George Gershwin and Refining Your Passion

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 27, 2012

Passion is with us from childhood. We’re born with a unique set of preferences and interests that are ours alone, no-one else’s. If we’re lucky, we are able to identify them early and persist in putting them into play. In 1914 George Gershwin left high school at fifteen (against the wishes of his mother, who wanted him to be an accountant) to become a song-plugger and pianist for Jerome H. Remick and Company, a tin pan alley music publisher.

Imagine the initial joy of immediately finding employment in the field of his passion and making fifteen dollars a week at that! He must have been excited. He had a cubicle with a piano and played songs to prospective customers. He used his gift to ‘improve’ some of the trite melodies and learned a wide range of tools on how to accompany a vocalist. If you’re meant to be a musician, this is definitely preferable to accounting.

Yet, his passion was not satisfied. “I was a most unhappy lad at Remick’s”, he would later recall. “The popular song racket began to definitely get on my nerves. Its tunes began to offend me.” His passion was leading him to other places.

Three years later at 18 he quit and started writing for the stage. A year later, his song “Swanee” was presented in a musical. A year after that Al Jolson recorded it, giving George Gershwin his first major hit at age 20. There were many more to come.

I notice three helpers in this story for those of us moving toward our unique passion.

First, you know your passion best. Beware well-intentioned advice that is meant to keep you safe. Happiness trumps safety.

Second, if you’re in a position that isn’t yet fully using your passion, there are always ways of putting it into play – any day, any moment, any situation. Gershwin rewrote some forgettable songs and made them better, and he picked up some valuable lessons about his craft at the same time.

Lastly, don’t rest with the first version of your passion. Keep refining until your passion is happy. Your calling calls to you every day and gets more insistent if you’re not totally listening to it. Keep listening to yourself and keep refining the strengths you were born with.

One last quick thought: What a lesser world if Gershwin had done what so many of people do – listened to what others have planned for us instead of our inner dictates? What if he had put his dreams away and listened to his mother and become an accountant?

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How old was George Gershwin when he wrote Rhapsody in Blue?

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 25, 2012

I’ve been listening to a Smithsonian Collection four-disc box set of George Gershwin(amazingly available for $10 used on Amazon). The timeline of his life is fascinating. Here’s what I learned:

Born in Brooklyn in 1898.

Twelve years later he touched the piano for the first time.

Five years after that he wrote his first song.

Fourteen years after he started playing piano he composed Rhapsody in Blue! He was 26 years old.

Thirteen years after that he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was just 38 years old.

Here’s a small, selected list of what he gave the world in the 23 years he wrote music:

Orchestral works: Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris

An opera: Porgy and Bess

Over 30 musical theater works

Hundreds of songs:

Bess You Is My Woman, The Best of Everything, Embraceable You, Fascinating Rhythm, Foggy Day, Funny Face, How Long Has This Been Going On, I Got Plenty O Nuttin’, I Got Rhythm, I Loves You Porgy, I’ve Got a Crush On You, It Ain’t Necessarily So, Lady Be Good, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, Liza, Love is Here to Stay, Man I Love, My Man’s Gone Now, Nice Work If You Can Get It, ‘S Wonderful, Shall We Dance, Someone to Watch Over Me, Strike Up the Band, Summertime, Swanee, Sweet and Low Down, There’s Boat Dats Leavin’ Soon For New York, They All Laughed, They Can’t Take That Away From Me, and on and on.

I don’t know exactly what to do with this information yet. It’s stunning when taken all together in one gulp. 23 years of working on his life’s purpose and what immortal beauty he gave us with that time! There are immediate knee-jerk reactions – “I better get moving!”, “look at my lame life compared to him”, “he was a genius, the rest of us aren’t”, and so on. None of those are true. There is an inspiring truth to this question: “How can George Gershwin living his life’s passion enrich my one and only life?” I don’t know the answer to it but that’s the question I’ll try to live a response to for the next few days. How about you? Gershwin somehow found a way to live his passion. What’s the way for you today?

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Guitarist Jim Hall on rehearsal/spontaneity, leadership and four-part teamwork with Sonny Rollins

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 23, 2012

Jazz guitarist Jim Hall was chosen by saxophone legend Sonny Rollins to play in his legendary quartet. They rehearsed extensively, but not for the usual reasons.

Hall said, “we used to rehearse a lot. But I have the feeling that the rehearsal time…was just to help us be spontaneous together…when we got on the bandstand, just sort of take signals from him and each other…I think ideally Sonny wanted it to be four-part music and that we should react to one another, but his presence was so strong that there was no doubt who the leader was…I think Sonny liked the interplay, but also he was very much the leader.”

Rehearsal leading to spontaneity. I know that persistence well while working alone on jazz harmonica, learning a song, playing in the different groups I’m in. These days, the more I rehearse, the more spontaneous I can become, the more options I have. If I’m inside a song, I can play in the form and let the moment take me. If I’m trying to read something from a chart on a music stand while at a gig, something is lost for me.

Leadership presence. Everything I’ve read about Sonny Rollins as a person marks him as an introvert. Yet here’s Jim Hall saying, “his presence was so strong that there was no doubt who the leader was.” This points out how leadership can come from some unexpected places. Presence can come from mastery, from personal passion and conviction, from fearless play, just like Sonny Rollins.

Four-part music. Perhaps one of the reasons people love to play with Sonny Rollins is he wants it to be four-part music and be spontaneous together. Great teams are able to do this. And great leaders create the setting to make the team play happen.

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Saxophone player Joe Lovano on the magic of leading and following

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 20, 2012

In the liner notes to Bird Songs, his album of reimagined Charlie Parker songs, Joe Lovano had this to say about playing with his band UsFive (which included bassist Esperenza Spalding, the ‘new artist’ that beat out Justin Bieber):

“We try to play from many points of reference, leaving space for each other to contribute to the feeling of the music in a real spontaneous way. Everyone is leading and following. There is a lot of magic in that way of playing and I feel that we’ve captured the essence of who we are as a unit within the forms and structures I’ve put together for each piece.”

Many people’s unconscious assumption about leadership is that there’s one set leader that is ‘leader-ish’. They can get up in front of people and talk, be in front of large groups, be animated and loudly inspiring. That’s one kind of leader, but leadership comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes and a team usually exchanges leadership and followership freely throughout a project. People mutually influence each other and the magic of leading and following becomes a dance. Joe Lovano was the leader in name and he set up the ‘forms and structures’. After that, it was interplay, and perhaps most important – leaving space for each other to contribute.

Check out Quixote Consulting’s strengths-based leadership training Leader Quest to explore the magic of leading and following with your leadership team. Check out Quixote Consulting’s influence training Influence: The Power of Persuasion to learn more about influencing.

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“It was a love affair”: NBA Champion 1970 New York Knicks team members on teamwork and connecting with your audience

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 18, 2012

“We were a team and we knew none of us would be as strong individually as all of us were together. Which was a very powerful metaphor that I think a lot of people in New York saw. And then the crowds that came were knowledgeable crowds. You’d have people applaud the pass that led to the pass that led to the basket. You knew you were playing for a crowd that understood what they were seeing.”

-Senator Bill Bradley, member 1969-1970 NBA champion New York Knicks

“We had five guys that came from different backgrounds. But when we came to play as a team it was something beautiful to watch because the ball really moved around the court.” – Walt “Clyde” Frazier

“I think people identified with our team. The electricity that went through not only Madison Square Garden but the whole city…it was a love affair, really.” – Dave DeBusschere

Two things to notice especially –

  1. How teams create more than the sum of the parts: “none of us would be as strong individually as all of us were together”, “it was something beautiful to watch because the ball really moved”
  2. The power of a great team to influence its audience (customers) and vice versa: “you were playing for a crowd that understood”, “people identified with our team”, “it was something beautiful to watch”, “it was a love affair”

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Love’s Confusing Joy (Part Six) What You Really Want

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 16, 2012

You’ll be forgiven for forgetting

that what you really want is love’s confusing joy. – Rumi

For the last post in this series I come back to what I mentioned before – how as humans we live in both worlds – the butterfly and the caterpillar, the glorious dream and the messy reality, the play and the work. I don’t know how much these two need each other or how much of each we each need, but I do know what I need, at least this month – more butterfly. More play, more freedom, more flight, more color.

But here’s the irony – I’m way more comfortable in caterpillar mode. It’s how I feel safe, it’s the method I’ve used most often in my life unconsciously to create stability and safety in my life – to generate money needed to live, to get better at what I’m passionate about. It’s easier for me to practice scales than to practice improvising. It’s easier for me to be a caterpillar than to be a butterfly. It’s more comfortable to just live in the winter of persistence. Yet it’s harder on my heart and my happiness to just be a caterpillar. One or the other by themselves is foolish.

Yet together – play married with passion and persistence – winter, summer and spring all rolled into one – that’s the right path for me. I can recognize in writing these words the method for happiness and dedication, freedom and safety, visible reality and the unseen world.  It’s right there, all balled up in my own particular brand of love’s confusing joy.

This post is part of a series that shows how April’s passion and play come to the rescue of winter’s persistence by looking at a poem by Rumi, line by line.

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Love’s Confusing Joy (Part Five) – Work is Love Made Visible

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 13, 2012

but you’ll be forgiven for forgetting

that what you really want is love’s confusing joy. – Rumi

When I first read his poem fifteen years ago, I thought Rumi meant romantic love. I now know that definition of love is way too narrow. Love’s confusing joy can encompass any passion in life, any connection with what we care about. This love applies to vocation, people, animals, lifestyle, physical place, and on and on. It can apply to projects, email conversations with clients, meetings, cleaning your office, anything. As Kahlil Gibran said, “work is love made visible.”

One exercise that I have participants do before a strengths-based team building activity is to track what they loved doing the week before the session. Some managers get uncomfortable with using the word love – “what about like?” they ask. That’s fine if that’s as strong as you dare to go, but the word love can really cut through the muck of a busy life.

Anyway, love, or more specifically, love’s confusing joy, that’s what we really want. It’s forgivable to forget that, which is a lucky thing. Because I’m going to forget that a few thousand times yet in this life. Yet with the forgetting comes the remembering, like this moment right now. I do long for love’s confusing joy. And I long for it in every aspect of my work – my business, my music, my home life, sports I play, my relationships, everywhere.

And I find a great deal of sweetness inherent in the word ‘confusing’. What a relief that what we love and the way we love it doesn’t have to make sense! It’s confusing to love playing scales some days. And confusing when that feels like the last thing I want to do. But the tracking of my wobbly interest within a larger context of dedicated persistence over time is powerful. Over time, I want to get more facile at playing jazz harmonica. I want to feel free to play the music I love and to create improvisations that reflect my unique spirit and love in the world. I want to communicate that with others, playing and listening with each other. That’s what I want and that’s not going to happen overnight. And I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t happen in four months either. AND it happens in the moments when I let it happen, right here, right now. I know, confusing right? Rumi would approve of that confusion I believe.

This post is part of a series that shows how April’s passion and play come to the rescue of winter’s persistence by looking at a poem by Rumi, line by line.

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Love’s Confusing Joy (Part Four)

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 11, 2012

If you want what visible reality can give,

you’re an employee.

If you want the unseen world,

you’re not living your truth.

Both wishes are foolish – Rumi

Both wishes – just wanting what visible reality has to offer or just wanting what the unseen world provides – are foolish on their own. It’s the combining of the two that makes us come alive – to feel the tug of both and say yes to both. The caterpillar elegantly turns into a butterfly and never looks back. At our luckiest, we straddle both worlds – the caterpillar and the butterfly – and live with the contradiction and tension inherent there. We never just fully live the freedom of a butterfly and hopefully also don’t just live in the realm of the caterpillar, munching away all day and inching up and down tree branches. Not only are these wishes foolish, they are painful on their own. Just wishing I were a butterfly dancing over the music 24-7 is painful – life isn’t that 100/100. Just putting my head down and practicing, practicing, munching, munching on scales, arpeggios, exercises is painful too. I never allow myself the dance. I miss out on the joy and the play. And perhaps more than anything else, I was put on this earth to play. And musicians play music, they don’t work music.

Is there a place in your life today that you’re wishing for one side or the other? How can you walk in both worlds instead?

This post is part of a series that shows how April’s passion and play come to the rescue of winter’s persistence by looking at a poem by Rumi, line by line.

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Is April the cruelest month?

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 10, 2012

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

T.S. Eliot, from The Wasteland

April IS the cruelest month, if we want to stay asleep. Winter, as much as we may get sick of it, is pretty straightforward. Things sleep, go underground. Life slows down and it takes more energy just to keep going. Days are short, the dark night is long. Summer is pretty straightforward too. Long days of light and gentle breezes, water, green, color, vibrancy, growth, aliveness. It makes sense.

April is perhaps the month that most mixes the two worlds. As T.S. Eliot says, it mixes memory (winter) and desire (summer), stirring dull roots (winter) with spring rain (leading to summer). Paradoxically, ‘winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow.’ April calls on us for the first time in a long time to remember. The forgetful snow is gone and we’re asked to again breed lilacs out of the dead land. We’re asked to awaken, stretch and yawn and reach for our heart’s desire, our very own brand of love’s confusing joy. A little life fed only with dried tubers will no longer do.

And as exciting as that sounds, it’s not easy. In fact it can be downright scary. Entropy and inertia would have us lie back in the cocoon wrapped in our gray winter beards. It’s comfortable, relaxing, quiet, orderly. Spring is messy and exuberant, with false starts and sputters, mud and old leaves mixing with citrine sprouts. And when we make a stand for something, life usually gives us the exact opposite for a while, perhaps as a way of testing us to see if we’re really sure that’s what we want. Robert Johnson sung it as, “stones in my pathway.”

On another unseasonably warm night in March, a moth came to my office window and fluttered there. I looked at it tenderly and vowed to wake up to play and the confusing joy I feel when I love my work. And that means letting in the sadness that comes with perceiving that that feeling feels far away. But as Rumi said, “the breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you, don’t go back to sleep.”

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Teamwork is the key for the 2012 Knicks

By Rob Fletcher | Published: April 9, 2012

by Theo Michelfeld

Basketball, professional hoops, slam dunks, alley oops. NBA basketball is a kind of performance art—part semi-improvisational dance, part gut check. Talent is important, but often fickle in the equation. Consistent success requires less glamorous virtues: hard work, a good attitude, trust and cooperation among teammates. This is why, behind the highlights and headlines, there is often a fascinating tenuousness to the teamwork on display. For instance, let me introduce the 2012 New York Knicks.

The Knicks’ roster is the proverbial embarrassment of riches, with two superstar offensive players, at least three outstanding defensive players, a wildly creative point guard, at least one lethal scoring threat from long range, and a very deep bench capable of winning games while the starters sit and watch. All that talent, and yet the team has endured a head-spinning season, featuring more than one alarming losing streak, more than one electrifying winning streak, some significant injuries to star players, and a mid-season coaching change. Coming down the stretch the Knicks are clinging to the eighth and final seed in their conference, facing a formidable gantlet of upcoming foes, and two of their key players are injured and out for most, if not all, of the remaining games. The campaign has been one of nearly constant adversity with the team adapting on the fly, and yet one theme has remained unchanged throughout. Talent is not enough. Winning requires effort and teamwork.

Basketball is a game where order repeatedly collapses into chaos, then reassembles back into order. A team mobilizes with a certain degree of choreography, passing the ball, screening defenders, working to create an open shot. When the result is negative—a missed shot or stolen pass—the discipline gives way to hell-bent hustle. These moments test the will, but resistance, as we know, builds strength and character. We love this about sports, and we welcome this message from sports. When the other team scoops up the ball, we must get organized, keep our heads up, and do the dirty work. The lion’s share of any winning formula is the ceaseless diligence of not getting beaten.

The Knicks may be awakening to this principle. As of April 1 they are surging back from oblivion into contention. On the other hand they are beset by injuries, and the schedule offers little margin for error. Plausible endings range from disastrous to glorious, but in any case, talent will take this team only so far. The fascinating spectacle of NBA hoops is the triumph of grit, determination, and teamwork at the moment of truth.

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  • Do you want to be at your best?

    At Your Best takes Rob Fletcher’s blend of strengths, music, fun and content that he uses to create high-performing teams and distills it into four clear, positive steps for your success: passion, play, purpose and persistence.

    At Your Best is the title of Rob Fletcher’s next book and you can read it here as he writes it, one post at a time.

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