By the Ocean
Cloudy 77 Degrees
5:21 a.m.
I went to music school and majored in pipe organ performance. I spent 90% of my waking hours focused on becoming a thing that .001% of the world (or less) even knows exists.
When I was 19, I won a national music competition. You could hear the gasps in the room when they announced the winner because some of the competitors were twice my age. The dude making the announcement even said my age out loud because no one could believe it, including me.
I loved music but I didn’t love performing. Back then, I had no tools, no strategies, no help for managing my hyper awareness. Most of the genius musicians I was surrounded with got lost in their music. I never got lost. I was always aware that I was playing.
When performing is your thing, this type of awareness means that performing = suffering. I was surrounded by people who could either do this music thing naturally or endure the suffering enough to do it. Some people just took drugs to manage the stress. I never chose that path.
When I got out of school, after spending 4 years focusing every moment on getting better, on being perfect, on climbing a mountain, I stepped out into the real world and discovered something shocking:
Most people have no idea what excellence looks like.
That initial discovery led to more:
Very few people want excellence. Even fewer people have the capacity to achieve it and sustain it.
Excellence is a way of life you choose. You choose to commit to an ideal, an idea, a path that few are willing to tread towards a level of mastery most people don’t know is available.
Excellence requires honesty. It requires you to be honest with yourself about whether or not you have what it takes. There is no dishonor if you don’t have what it takes. The dishonor comes when you lie to yourself and waste your life doing something you KNOW isn’t the thing you’re designed to do.
The reason this matters is that you have to find where you belong. If you pursue excellence but surround yourself with people who don’t care about it, YOU WILL STRUGGLE.
But if you find your crowd, if you find the people who can spot you coming a mile away because the type of excellence you embody sticks out like a diamond at a coal convention, then everything gets transformed.
It is easier for me to sell a $30,000 engagement than a $397 course. Why? Because the people who would invest $30,000 are my people. I tend to be fairly invisible to the rest of the world.
Know yourself. Find your crowd. Serve your crowd. Thrive.
That’s my 9-word business course, for free, available to anyone who wants it. You don’t have to listen to my podcast, or watch any shorts or reels or numb your mind by tikking and tokking or whatever those people do, just take the truth and do something with it:
Go where you belong. Go where you are wanted. Go where you are valued. Do your thing when you get there.
There is no rule that says YOU cannot move, that YOU cannot change location, that YOU cannot swim upstream away from the noise and the commotion and all of the people yelling, “look at me!”
And if you ARE one of the people who is here to be excellent, DON’T APOLOGIZE. Show that excellence to the world and don’t compromise.
The Matrix breeds mediocrity. Excellence is the balancing force.
You are keeping the Universe from blowing apart by being anchored in the world of better, the world of demanding, the world of elite performance, the world of mastery.
If that’s where you came to play, stay there.