As any studio musician can tell you, just because a song gets stuck in your head doesn’t make it a good song. After playing it fifteen times in a row it’s going to get stuck in your head regardless.
This doesn’t just apply to songs.
It turns out whatever we spend our time filling our heads with, it’s gonna get stuck there.
Whether it’s good or not.
Creating things is sewn deep inside us. Art, games, tools, ideas, and inventions…they’ve been around for a while and we like coming up with the next one.
And when we come up with something good we want to share the goodness.
But when the instinct to share kicks in, most of us think share means social media.
However…for most of human history when the instinct to share kicked in, family and neighbors were as far as the sharing could go…and that would be enough to satisfy the instinct.
The compulsion to share our creation beyond the people closest to us is brand new, and it doesn’t seem like our brains have figured out how to process it yet.
How long are the slides? How tall should the monkey bars be? How many swings?
The jungle gym designer has a tough job because children are going to be disappointed.
The slide is too long and scary. The monkey bars are too high to reach. There are four swings but five kids want to swing.
Kids are going to cry.
The only way to have the perfect jungle gym is to have an unlimited number of every element at every size and height. And this isn’t possible.
Disappointment is part of the gig.
You can’t be everything to everyone.
We don’t have it. That’s what makes our lives different from the all the things we stream.
In streamer land we can always find out what’s next, we know the episode schedule, we have behind the scenes, we can binge it in two days and find out the end, or we can look up the end right now.
That’s why we’re drawn to movies and tv and podcasts and stories…because we long for a complete story where it all makes sense and the loose ends are perfectly tied.
But in real life we don’t have the next episode and we certainly don’t know the season finale. We’re living it.
Always on stage but never the star.
The plight of the hired musician. The sideman blues.
It’s fun to get hired. Partly because it means you’ll get paid. But if you’re hired onto someone else’s gig…you’re helping to build someone else’s gig. It’s fun to cash the check…but the person writing the check is on a different course than the sideman.
But if you’re hired onto someone else’s gig…you can take it upon yourself to make it the best it can be, to make the artist look like a genius for hiring you, to contribute something extra special…more than just being a hired gun.
»» Shout out to Sadler for this one.