When Seeds are burning…
A vice president stopped at my door…
The stereo in my office played louder than a reasonable person would. We were “off campus” … because we were the group that no one liked, which is its own kind of message. Spoiler alert … we didn’t like them either, and the compensation was a good office with nobody around to complain, walking distance to so solid Texas BBQ. And, I had started listening to an alternative station out of Annapolis, on the theory that I should find out what my kids were going to be listening to, and it turned out some of it was excellent. A brand new vice president walked past, stopped, and said, “I love Midnight Oil. Hi, my name is…”
My first thought, which for once I did not say out loud: vice presidents do not listen to Midnight Oil. He kept doing it… stopping with a quick note about whatever was playing, some new artist I had not heard, and then he would stroll on. It went on for months and I did not think of it as anything. Later, in a desperate season, our VP said late one night that somewhere out there must be people who could help us, and I thought of him immediately, and the rest is history. It was 1 of the very few times I was the one who helped him.
… what do you observe?
Riley was 24 in the winter of 1949, playing a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas. It was cold, and the heat was a barrel half filled with kerosene, set on fire, standing in the middle of the dance floor. Nobody thought that was unusual. Two men started fighting and knocked it over. The building went up. Everybody got out… and he was outside in the cold before he observed he had left his guitar inside, so he ran back into the blaze… for a 30 dollar Gibson. At least 1 account of that night says 2 people did not make it out…
He found out the following day that the 2 men had been fighting over a woman named Lucille who worked there. He never met her. He never spoke to her. He took the name of a stranger he would never meet and put it on the instrument he carried for the rest of his life, so that every single time he picked it up, for 65 years, he would remember that he had once run into a burning building for an object. That is not a romantic story. It is a standing correction, worn in public, for 6 decades.
Seeds come from strange places…
Riley’s music mostly came from his cousin Bukka, a serious bluesman who took an interest early. First, Bukka played bottleneck slide, that crying vibrato that makes a guitar sound like a voice, and Riley wanted it and could not do it. So he built a way to get at the same thing with his hand instead. “To get the vibrato started, my thumb is on the neck. But when I play the trill with my finger, my hand is not on the neck at all. It all comes from the wrist.” The most identifiable guitar sound of the 20th century started as a workaround by a man who could not do the thing he admired.
Second was a rule he stole: Bukka told him, “Riley, blues musicians should always dress like they’re going to the bank to borrow some money.” He was still repeating a version of it to his own band 40 years later, which you met on Tuesday. Both of those are things he went back for. He did not hear the vibrato once and move on. He kept going back to it for years until he had built his own way in.
Most of the stories I have from that vice president come down to observation. He could see through a murky situation and plot a course that came out well for everybody in it, which sounds like political skill and mostly is not. It is attention. He used “and” instead of “but” long before that was a thing anybody talked about. He once observed, in passing, that I needed a right-hand man to execute the ideas I kept generating, and a person appeared the next day, and our output doubled inside a month. I did not even interview him. He taught me that politics is what people call the things they do not understand, and I set about understanding it well enough that I would stop calling it that.
observe who and what you would run back into a fire for…
Think of the person on your team you thought about at 11 o’clock last week. Something they said in a meeting sat wrong with you and you have not asked them about it. You told yourself you would catch them Thursday. It is Thursday…
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: pick the 1 thing you noticed this week and did nothing with, and go ask about it before Friday.
Learning to convert what a leader already notices into something that actually moves is a large part of the work I do now. Schedule time with me here.
He carried a stranger’s name for 65 years so he would never forget what he almost paid. Wouldn’t the world be better if we all had a… Lucille.
