I believe this song may speak to you. Be it in seeking peace, be it in the observation of the absurdity of life, be it in wild antics, or because you happen to love a diner.

My friend, Brian, sent me a passage from Zen Heart by Ezra Bayda.“… much of what passes for profundity may be just confusion that’s well stated.”I don’t know if I agree. It’s my experience that well-stating the confusing part is hard for most people. If it was easy, we wouldn’t find it profound.

Charles Mingus teaches you how to toilet train your cat. Read here.Charles Mingus was a world famous bassist and jazz composer. You don’t expect an icon in music to write such a pedestrian, and absurdly well thought out playbook on toilet training — or do you?It makes perfect sense to me that a jazz musician should have such an interest. Jazz is about experimentation, testing, observation, making predictions, and studying outcomes — musically. Why shouldn’t these skills be used to toilet train a cat? You and I have skills that transcend our professions that make us able to do many things and pursue many interests. Be like Mingus, and don’t limit your curiosity.

Quincy Jones influenced my piano playing and my musical mental model. My parents gave me a Quincy Jones “Best Of” album when I asked for a jazz album. Not much jazz on the album, mostly R&B, but that’s probably better — I play much more like a R&B player from the 70s than I do a jazzer from the 60s. In college, a friend - Germono, introduced me to the film score of “The Wiz”. I became hooked. I wanted to arrange like Quincy Jones, I wanted to write like Quincy Jones, I wanted to do the work he did. I transcribed his scores onto score paper; I still remember a composition teacher I worked with criticizing my transcriptions. Quincy’s passing is a chance to (not that I need one) to reinforce his contributions to the culture and to the music industry. Germono shared this 49-min Quincy tribute with me. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.Also, check out Germono’s music and work here.

I attended my city’s international holiday folk fair yesterday. I learned that Pomeranians are a group from modern day Germany that live near Denmark. I learned of the Donauschwaben, ethnic Germans that live in the Kingdom of Hungary. I watched two different types of Polish groups dance — northern and southern. I ate a Senegalese “fataya” which is similar to a beef empanada. Ultimately, I learned that we people have more in common than not. We all seem to be proud of our language, our customs, our food, our dance, our music, our homelands, and our stories. And I believe that’s good. Because if we cherish something that makes us truly unique, our culture, we have something to share with the curious adventurer who wants to learn. Some of the most timeless wisdom is simple: show and tell.

Inspired by a question from a friend. The full question what will you do with your life.The question requires an element of certainty with words like will and do. Additionally, the question contains a time vector - life. I wonder if some humans experience anxiety when they are asked to be certain about an inherently uncertain thing — life. I thought about this more — if you asked me what I wanted to do with my life I would have responded: be a ghostbuster, be a vet, be an architect, be a musician. I work as a musician and made a career out of music. But I don’t believe “being a musician” is what I did. Doing requires an action — a verb. The act of being a musician is a function of these verbs: collaborating, listening, considering, reflecting, practicing, solving, conceptualizing, communicating, and many others. These verbs are verbs I do now in the work I do in sales/marketing. These verbs are verbs are functions of my earliest proclivities.I discovered these verbs by way of interests. Pursuing my interests forced the expression of the aforementioned behaviors. I’m privileged and fortunate that my parents allowed me to pursue many interests — even at the expense of school (which was not their hope). I conclude — if interests allowed me to express actions that I realized I wanted more and more in my life, and if my life is a product of those actions, then it was the freedom (and privilege) to pursue my interests that helped me get to where I am now. If that’s true, then the question “hat will you do?” may not be as helpful, or as stressful, as…What are you interested in now? And what do you love most about pursuing them?

With thanks to James Clear’s newsletter. From The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein.Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened.“​Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.“My own theory of how meaning is derived from living is (kind of simple).You decide to do somethingYou do the thingYou observe an outcomeYou receive feedback from nature/world/people about your thingYou learn something about yourself and life.You make an update and try again.I observe that the story people tell themselves about themselves occurs around step 4 and 5. However, I also observe that step 4 or 5 would only be reached because step 1 happened — a decision. My (unscientific and highly personal) hypothesis is: life’s meaning is derived from the meaning of our decisions. To test my hypothesis I propose you think about major decisions you’ve made. What happened just before you decided to take action? How did you feel? What did you consider? What outcomes did you predict? What was the actual outcome? And what would you do differently? After asking the aforementioned questions, write down your answers in a notebook or in a doc. Catalogue your decisions. Review them often and determine if you’re getting better at making them, and if you are, are your outcomes getting better. My hunch — the more you see your life through the decisions you made, the more you can be honest with yourself, the more you will be able to propel yourself forward, the more life will mean something to you. You have to decide what to do with the time you have.

Kelly Crow, of the Wall Street Journal, reports that the artist, Maurizio Cattelan, taped a banana to a wall with duct tape at an Art Basel exhibition in Miami. When Cattelan debuted the art, he ripped it off the wall and ate it. Justin Sun paid $6.2M for that banana. (link to WSJ article)I believe Cattelan makes an ironic statement with his piece — the commoditization of the art market. It’s no different than the urinal piece often credited to Duchamp. John Cage wrote a piece called “4’33” which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of total silence. The culture decided that these pieces — all of them — are significant — 6.2M significant. I see the irony though. A banana and duct tape has to cost ~$10. It’s absurd that someone would pay so much for something that costs so little — it’s because the culture decided that the banana on the wall is valuable. The piece itself is a critique of the absurdity of the art market. And the art market, in the end, paid an absurd price for it. How much do we allow the collective culture to inform our valuation of things?

From “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales” by Dr. Oliver Sacks.“We have, each of us, a life -story, an inner narrative whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives a ‘narrative,’ and that this narrative is us, our identities.To be ourselves we must have ourselves — possess, if need be re-possess, our life-stories. We must ‘recollect’ ourselves, recollect the inner drama, the narrative, of ourselves. A man needs such a narrative, a continuous inner narrative, to maintain his identity, his self.” A person — human — needs a narrative. I have a narrative about myself just as complicated and as beautiful as the one you have about yourself. That’s sonder. That’s life. However —Imagine you are forced to live your life constantly reinventing who you are. You are forced to do this through a mechanism of nature — you are unable to retain for any length of time your knowledge of yourself. You think of anything and create fantastical stories hoping that the story you come up with will be the one. The truth never arrives for you. There are people who live life the way I described. They live with a mental constraint that prevents them from holding on to themselves. In spite of the constraint, they keep on keeping on.More and more I believe — we can tolerate so much if we have the ability to choose.

I’ve noticed something from two medical doctor visits — both docs are not great at closure. Closure — the end of something, the final song, the button, the trash can ending, the big finale. I know, “law of small numbers, n=2, give people a break.” I get it. But I also wonder, How much thought is put into how service providers close?I work with service providers as part of my day job. I often share best practices about closing deals, ending customer interactions, etc. The best practices are to give people something to walk away with — a win, an outcome, something to help them believe they were positively productive. Of all the places where being positively productive could be a net benefit, and specific to these two wonderful people, why not the exam room?