what engages your Mind?
I played it safe for 2 years…Bass, in my church band. I knew the part cold. I never played anything that could go wrong, and nobody ever noticed, because the safe notes sound fine. That is what makes them dangerous…One of the first questions I ask leaders is: are you doing work that belongs to someone else? Are you even in the room, or is your Mind’s press secretary attending in your place?
… Nobody pulls you aside about the safe notes… the risk you did not take. The band sounds fine, the service sounds fine, and the only person who knows what you did not play is… you. I have since learned that most senior leaders are running the exact same act in every meeting they lead… and getting the same review… the Christian F word – Fine.
Jagged Little Mind…
I missed the anniversary of this week’s artists’ breakout album back in June. She spent her career playing nothing but safe notes… and then made the loudest career change of the 1990s.
Alanis Morissette grew up in Ottawa, Canada, a cast member on the kids’ TV show You Can’t Do That on Television, and by 1991, at 17, a Canadian dance-pop star. Her debut album, Alanis, sold over 200,000 copies, was the 1992 Juno for Most Promising Female Vocalist, compared to Madonna and Janet Jackson. Polished, produced, safe. The follow-up, Now Is the Time, came in 1992. The industry had heard her safe notes and moved on… the teen-pop lane had closed behind her.
So in 1994 a 19-year-old walked into a producer’s house in the San Fernando Valley with nothing left to save. Once inside, most songs came in 30 minutes. A song a day, 12 to 16-hour sessions, vocals kept in 1 or 2 takes. Not fixed. Kept. Several labels passed on the record anyway.
…the take they kept was the first one…
It came out as Jagged Little Pill on Jun 13, 1995. “All I Really Want” is the opening track… the first thing the world heard from the new Alanis, and it is a first take in every sense. The lyric came out of those Valley sessions nearly stream-of-consciousness, the song a rush of everything she had not been allowed to say in the safe years: impatience, appetite, the wish to be actually met by another person instead of managed by one. The woman who had been produced within an inch of her life opened her second life with the least produced thing she had.
What are they actually hearing from you?
That is not a music-business anecdote. That is a decision you get to make in your next meeting. If you are the leader who runs every sentence through a filter before it leaves your mouth, your team is not hearing you. They are hearing your Mind’s press release. And they will never tell you, because the safe notes sound fine to them too.
engage starts when you go first, unedited, and let someone hear the take you would normally do over. The first take is not sloppier than the third… it is more informative. It carries the doubt, the appetite, and the actual question, before your internal producer mixes them out. People do not follow the press release. They follow the person, and they can only follow a person they have heard.
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: in your next meeting, say the first version of the thought out loud. Not the third.
All I Really Want … and your team… is the take you did not clean up.
