arrange • compose • conduct
Don’t pursue the career where you have the strongest skill. The most successful among us have a constellation of skills in the same skill area. A constellation is just a grouping of stars that suggest a shape because they’re clustered together in the sky. Likewise, successful people have multiple skills […]
The battles worth fighting can take a lifetime to complete. That means you’re going to be fighting the same battles the entire time, over and over again. Battles of advocacy, battles for emotional well-being, righteous battles, battles against complacency. None of these are easily solved in a month, a year, […]
There are no hacks for the hard work. You can make easy work faster with a shortcut hack. You can make complex work less complex by streamlining it via a hack. None of those are the hard work of your job. The hard work is creative, or it’s interpersonal, or […]
How do you reconcile your knowledge of how long a project will take with others’ estimates? For me, it’s knowing you’re going to need one extra day – and secretly building it in. The more projects you work on, the more you are able to plan effectively, and a big […]
Should you “speed run” your teaching? If not, what’s the alternative? I asked my kids, what is the opposite of a “speed run” – the method of playing a game as fast as possible. (For example, the record speed run for Super Mario Bros. is under 5 minutes.) But some […]
Temporary productivity paralysis is a normal part of the project process. There is a moment – usually about 80-90% of the way through the process, for me – when I feel completely incapable of finishing a project. It’s never easier to get distracted from my project than in that moment […]
I spent the morning singing backup for our brand-new Superintendent of Rockford Public Schools, Dr. Steve Matthews. Dr. Matthews is not a professional singer, but he’s a visionary leader and passionate believe in education. He wanted to introduce himself to 1,000+ staff in a powerful way, and enlisted Mandy and […]
I could write volumes about what I have learned spending time talking music with Alice Parker. Actually, I hope someday to do just that. But what struck me most on my most recent visit, when we set aside an hour or two every day for little musical projects, is her […]
Any break comes with an “Oh, yeah!” moment at the end of it. The rhythms of my work life are such that breaks occur. I might not use Pro Tools for several months, or Dorico for a few weeks. (I hope it’s a long time before I am working in […]
It’s a question I get so often from guests, especially friends of my kids. “Do you, like, always have music playing? Well, yes. (And even when there’s no music playing, there’s music playing…in my head.) It’s always enlightening to learn the ways in which you’re not normal – clearly we’re […]