that’s where I feel most comfortable. I hope that you come to know your role whatever it is. I hope that you never give up on playing that role — that your energy allows you to persist in your endeavor.

All relationships have a beginning and an end. Look at the relationships in your life. Where and how did they start and stop? In some cases, your most important relationships had a ceremonious start. A wedding? a kickoff? A ceremony of some kind? A public event where you lay bare your love and commitment towards another person, a project, or an idea. I think of it like a “birth” process. On the other hand, your most important relationships that ended likely had a ceremonious end. A divorce? A termination? A graduation? A funeral? A time where you had to account for what happened — good or bad — and you looked forward to the future. I think of this like a “death” process.The birth and death processes ultimately end with some type of closure. When a new human is born, families/society (hopefully) often celebrate and initiate the newborn in some way. When a human dies, family/society (hopefully) come together to lay bare their love for that person in a memorial service. Your audience (mostly) only remembers how you start the song and how you end it. Make each moment special. How you start and stop matter.

You and I use thousands upon thousands of gestures (micro and macro) every day to express ourselves. We furry our eye brows when confused or angry. We open our eyes in surprise. You and I may swallow when nervous. Imagine how much we are communicating without even realizing it? The puppeteers behind the muppets cannot express emotions the way we can; they can limited expressions and gestures. Every gesture the muppet made to express itself mattered. Imagine you could only change your facial expressions in 3 ways to express yourself. You would need to really think about how you wanted to change your face and what you really wanted to communicate to avoid being misunderstood or being ignored. The reality is that we have an abundance of gestures we can make, we are often misunderstood, and many times we are ignored. The other reality is that we can do something to change that — we can think like muppet puppeteers.When we want our work to resonate, we can think about using a strong gesture — symbol — to speak for us. What’s a strong symbol?Silence, a hug, a question, a call, a text, an ear, a talk, and lots more. These actions seem small, but as the muppets show us, a carefully placed small gesture can make all the difference.

Start by creating or doing something new that helps someone solve a problem. When we start adopting new and novel ways to solve our problems, the culture changes. You can only do that if you stop and see people as they are first.

I talk a lot about the person as an individual because I have a working theory that what we can truly control is our self. If that theory is true, then what matters is our story and how we live our story to serve others. There might be people who share a similar story grid, but it’s not the same. You and I might share a few threads in common, but we are not the same. Your story is just as beautiful and just as tragic as mine. There are so many aspects about what you do that make you the powerhouse that you are — you are not 1 of many in some cohort of people.Be careful not to lump people into a cohort too quickly. As easy as it is for us to simplify people, do the hard work of seeing people and their beautiful personal stories first. Interestingly, I think when we stop and appreciate someone for the beautiful person they are, we start to see they aren’t so much different from us — they’re just doing their best, they love, they cry, and like you, they wish someone would give them the benefit of the doubt.

If you get the little details right, then the rest of the piece falls into place.

I’m working with a composer who wrote a musical and had it arranged for several instruments and computer track. The composer engaged me to reduce the music so that the score could be played by 2 people. Welcome to the world of music reduction — you’ve seen this world before, but in a different way.My mission is to take the body of the composer’s work and reduce it to its essence. I get to ask questions like:Who is this for?What was intended?What is this for? What is the effect we’re trying to create?I then remove everything that doesn’t help me answer those questions. What’s remaining is essential and elegant. We can, and arguably should, become the music reductionists of our lives and our work.

You’ll encounter a person behind you in line anxious for you to hurry up. You might get annoyed by that person. It’s possible you’ll want to tell that person to back off. You’ll get upset — what’s that person’s problem?Then you see them running off to be with their family. That person has noisy kids. They were anxious to get what something to make their kids stop crying. Finally, you end up feeling sorry for that person. Oh wait… you’ll also feel like a moron for allowing yourself to get upset.