Growth & Goals

Given how common it is to hear people bemoan where they are in life or their careers, you’d think that conversations about growth and goals would be more commonplace. So my hope is that by the end of this post you’ll either develop a new interest in this subject matter, or at least leave with yet another way to think about it.

In the macro sense, the goals we choose to embrace represent visible and evolutionary mile-markers within our lives. And at the micro level, they represent experiments that we conduct to test the theories we have on anything that’s important to us. So since one of my greatest goals has always been to sound as great as my musical heroes, it means that I’m going to have to learn how to think like them—which is a growth issue—in order to play like them, which is a goal issue. And like I like to say these days, “the quality of our doing will always be a lagging measure of the quality of our being.”

Recently I came up with a simple iceberg concept that’s great for explaining why great musicians sound the way they do. And the gist of the concept is that if the visible part of their playing represents feelings, and the part just below the water’s surface represents moments, then the bottom of the iceberg represents function. In other words, if the potency of a listener’s feelings is reflective of the number and quality of memorable moments, then the solidity of a bands musical foundation is what makes it possible to create those moments. Now by this logic, it clearly says that the more moments you make, the more potent the feelings should be for the listener. However, there’s an important caveat to this perspective that can invalidate this theory if it’s not pointed out. Which I honestly believe separates the good from the great.

Story time…

A few years ago, bassist Chuck Israels said something to me that I’ll never forget. He said that back in his day everyone learned to play the same songs a million different ways, whereas today people learn to play a million songs the exact same way. And he’s absolutely correct! But the reason why is because in his youth he had more opportunities to learn how to maintain the attention of a typical non-music playing and paying audience, which tends to be the bulk of the attendees at most music events. And like the military, we musicians should be training for the types of battlefields we’re inevitably going to have to encounter. But when musicians aren’t put in enough of these environments to learn how to play for an everchanging audience—unlike the same faces they encounter among their peers in perhaps a scholastic environment— many important lessons go unlearned.

As mentioned earlier, moments create feelings. But if embraced at face value, this statement can derail even the most well-intentioned of musicians. Meaning that like the reciting of a script, it’s not hard to play an idea without regard to how it affects anyone else. But when it comes to the rhythmic timing/placement of an idea, it can only be understood within the context of how it affects the feeling of a groove for everyone else. So as you can see one is me focused whereas the other is we focused. And when I learned to place a higher premium on the integrity of a groove for the benefit of others, it suddenly became the musical differentiator that I was missing for how to make a song sound unique, and not like a million other songs that I know how to play. But to sustain this type of focus required me to become the kind of person that could see the value in caring more about what I could do for others than what I could do for the sole benefit of myself. And that perspective is one of the most quintessential hallmarks of personal growth, as in this scenario the quality of my being needed to be what it needed to become in order to improve the quality of my performances.  

So again, while goals are great for helping us to focus our energy on a productive set of purposes—so as to prevent ourselves from spinning aimlessly in life without direction—remember that the true value of our goals is that they reflect back to us the extent to which we’ve matured in life. And the extent to which we mature is the extent to which we travel inward to learn more about how to improve our outlook on life, so as to ultimately improve the way we show up in the world.

Suggested Takeaways…

a) Goals are temporary, growth is forever.

b) Good musicians rely on formulaic moments to drive the end feeling, whereas great musicians rely on the contextual feeling of a song to dictate the substance of the moments that can drive the end feeling.    

c) The goals we choose to embrace represent visible and evolutionary mile-markers within our lives. And like a mirror, they reflect back to us where we are along the continuous spectrum of our internal growth.