Music is an art that doesn’t exist. You can’t “see”, “touch”, “taste”, or “hear” music. When you listen to music, you are actually listening to disturbed air. Musicians create music by disturbing air molecules. That disturbance travels to our ear. Our ear drums feel the vibrations and translate that into sound. Our brains assemble those sounds. The listener decides if that assembled sound is pleasing or not. Musicians are disruptors; their art is one of disturbance and vibration. Truly, we are all musicians. If we want to create work that matters, we must disrupt and disturb the status quo. We put ourselves in a position of saying “this might not work.” We say, “hey, I made this for you because I hope it helps.” Don’t be afraid to disturb the air.

What if “save as draft” was an option for texts? What if “are you sure you want to send that message” was a prompt we receive before we speak?The prompt always existed. Why aren’t we looking out for it? If we notice it, why aren’t we listening to it?

I wanted to stop piano lessons because I didn’t like practicing - I wanted to quit. My mom encouraged, strongly, to keep it up - don’t quit. I persevered. I enjoyed a rewarding career as a professional musician.I had a job where my peers were making 80k more than me. My bosses said, “I was hired and paid at a time when the business wanted to hire ‘different’ people and grow them.” I quit that job, without another job in place, because I value myself. If I persevered, I would have to re-prove myself to get ahead… just because I was “different.”Know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em. Life is too short.

Fate will take from you and I that which is most precious to us: loved ones, careers, offspring, partners, or ability. You and I might not be prepared for Fate; and we can’t fully prepare. You can remind yourself that your life, or the lives of those you love, can end at any moment. You can imagine to yourself that you will respond with equanimity and stillness. You might be preparing yourself in the wrong way - you might be intellectualizing your fear. To intellectualize our fear, is to break apart the future into little parts and examine them as If we were living that future right now. That’s not possible. Instead, what if we visualized ourselves submitting to Fate and to our experience? Visualize a moment in the future that you fear - say the loss of a loved one. How might you see yourself radically accepting that news? When you think about yourself fully experiencing that moment, what kinds of emotions do you imagine you might experience?If I have learned anything from the pandemic it is this: we will never truly know ourselves until we are forced by Fate to walk in our own shoes.

You made a series of decisions that produced outcomes that you may, or may not, have learned from. The real question is, where will we go from here?

Do you know people who pack their calendars tight with meetings? They are likely the people who say they get their work done at night. How effective are these people in the long run? The most important work you do today are born from the decisions you make now. If you want to improve your decisions, you must invest time to think. If your calendar is packed with meetings, when, where, and how do you invest that time?Here’s a tip - take time to write. Writing clarifies your thinking.Clarified thinking leads to effective decision making which leads to producing more work that matters.

Do you have a hard time achieving long term goals? What’s the smallest step you can take now to help you reach your goal? The smallest viable step. For many of us, perhaps you, taking the step is easy but staying consistent is hard. If you are like me, you know that struggle. What to do? Take a spoonful of sugar. Making work fun, or sweet, incentivizes us to do more work - to take more steps. If we take enough steps, we eventually hit our goal. The hardest part about achieving longterm goals is keeping the journey fun! Perhaps the question you ask yourself is not, How do I stay focused on reaching my long term goals? Perhaps the question is actually, How do I make my journey more fun? How do I make the smallest viable step a dance and not a dirge?

Tabula rasa means blank slate, and you should have one for one simple reason.The best time to make lasting change is at the moment when the past and the present have a clean break. New Year’s, birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, new jobs, graduations, unemployment, divorces, death, birth - when the life you knew dies and a new life begins. Your tabula rasa does not have to be January 31 nor on a Monday. For me, it’s every day when I sleep - I remind myself that I might not wake up and ask what I might do differently If only I had a second chance. But what about at work - how can you leverage the tabula rasa at work?Your clients/customers/students/etc - they all have moments that they would consider their tabula rasa. How might you leverage those moments to influence change? Find your tabula rasa, love it, and leverage it.

You can be the most talented at what you do and still fail.It’s not your talent, grades, intuition, or divine providence bestowed upon you that wins the day.What wins is your ability to avoid and/or reduce mistakes. Eliminate and un-learn bad habits first to win more.

Scientific philosopher, Sr Karl Popper, shared his thoughts as to what makes science versus pseudoscience. You can read Popper’s thoughts in the book Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. In the book, which I’ve yet to read, Popper lays out seven conclusions. The first is what I find deeply curious: “It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory–if we look for confirmations.”Do you know people who walk around complaining about the world? It’s almost like they’re a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those people say things like “see, I told you this was going to suck.” That person believes they have a keen and infallible intuition that can’t be wrong. Popper’s first conclusion speaks to those people.Popper would argue that if we truly want to test our theories, then we should stop trying to prove them right and instead prove them wrong. As Popper says, “the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.”Nowadays, we must be on guard for claims and ideas that can’t be tested and refuted. We must guard our minds and souls against theories masquerading as facts. Remember, our minds may routinely betray us too.