Among the anecdotes resonating with me from Jeff Tweedy's Let's Go (So We Can Get Back) is when Jerry Wexler praises (then very young) drummer Roger Hawkins: "You're a great drummer." Tweedy writes that when Hawkins shares the story there is a very brief and poignant punchline: "So I became one."
It makes me wonder about the words we say to adolescents...and the seeds of future truths we plant.
Few successful people (at least those I have read) praise their formalized schooling for their success. Most often, success is linked to the perverse joy of the failure encountered while doing the work. I read again and again and again that the concept of the long genius (we are born one way) is a myth. The repetition of the work is what matters most--the work we want to do for us, not the work someones else prescribes.
I am so often thinking, while I am reading, about how we have been trained and encouraged to teach may be more limitation than liberation.
I love Tweedy's simple yet powerful "I try to make something new, something that wasn't there when I woke up, every day 168)." He didn't invent that concept, but he learned to do it. He learned the habits that work for him so that he might write and create and contribute--to engage--every day.
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