What do we owe musicians?

What if the answer is . . . nothing?

I’m reading Seth Godin’s excellent book What to Do When It’s Your Turn (and It’s Always Your Turn), and I’m struck by this passage on page 99:

[The] feeling of being owed is toxic.

And on page 101:

What do we owe the singer who trained for years to sing us that song? What do we owe the person who spoke up at the meeting with a brand new idea? We have all sorts of moral and cultural obligations, but the artist must act as if:

Do you have a mental list of “things I should be doing more of?”

Haha, trick question. Of course you do. Everyone does.

Is reading on that list? If you’re perusing a blog on personal development, it probably is. It’s definitely on my list.

We all know we should read, but making time to do so takes intention. So why carve out time to read?

Because reading a lot of books, especially nonfiction, will change your life.

It does not feel good. It does not look good.

But failure is good.

You know, one of the great things about writing a blog is that I get to cover what I need to hear the most. And that’s great, because I suck at dealing with failure. I really, really hate it, and if left to my own devices, I avoid failure at all costs because I like to feel smart and good at things. Is that so wrong? Is it??

Why get better at anything? It’s an interesting question. When we’re kids, we don’t have a choice. The adults around us demand improvement:

• We’re expected to move from 6th grade to 7th grade at the end of the year.
• We’re expected to be nicer to our younger brother when we’re 10 compared to when we were 9.
• We’re expected to get at least a little better at the piano after six months of lessons.

But once we graduate high school (or maybe college) and reach a point where we can function in society, the external pressure to improve disappears. If we can hold down a job and keep a roof over our head, odds are no one’s going to hassle us too much. If we want to keep improving, we have to hassle ourselves, and that’s no easy task. Here are some reasons it’s worth doing:

In June 2010, I was having a real rough time. I was an aspiring professional trumpet player with an injured lip, and I couldn’t play. I was also trying to finish a graduate degree in music at the time, so this was kind of a problem. I had other problems, too:

• I was deep in student loan debt.
• I was completely out of shape.
• It was time to start a career, and I had never had a “real job.”
• I had no idea where to start fixing any of these things.

The one thing I had plenty of was time, and I decided to do some reading. Needing somewhere to start, I picked up a reading list given to me by someone I truly admired: jazz trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, whom I’d been lucky to meet a few years earlier. One of the books on her list had a bizarre title, and it caught my eye: Psycho-Cybernetics, by Maxwell Maltz. I got a copy and went to my local coffee shop to check it out. That book’s message — that our self-image guides our behavior and we can change our self-image — blew my mind. I started down a road of self-improvement and personal development, and I’ve never been the same since.