Seek and Ye Shall Find...

I often marvel at how marvelously successful people can act so humble. People like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jayhawks men’s basketball coach Bill Self, and a Royals pitcher named Joakim Soria just don’t seem to have big heads. Like, at all.

I think that humility comes from four main sources: competitive perspective – there are other people just as good or better at what one does; cosmic/religious perspective – to the greatness of a deity/size of the universe, one’s individual greatness is as nothing; the understanding that there’s always room for improvement – no one is perfect; and frequency of failure – successful people often fail far more frequently than so-called “failures.”

I’ve felt for a while that I’ll be able to move forward faster in my life if I find humility, so I’ve been searching for it, and I think that I’ve finally found it thanks to the fourth cause of humility – frequency of failure. I’m now an academic coach - what most people call a tutor – and, boy, have I found humility. Most days, even if I understand perfectly the subject matter that I’m teaching, I leave my sessions wondering if I’ve done even the slightest bit of good and wondering if I’ve communicated effectively. Sure, I’ve had a moment of triumph - I found out that one of my students got a B on his Spelling test when he hadn’t passed a single one to that point. Even so, doubts like the following constantly run through my head: “I have six students, and it’s about to be seven. I surely can’t feel that one success with one student means that I’m succeeding with them all. How do I know if I’m doing them any real good? Can’t the rate of improvement always be a little bit higher? Am I moving too fast?

The frequency of failure truly hits home as I practice piano daily. I focus on playing all the notes at the right times, try to balance the volume in both hands, yet I still make hundreds of little mistakes in the hour or so that I practice. Coaching academics gives me so much opportunity to fail. I think, then, that the success is in learning. Success is understanding that failure never has to stop motion. My communications instructor during college says, “Just work to post quality content. Do nothing more. Just try to post quality content.” So, that’s what I try to do with my blog, tweets, with anything that I post on Facebook, with any comment that I make on the radio, and what I do when I try to write songs.

In my efforts to post quality content, I fail so much. I could always say something a little bit better or find a clearer or briefer way to express my thoughts, but I have to fail. I have to fail before I can succeed; and, no matter how much I succeed, more failures wait to creep up and bite me. I was teaching voice lessons to a group of wonderful ladies. Yet, one by one, they dropped out. It’s most likely that they really have just gotten too busy, but I still can’t help but feel that if I’d made the product attractive enough that they’d have found time to continue. It’s not like we didn’t have fun, and they certainly produced more quality sound as we went along, and it’s not like they stopped lessons right after starting. If I ever get to teach voice lessons again, though, I’ve certainly learned what I’ll do differently, even if I never get to work with those ladies again. The loss of the opportunity feels like a very humbling failure.

Bamba Blindside

He didn’t even speak Spanish…

Last night, I saw a movie about Ritchie Valens. That Rock n’ Roll pioneer.

I’m not a rock star. Perhaps, I’ll never be. But, as a passionate music lover and semi-pro musician, hanging out with a couple of Mexican friends who love Ritchie’s music, I felt connected to “my roots.” I felt like I was learning about my history.

Why it hadn’t registered in my head that it was Ritchie Valens, the original “La Bamba” guy, was one of the people who died in Clear Lake, I’m not sure…

“The day the music died.”

Watching the movie, all that I knew from the exposition of the film, and from my friends, was that Ritchie was the “La Bamba” guy… but then, when the film showed a guy with glasses about to board a plane during a snowstorm, and a big fella who vaguely resembled a guy whom I vaguely remembered from a video clip of “Chantilly Lace” that I’d seen about 10 years ago, it suddenly hit me… and the moment of realization and shock pressed on me almost as if it had just happened…. Valens was getting on a plane with Buddy Holly… and the Big Bopper*… oh my lord… no… the day the music died…

*Note: Talk about “stealing black music.” Listen to “White Lightning” recorded by the Big Bopper. Just… wow.

And Waylon Jennings could’ve been on that plane. For those who follow me on Twitter*, you got a tease of this entry. To think how those guys, Waylon for example, used the time that they perhaps could’ve never had… If life isn’t random sometimes, explain to me how a coin toss gave us Waylon, Shooter, etc. Try to imagine country music history with out the name Jennings. Then try to imagine rock n’ roll history with more Ritchie Valens. Either result of the coin toss gives us a major plus, and a major sadness.

*Shameless plug: @mapnmusicman

Now, think of the music that we’ll never get to hear form Ritchie. He was a hell of a guitar player. We got Waylon. In a way, from now on, when I hear Waylon’s music, I feel like I’ll be hearing a piece of Ritchie, of Buddy Holly, of the Big Bopper.

I’d been wondering, off and on, about the mystique of things that will never be but could’ve been… what if Mickey Mantle (baseball reference, kids) hadn’t drunk away a good chunk of his health and gotten knee problems? What if Ritchie Valens hadn’t died? Now, I think that I understand… It seems that there’s a personal connection to the loss of the glorious things that could’ve been. We are all united in this loss. It always feels new and fresh. I could hardly get to sleep last night… the power of that realization, and to lose Ritchie, and the fact that there was a little miscommunication when one of my friends told me that the actor was still alive and I misheard him and thought that he meant that Ritchie was still alive… The death of the hope of seeing Ritchie somewhere in his old age crushed me, and thinking about all of the great music that he could’ve made… Perhaps he would’ve learned Spanish and, today, there’d be more blending of Mexican and White music. Perhaps he would’ve flamed out after a couple more hits… But, his guitar ability makes me think not. RIP Ritchie. To me, you just died. Thank you for the music.

Making Up Rules

Perhaps there isn’t a lot to say this time. My last project was to try to lessen my clutter. I did fairly well; I got rid of two grocery bag sizes of trash. I felt, at first, like the whole project was just moving too slowly. I felt like all that I was really doing was getting my junk count down to where it was when I moved from my old house. Let’s face it; one is always acquiring more junk. Advertising in the mail, pay stubs, bank receipts, for me things like sheet music, show programs. How does one decide what’s necessary and what isn’t? Well, for starters, some of my junk was from my financial advisor, so I called her and asked if some of those generic mail-outs were necessary to keep. She said no, so that got rid of a handful of booklets.

One thing that I have going for me at the moment is that I’m really starting to enjoy having floor space in my bedroom. Currently, the boxes of junk are in the living room, and I’m doing the sorting there. I feel much more creatively free with space in my bedroom. I feel more inclined to sit down at my keyboard and play… the reader will recall that one of my current intentions is to make playing the piano a daily part of my life. Which reminds me that I need to get some playing in before I leave to call the football game tonight. Fire pit time awaits me after I get back from the game, so I probably won’t do any playing tonight.

In any case, I feel pretty good about the progress that I’ve made. I think that, if I achieve my ends in this junk sorting project, I’ll reward myself with a carrot cake. Oh, yeah.

One of the things that I accomplished was clearing off the top of my roll-top desk (yes, I have one of those.) I put my CDs (yes, I have those) on little horizontal racks so that they’re properly displayed and the top of my roll-top looks much better. I could get accustomed to this improved organization.

The rule that I’m making up is that I’m going to extend this project. I feel that, though it’s good to not get stuck on one thing, it is good to see a project through. I feel that this project is probably the most important short-term one that I’ve undertaken to this point. It’s so important because it speaks to three larger issues: 1) overall organization of possessions, 2) future freedom, and 3) lessening of stress. To not have all that junk weighing me down will really help my stress levels. I’ve got a box of stuff to donate that’s already 1/8 full, and I still have 5 boxes to sort through. Well, really, it’s about 4, but it feels like more because some of those boxes are small. Some things have found places to belong, and the resultant organization is very pacifying.

Note: This article is written in the present tense from last Friday, when I intended to publish it.

Baby Steps

I love my housemate. He’s a terrific listener and offers marvelous insights. In college, he was a member of the cross country team and has maintained his conditioning. This commitment taught him a lot, it seems, and I’m now the beneficiary of a big pearl of wisdom.

He and I were talking about this mutual acquaintance of ours, and I mentioned how she talked about working out. He was a little surprised, and said, I didn’t think that her body looked like the type of a person who makes working out a regular part of her life. He said that he can tell by looking at a person how committed he/she is to working out. He said, for a lot of people, they work out for a little while, super hard core for a couple of weeks, and then they flame out. I jumped the gun and correctly guessed that he could tell that I was such a person.

I was fascinated by this concept because it seemed to speak to a larger issue in my life… the inability to completely follow through on personal improvement plans. This whole three days’ focus series is a way for me to be focused on being productive. To this point, I’ve had success with the three days’ focus series because it has ensured that I, at the very least, start projects. I find this to be an effective method, especially for little projects that can be completed, largely, in three days’ time. However…

The last three days’ focus project was to focus on playing the piano. I’d said that I wanted to achieve 15 hours of practice time towards that magical 10,000-hour target which, when achieved, would probably put me at the level of piano mastery (note that I’m not saying virtuosity). In looking at my progress, I tabulated 2 hours and 15 minutes. Now, if I took the measurements and compared them to my goal, surely I would consider this last project a failure. But, I don’t, and it’s because of my conversation with my housemate.

You see, in that discussion, Housemate mentioned that, to really make something a part of your life, you want to start out small and simply commit to it. I played piano on each of the three days. If I make the piano playing a daily thing, then, perhaps, some days, I’ll practice much more than 25 or 50 minutes. If I tabulate those times, perhaps by the end of the year I’ll be close to 1,000 hours. Perhaps, in coming years, I’ll commit even more and reach 10,000 hours after 5 or 6 years. At that time, I’ll still be in my early thirties, and have the rest of my life to let the keys help me to go wherever I want to go!

In speaking of going wherever I want to go, today I started a new three days’ focus project. The reader may recall that one of my earlier entries was “Clutter Confrontation,” in which I described my attempts to de-clutter my bedroom, making it more livable. I made moderate progress at the time, and now I’m going whole hog. I’ve hauled 98% of the boxes of junk out of my bedroom and started asking myself questions like “What can I do with this?” “Is there somewhere in my house that this can belong?” I feel that working on this project and organizing the junque (misspelling intentional. Junque refers to junk that isn’t worthless… it’s just in the way) will enable me to move about the world more freely. I have no plans to settle permanently in Salina, and, when I do move, I want my move to be relatively stress-free, and having control over my possessions will make that much more likely. So, for today, tomorrow, and the next day, I’m doing battle with my past that I might have a more stress free future. ¡Olé!

Three Days' Focus Interlude: Who is my audience?

Writers produce more effective writing when they keep their audience in mind. Well, more specifically, when they write to the audience. My goal is to produce effective writing. If I’m going to do this, I must not only write with plenty of voice, edit myself to have effective use of conventions, etc., but must also write to the audience.

The thing is that my goal with the “Three Days’ Focus” personal improvement plan and the accompanying editorials is, well, to learn to focus. So, it seems to me that, rather than just saying “I’m trying to write in a good journalistic style” or “I’m writing to anyone who likes to read introspective literature,” I think that I should write to a specific person, whether real or imaginary.

So, what is the appeal in doing this? Frankly, I think that it’s an appeal of personal taste. Consider how historically exciting it is when one reads what Lincoln wrote to his wife, or your mother to your father in old love letters. You get to put yourself immediately in the personal and empathetic mindset of reading. It’s similar to how much popular intrigue books like Harry Potter have. In these books, seemingly half the literature is dialogue. Reading plays, too, is exciting; the reader can picture him/herself in the scene. “Open letter to [some person]”-type literature (Morris’s “Open Letter to a Christian Nation,” and Living Colour’s “Open Letter to a Landlord” are powerful examples of this medium. I’m going to try, for a while, to write thus. So, for example, and I’m not sure at this point who the particular audience member will be, you might see a passage like:

Therefore, Marvin (Marvin is my M&M dispenser), the reason that I have decided to make the next three days’ focus project a song to my grandma is because….

Or, perhaps, I don’t need to name the person out loud (figuratively speaking). Perhaps, as the writer, I simply need to keep that person in mind.

It’s important to note, however, that I‘m not writing this way because of someone, as Dante wrote the Divine Comedy because he couldn’t get over his obsession with Beatrice; I’m not writing to a muse. I’m writing this for myself to a particular person so that that person might know me. Johnnny Rzeznik, in the iconic pop rock hit “Iris,” wrote “I don’t want the world to see me/Cuz I don’t think that they’d [sic] understand/When everything’s made to be broken/I just want you to know who I am.” In this exercise, you could say that I’m writing of my personal progress to this particular audience member in order to build the relationship. This isn’t a method of persuasion; it’s a method of relationship- and self-building.

So, who is my addressee?

I feel that it would be very short-sighted, or at least potentially trivial, to write to a love interest. More to the point, I think that it would be hard to resist the urge to impress a love interest. I think that there is a part of me that is a teenage boy who is willing, potentially, to do almost anything kosher in order to get the sweet-smiling, kind, confident girl to notice him… A guy is likely to do things out of character just to seem cool or unique. For me, I’d rather stay true to myself and make more of a conscious effort to produce quality content than to stumble onto quality content by accident. I think that I’m more likely to impress a love interest if I do the best that I can at what I do… this blog, appropriately, being a potential part of that. Yay, me!

Picking a person gives me pause. It feels like a very powerful choice. Jumping off of a cliff is easier with a battle cry. The selection of my addressee is my battle cry.

Do I write to someone famous who can help me to achieve my dreams by giving me advice from his/her success? If I did, I’d probably write to Charlie Daniels, Johnny Rzeznik and Alice Cooper because some combination of their music is probably something like I would/will write. But, that’s not really my style. I prefer to try to do the little things right and let success follow from there.

This isn’t getting me anywhere. It looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of over-thinking myself and nearly falling into the secondary, and worse, inaction trap. I’m not going to let myself fail. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll compromise with myself that I’ll not be married to this choice… If I change my mind later, I’ll roll with it. So, here I go…

I’m now writing this blog to my siblings.

The reasons are too many to count, but the biggest one is that my mom has two wishes for us, her children. I can’t honor one of them, but I will do my best to honor the second, and that is that my siblings and I should be friends. In order to be friends with people, they have to know you. Here goes. To “yuce guys,” this blog’s for you. It’s to you.

To those of you who’re kind enough to listen in, you’re welcome here, indeed invited. Hopefully, this audience selection makes your read better from now on.

Brain Shower

This entry was delayed by the death and burial of my grandmother, a very special woman to whom I was very close.

The last three days’ focus was to work on a poem.

Result: I enjoyed the brainstorming stage of writing the poem. I’m technically still in the brainstorming stage. When I began with my three-days’-focus series, I promised myself that I would not be too hard on myself for an unfinished project. And to that I hold.

The trouble, for me, in any creative work, is that, sometimes, I just have to make a choice, and I cannot expect every choice to be perfect. I pursue perfection, yet I know that I won’t achieve it.

The question for me will become, when I make it past the brainstorming stage, can I come up with something coherent that says what I want to say.

The next three days’ focus project: work on exercises that are in my piano book. I took four years of lessons at KWU, and, I’ll admit, I never really practiced. I think that I passed because my instructor was more interested that I understand the concepts of playing… that, and, at least during my lessons, I was able to do what she wanted me to do. At the time that I was a music major at KWU, the program was still building and solidifying. Does this excuse my lack of proficiency? No, certainly not. I was more concerned with my class attendance (the skill of commitment-keeping) and my emotional growth, social growth, and involvedness than I was with actually building skills. College, it seems, for me was a 3.75-year foray into learning how to think… I recount with embarrassment how it always seems like I know a fair amount of things, but I can do hardly anything.

There is a difference between intelligence and smartness. To illustrate this, I go back to a conversation with one of my college instructors. This conversation took place about six months ago. The professor said to me, in a tone of comfort (necessary because I was coping with mistreatment at the time), that I was “pretty smart,” and at, at the time, this didn’t make sense to me. “Pretty smart? I’ve had people complimenting my intelligence all my life! You’re just downplaying it because I’m not good at what you do, because I don’t have the skills and didn’t succeed all that much.” It was moronic to think this… Perhaps, if I’d had guts and said this thought out loud, I might’ve learned faster the difference that I now understand. This particular instructor is also a coach, and the activity that he coaches requires not that people be intelligent, but that they be smart. Smartness, then, is intelligence in action. By this definition, I’m not very smart. I have the intelligence to learn smarts, but I need to focus and practice in order to obtain these smarts.

As far as being a musician goes, it’s quite embarrassing to sit down at a piano and not be able to do what my brain wants done. I have many of the piano concepts in my head, but that only makes me intelligent. It doesn’t make me piano-smart. I’m going to spend the next three days, starting tomorrow because tonight I’m covering a high school football game on the radio, working rather hard to build some piano smarts. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours of commitment to master something… I’m going to see if I can make it at least 15 hours closer to piano mastery.

Clutter Confrontation

Talk abou’chr floor space! Check this action out!

A moderate success in the second three days' focus project

My second three days’ focus project was to focus on arranging my room.

Report: I made considerable progress on the first day, and then didn’t accomplish anything the next two days. I did show off my progress to my housemate and his girlfriend, though. *sticks tongue out to the side obnoxiously*

How I progressed: This box of random j-u-n-q-u-e sat behind the door to my bedroom. Having sorted through it, I was able to play a game of rearrange-the-squares-to-make-the-picture in my room. I don’t have much shelf space, but I changed what I kept on the shelf and put storage containers closer together, near my closet. The end result is that I can now walk freely into my room. I can see my desk completely, there are probably 24 square feet of free floor space now, and I have easy access to my piano keyboard.

Looking forward, now, to the next three days: I will be celebrating my nephew’s first birthday tomorrow (Eight hours of driving are involved.), and I’m directing my church choir in the morning, so I’ll lose an entire day of progress (for a good reason.)

Unless…

I work on a poem.

I’ve realized that the beauty of poetry is, in part, that every word is carefully chosen. And, even though one can sit there, putting his/her thoughts in lines and rhyme words at the ends of those lines, there isn’t any depth, any gravity, to the work other than simple conversational idea communication. So, I think that my thoughts, pensamientos, need to be more carefully considered when I write poetry. My next three days’ focus project is to work on a poem dealing with the concept of how some things will never be. I will search for ways to express the profundities of what “neverness” means. The choosing of the right words should involve lots of brainstorming, structuring, and careful consideration. I don’t expect to “finish” the poem, but, perhaps, I’ll make a good start.