dare to dream

Hold your dream close: What I learned in the recording studio

On a sunny and warm September morning, I walked into a recording studio for the first time.  The building exterior was non-descript, but inside there was shelf upon shelf of musical instruments, lots of recording equipment, and a grand piano. I was there to play piano for Macy Robison's cabaret-style recital Children Will Listen, in advance of her Time Out for Women (TOFW) performances in 2011, and I was "pinch-myself" thrilled.

I had accompanied Macy for several of her live performances, but I'm not a professional musician.  In order to get the best recording possible, I expected the TOFW producers to hire a professional musician, one who could easily "out-scale and arpeggio" me.  But neither they nor Macy opted for a professional, they wanted me.

Upon entering the studio, I was eager, but relaxed.  The calm was short-lived.  Within minutes of  meeting producer Tyler Castleton, who also composed In the Meantime (one of the songs we were about to record) and audio engineer Mike Greene, the taskmaster in my head (maybe you've met her/him) started in on me:  "Tyler and Mike are professionals.  I'm not.  They are going to think I'm lousy.  I am lousy.  I'm going to let Macy down.  This is supposed to be about her and her dream and it's becoming about me.  How selfish.  Why did I think I could do this?" Inside the recording studio, where the photo shop for your ears happens

The first song we record is Tyler's In the Meantime.  It's a new arrangement.  I've been on the road.  I haven't practiced.  It's not in my fingers.  I play badly.  We try Grateful.  Also a new arrangement.  I continue to play poorly.

After several lousy takes, I put everything on pause.  I'll practice these tonight.  Let's move on to something we've polished.  A first take of Just a Housewife. A second take, and then another.  Ah... better.  I'm not accustomed to multiple takes.  In a performance, you get one shot and then move on.  In a studio, the first performance is a warm-up, and you keep warming up, until you've recorded the song 5-6 times.  Once you get the hardest parts recorded, you breathe easier, because you know that a great audio engineer can string together the best of the takes.

Next we record Children Will Listen, When I Grow Up, the easiet piece by far, which I also play poorly.  The taskmaster in my mind has backed off a bit, but feels compelled to remind me she's there.  On to two of my favorites, Simple Little Things and I Won't Mind. The playbacks sound pretty good.  Macy quips -- "If I can listen to myself over and over again, and not hate it, then it's probably ok."  By the way, her singing isn't just ok.  She sounds fabulous, especially given that she's six months pregnant.  Macy's telling a story not only with her words, but with the richness and texture of her voice.  She's also unflappable.  If she's nervous, she's got an impressive poker face.

Macy Robison at the microphone, about to deliver up some magic

Things continue to improve after lunch.  Around 4pm, day one is complete.  We've run through every song at least once.   There are some good takes.  I'm no longer mortified.  In fact, I think we're both confident the album will be good, a lovely post-Time Out for Women memento.

There's only one little problem.

As I wrote in The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I loved the piano as a child, but by the time I was a teenager, music had become a drudgery.   Since moving to Boston, as I accompanied/collaborated with Vanessa Quigley, and then Macy, my love of music had re-emerged.  I began to remember that I loved piano; to cherish my talent.  But that afternoon, as I walked out of the studio, I could feel the happiness slipping away, sadness seeping in.

Me at the piano, slogging

But I'd lost this dream once. I couldn't let it happen again. I had twelve hours to get the dream back -- to get myself in a place where I could walk out of the studio on day two, brimming with, not bereft of happiness. 

I got to work. I practiced In the Meantime and Grateful in the hotel lobby.   A little embarrassing.  But when you're fighting for something, you do what you must.  And then I really got to work.  I reviewed what I'd written in my journal, and reinforced what I'd written by reaching out to a few trusted friends for pep talks.

Here's what I needed to remember:

Whenever piano becomes about performing -- of proving something -- of being perfect, I rarely play well.  Like Sisyphus, I can never roll the stone up the hill of my expectations.  Even if I could play perfectly, the lesson I've learned from Lady Galadriel is that when we seek adulation, we despair.   Perhaps too that's what the biblical passage about charity was trying to convey: when what we do is about connecting with, rather than impressing, others, we will succeed, regardless of how many "mistakes" we make, because charity never faileth.  

As Day 2 dawned, I had neutralized the taskmaster by planning on mistakes, lots of them.  More importantly, my focus shifted from me to Macy, to providing a foundation upon which she could build in order to communicate, in a way that words cannot, how important mothering is.

And everything changed; the joy was back.

Macy Robison and Whitney Johnson, End of Day Two -- Happy

Sometimes dreams begin to slip away.  If and when they do, fight for them.  My friend Cara Quinn, a gifted pianist, who has at times practiced 10 hours a day, is now a mother of five children under the age of 10.  She holds her dream close by practicing every evening from 9-11 after her children go to bed. Amidst the handling the logistics of being a published author and the mechanics of mothering, author Julie Berry holds tight her love of writing by occasionally reminding herself why she writes.

Do you have a taskmaster with whom you contend?   Do you record in your journal what you've said or done in the past so you can refer to it?  Who are your go-to people when you get sidelined and need help getting back in your game?

Are you holding your dream close?  Fighting for it, if need be?

HBR Blog: Harnessing Those Hard-Won Skills

A funny thing happened on the way to writing these posts of looking at personal disruptive innovation.  I was just going to write just one, then two, and now this most recent piece Harnessing Those Hard-Won Skills is the third of what I expect will be four posts. 

After you read the post over at HBR, below are some additional musings:

Are sustaining skills always hard-won?  Probably not.  Last night as I was driving home, thinking through my list of things to do, I realized that I was priortizing things that I like to do, that will help me do what I already do, better.  But, if we really want to do what we do disruptively well better, we need to add in things that don't come easily, like learning html code.  I am constrained with what I can do on my blog,  not only because I don't know how to code, but because in not knowing, there are things that it won't even occur to me to do (e.g. I don't even know what's on the menu).  And that limits my ability (our ability) to engage here at dare to dream.

Another example.  My accountant, Carol Sanchez, has been encouraging me hire a bookkeeper who will teach me how to use Quicken for my personal accounts.  Sure I could hire this out, but isn't it also true that if I keep my own books -- even for a time -- that apart from making sure there's food on the table, I will be more expert at knowing how to garner and when to allocate financial resources to my dreams and to those that I love.

Thoughts?

What are your hard-won skills?

What are your disruptive skills?

How do the hard-won skills help you do what you do disruptively well better?

*** 

P.S.  Hat tip to Macy Robison for telling me about Zack Arias who, in addition to being a talented photographer is also a master teacher, to Jill Hubbard Bowman for introducing me to Alicia Morga.

P.P.S.  I have a blog half-way done about my experience of accompanying Macy for her musical recording.  Will you give me a gentle nudge so that I will get it posted? 

 

Alicia Morga: Telling my Story on Camera

Alicia Morga's resume is chock full of brand names, like a B.A. from Stanford University, a JD from Stanford Law School, an investment banking position with Goldman, Sachs & Co, and time at the Carlyle Group, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.  She was born number eight to a Mexican-American family of 11 children, and due to a lack of resources, found herself in foster care for most of her childhood.  Having recently sold Consorte Media, a digital media company she founded five years ago, Alicia finds herself eager to tell her story.  You can find her personal blog here and her posts at Fast Company here.

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“You live in a fantasy world,” I was once told.  It stopped me cold.  From talking about my dreams, from talking about me.  It’s taken a few years, but I finally reached the point where I wanted, needed even, to tell my story.

Recently Angelica Perez-Litwin who runs a website called NewLatinas.net asked me to tell my story on camera. I had put my story in writing, but not on film.  So I reached out to a few friends who had expertise in filmmaking and asked them to help me.  The process was illuminating.  I found it difficult to talk about myself and my experiences.  I was also a little unnerved by the cameras and the need for makeup. 

That said, I really enjoyed learning about the craft and found that telling my story on camera has helped pull out different threads.  More importantly, I have found that, regardless of the medium, telling my story is paramount to acknowledging it, growing from it, and ultimately, letting it go.  Freeing me to write another one.

What Entrepreneurship Means from Alicia Morga on Vimeo. 

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Do you struggle, as Alicia has, to talk about yourself and your dreams?

Have you shared any of your story?  What medium have you used?

After you watch Alicia's video -- what did you learn about her?  About yourself?  

P.S.  Thank you to Jill Hubbard Bowman for introducing me to Alicia. 

Julie Berry: Why I Write

Julie Berry grew up in western New York, and now lives in eastern Massachusetts with her husband and four young sons.  Her first novel, The Amaranth Enchantment (2009, Bloomsbury) was a Junior Library Guild Selection and an IndieBound Next Top Ten Pick; her second novel, Secondhand Charm, releases October 12, 2010 from Bloomsbury.  She is also the co-creator, with her sister Sally Faye Gardner, of Splurch Academy for Disruptive Boys, a series of comic-graphic for ages 8-12 on August 19, from Penguin Books for Young Readers.

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I forget sometimes how much I love to write.

Life as an author is unromantic. Moments of joyful creation are few.  They never happen with the right set dressing – no windswept moors, no beaches, no cozy fireplaces. New books are born, in my world, in a tiny office so cluttered you can’t see the floor, or on my half of the bed, buried in unfolded laundry. Occasionally I flee to a library carrel, and sometimes I escape to a friend’s house to hide in her spare room and write. Stolen space, stolen time. I’m more fugitive than artist.

Often other concerns dwarf writing entirely. There are proposals to submit, contracts to negotiate, outlines to revise, ideas to research, deadlines to fret, and manuscripts to revise, revise, revise, revise.

Source:  istockphoto

Revision has its pleasures, to be sure, and anyone who dreams of publishing had better find them. But the rewards of revision are a pat on the back for washing the dishes. The rewards of writing, of pristine untouched virgin writing, can approach the Infinite. On good days.

Then there’s the commercial side of writing. Events to schedule, promote, orchestrate. Events to remember to show up for with an ironed shirt and brushed teeth.  Fun and thrilling in their way, and a necessary part of the process. But they’re a long remove from writing.

All author time is a withdrawal from life, home, and family that must be repaid. It would be far too easy to obsess over all things authorial and allow them to engulf who I was before I started writing. Perhaps I already do. But I try to balance my life in books with my other roles, principally in my marriage, mothering, and friendships.  So payback time is just another factored cost in my writing bottom line.

Source:  istockphoto

I’m lucky and I’m grateful to be an author. I’m fortunate to need to wrangle with contracts and deadlines and revision letters. It’s a privilege addressing audiences, young and old. But occasionally the sheer magnitude and fuss of these roles makes me wonder why I bother, makes me think nostalgically of those pre-writing days when I watched more movies.

And then I find a moment, or a reason, to open a new Word document and start to play. It starts badly. Again I tell myself it’s time to renew my friendship with Netflix. But first, just a few more paragraphs, to see if there’s some salvageable material here.

And then, while I’ve stopped paying attention, in a hum almost too quiet to hear, the joy appears. This bad beginning, this waste of words bends and twists itself into tangibility, like a man of clay beginning to stir. A breath of life brushes across the idea, across characters that were mere names, and they gasp a little. So do I.

Source:  istockphoto

It’s a miracle, and I’m a witness. These stories come from a land I do not own. Not without effort, for it’s a hard rodeo pinning a skittish novel down, but still, they come on their own, and when they do, then I remember. Ah, yes. This is why I write.

That I ever discovered I loved it was a gift my creator gave me.

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Do you ever get so mired in the unintended consequences (good and bad) of your dream that you forget  why you love your dream -- whether writing, painting, running, working, mothering?

Is there anything in particular that brings you back, as Julie described it, to what is "profoundly spiritual and unexplainable, like dew from heaven" about your dream?

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P.S.  My 10 yr-old daughter (she's read Splurch Academy 3x already) and I will be at the Wellesley Booksmith for one of Julie's book-signing events.  Bring your children (girls and boys) and especially yourself if you are an aspiring author: these events are a real treat!

Upcoming Book Events:
October 12 (Tue), Maynard Public Library, MA, 7pm
October 14 (Thu), Wellesley Booksmith, MA, 7pm
October 19 (Tue),  Orem Public Library, UT, 7pm
October 20 (Wed), King's English Bookshop, SLC, UT, 7pm
October 21 (Thu), The Purple Cow Bookstore, Tooele, UT, 6:30pm

HBR Blog: How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills

A number of you asked me how to idenitfy what your best skills are.

Here's a partial answer:  How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills.

Thoughts?

In particular, what compliments do you habitually dismiss?