Feb Update 2016
NEWS & MUSE
Excerpt from The Great Book of Troubadours
Rule #35: Be a Professional Amateur
Dear friends,
This month i bring you some scribblings from my upcoming little troubadour book. i hope
you enjoy them …
It’s tricky. i love to eat. i adore cooking. Do i want to own a restaurant or be a chef? No thanks.
Nor do i do recreational music. Some people think i’m being precious when i say this, but my favorite symphony has been, and always will be, silence.
It could be my particular inner melody of sensitivities to noise, music or otherwise. But if the music is playing loudly when I’m sitting in a restaurant about to eat my vegetables, i cannot enjoy eating. i can tell you how many beats per minute, what the high hat is doing, what the background vocals were doing, what key it’s in… i play kazoo, guitar, bass, piano, sax, flute, background vocals, EQs, stereophonics, and i’m evaluating them all. All this instead of dinner.
Please get Whitney Houston out of my soup.
Show Up, Do the Work
To be a Troubadour, you must first and foremost be professional. i adore being a professional.
Better, i adore working with people who are even more professional than me. Being professional means being in the room with somebody who knows how valuable i am (and how valuable they are), how important my time is (and theirs), and who agrees that combining our forces is a wise choice on so many levels. The work talks and the bullshit walks. Don’t put up with anything less.
Being a professional is an ethic. An epic ethic. Even as we speak, i’m dressed for work, in a meeting with my editor, on time. (Though I did rollerblade here.)
Put yourself in a professional environment. Each morning i get up, put on my best songwriter’s clothes and i go to work. i set the trap, hop into the duck blind, and then forget everything except ducks.
Being professional means showing up. The work has priority. That means you come second.
For many years, Charlie Monk, the godfather of country music and the publisher i worked with in Nashville, told me this: “Write all year, be diligent, do the work, son, and whatever you do, bring me one good song.” He meant: keep showing up until the magic comes through.
 |
|
In Nashville, yours truly and brother/mentor/friend Lance Hoppen, a consummate musician. You’ve heard him sing and play bass in the legendary band Orleans (Dance with Me, Still the One, etc.) If you want to be the best, hang with the best!
|
Professional Amateur
So now my inner amateur gently slides her hand into
the hand of my professional. And we travel together, hand in hand, in a circle of professional creativity
called yes-and.
We turn up on time, and it’s the first time we’ve ever turned up.
We do what we do while we do it, and we know that the quality is there because we are present.
We laugh a lot more, cry a lot more, and drink a lot less.
We think every creative idea is a privilege, a baby, fresh, vivacious, bubbly, with chubby little cheeks like mine. The amateur is gobsmacked. Breath taken, spellbound, and (I hate to use this abused word) in awe. And an amateur knows how to love baby ideas.
The professional knows exactly how to care for baby ideas, manage them. We’ll show up for the sleepless nights, the diaper changes, the bottles, the sore nipples, the sheer helplessness, and the awesome responsibility entrusted to the work. The work of the professional amateur Troubadour.
In professional golf, even the greatest players have coaches, and they practice, practice, practice. They are professionals and they work at it for hours upon hours. Even though they are top of the line, they have coaches helping them get it better. And then one day, they walk out on the golf course and make it look effortless, easy, like they were an amateur, just loving what they do.
Here is a great question for your amateur: why do i do this? Bottom line: because i love it. Then remind yourself, over and over, why you love it.
Being professional means holding beginner’s mind, too. So you’ve developed your craft, you’ve become masterful. So what, who cares, forget it. Forget everything you know. Set a clean slate, let the seed for your next work germinate from what you brought to the table today. Yes-and, yes-and, yes-and.
At work, words and music have my 100% focus. And when i walk out the door, i shut music writing off. i’m done, i’m toast. Blissful toast, mind you. Someone could pop an axe into my forehead and i probably wouldn’t notice.
Love What You Do and Why You Do It
On the other side, be an amateur. i don’t mean being amateur in the sense of someone who hasn’t bothered to learn your lyrics. For God’s sake, be professional and memorize your lyrics.
i mean amateur from amor — love. To be an amateur is to love what you do. And it dovetails nicely into the Troubadour’s practice of beginner’s mind. (Maybe the Buddha spoke Latin. Hard to imagine. Still, lots of great things are hard to imagine, which is why the world needs Troubadours like you.)
Amateur means you can laugh at yourself. And you don’t grow up until you’ve had your first good belly laugh at yourself. Most of all, amateur means love what you do. i remember the day in Nashville, going back 15 years or so, amidst tons of background stress, thinking, “What good is all this if i’m not enjoying it? If every morning i don’t get up and think i’m the luckiest man alive?” So that was the day i decided to be a professional amateur. i love what i do, and when i forget, i remind myself.
And now back to the work.
Ultimately, a professional amateur knows that all — i repeat all — that you create will have to be let go. The work will go out into the world because you are a professional and you send it. You will be sensitive to its journey because you are an amateur. And you will learn to live the question about how it will fare.
Let it go. The work is enough. What you think or what anyone else thinks about it ironically becomes unimportant once you birth it.
Be great. My amateur has no time for amateurishness; professionalism is its own reward. My boss is compassionate (that’s me). My coworkers are brilliant. And as professional amateurs, we are all here in the same boat, with the wind at our backs. Sometimes that boat is called Bliss.
Live Wild, Dream Hard, Love Big,
…w
Follow Us!