Looking west from Paseo del Volcan, Albuquerque, NM

Not all leaders are anointed, headhunted, or groomed. Now, more than ever, anyone who decides to lead is a leader.

Which means the next question has to be:

Is leadership an obligation?

1. If you can help someone who’s facing a problem you’ve faced in the past, is it okay if you decide not to?
2. If you have insight to share with your colleagues and you keep it to yourself, is that fine?
3. If you could push for positive change but you choose instead to preserve the status quo, is there a problem?
4. If you could recommend a book or podcast to someone who needs some inspiration, are you failing them if you do nothing?
5. If you could have a frank conversation with a friend who needs to hear some hard truth, should you?
6. If you could be building skills that would help you change your entire industry in ten years, do you have to?
7. If you’ve spent 25 years accumulating deep institutional memory and you choose not to share it with your new boss, is that acceptable?

Questions like this make us uncomfortable. Here’s another way to ask the same questions:

What is an orchestra audience paying for, exactly?

Why would an art lover buy a painting from a local artist?

When a college freshman visits his academic advisor, what is he hoping to find?

The answers seem self-evident: Music, art, and information, respectively. Duh.

But we’re missing a crucial ingredient.

Well-Executed Art Isn’t Enough

If a classical music lover just wanted to hear her favorite piece played well, she’d buy a pair of Grado headphones, open a bottle of wine, and listen to old Chicago Symphony recordings in her living room.

Every job requires tools.

Whatever kind of creative work you do (or want to do), you’ll eventually have to wrestle with this question:

What equipment do I need?

This is a tricky question for two reasons:

1. Buying gear is super fun.
2. We’re great at convincing ourselves we need more gear.

And come on! Who doesn’t want a Gibson Les Paul, or a new MacBook Pro (with Retina display), or a set of Monette trumpet mouthpieces, or a Canon EOS 5DS? (I’m not even a photographer, and I want that camera).

From Gaston DuFresne’s Develop Sightreading. This book is full of discomfort.

Musicians are supposed to practice sight-reading (playing music we’ve never seen before).

Sight-reading is a crucial skill. We need to be able to sound good playing anything, not just music we’ve practiced for weeks.

Practicing sight-reading is dead simple: you practice it by doing it.

But simple doesn’t mean easy, and sight-reading is also uncomfortable. When you sight-read, you have to listen to yourself sound bad. Musicians like to sound good.

A man is terrified of snakes. He avoids them at all costs. If he sees a snake on TV, he gets anxious. If he encounters a real live snake, he’s overcome with anxiety.

An effective treatment for this kind of fear is exposure therapy. It’s pretty much what you’d think: gradual exposure and desensitization to whatever is causing the fear response. At first, a patient might be asked to look at pictures of snakes. Later, he might take a trip to the zoo and spend a few minutes in the herpetarium. Eventually, he might hold a live snake.