arrange • compose • conduct
When you’re the deep water of too much work, too many responsibilities, too little time to breathe, it’s easy to feel like it’ll be that way forever. I have been trying to remind myself daily – hourly! – that it’s too much, but only temporarily. In my conversations with Alice […]
Happiness is being able to say, “I still love doing this!” well into your career. Sometimes you get bogged down in the daily to-do lists and are just trying to stay on top of what comes next. But I hope that some part of your job, at least once in […]
Drop some balls today so you won’t have so many to juggle tomorrow. The only way to stop feeling like you’re triaging your work life, day after day, is to turn away from today. Drop everything, for a little while, and look further ahead. Two days, two weeks, a month […]
Anger alienates. Always. Communicating with anger rarely solves a problem, and can often make it worse. As and educator, I believe that anger is never a tool that teaches, so if possible, I never want to use it at all. This goes for all types of communication, and double for […]
How is it not obvious? It seems an almost universal challenge to learn to differentiate between things we do to make ourselves happy things we do to make the people around us happy. As an educator, it’s essential that we master the art of helping our students find what makes […]
In everything I do, “build it to outlast me” is an organizing principle. I want the ensembles I have started or directed to continue after I finish leading them. I want the music I write to continue to be of use after I’m not conducting it. I want the words […]
20-year-old me would be terribly impressed by all the things I know today. That’s the magic of time: spend long enough diligently studying something, and you’ll find you’ve made a lot of progress. Maybe that’s not reassuring to young people hoping to master something big, but I find it so […]
What’s the equivalent of quiet quitting in school? In the work world, we’ve seen a big increase in so-called “quiet quitting” – a decision to do the minimum required, rather than overtaxing yourself for the sake of your job. (There was a very interesting discussion of this on Dr. Brené […]
Take a deep breath, and consider what it means to be emotionally professional. Here’s Simon Sinek: “If you’re having a bad day, you can say, ‘Listen, I’m a little off my game today.” But you can’t sit in the meeting and be grumpy and give one word answers. That’s emotionally […]
It’s short. The most consistent block I find in my creative work is my self-judgement. I have a hard time objectively assessing the work I create, because all I can see and hear are the flaws. But I come with good news. The half-life of that self-judgement is so, so […]