“Keep your pants zipped, and everything will turn out fine.”
As I crested the hill west of Tyler as a 17-year-old freshman, happiness was palpable and real. My favorite radio station would only get stronger, a good stereo to set up in my dorm room was in my trunk, and an easy drive ahead to take me into the… Future.
My Dad is a classic engineer – a man of few words, and in this case, well placed. How many people’s careers would have been better if they had followed those simple words?
…the advice you did not know you were carrying…
Think about the sentence you say most often to your team when things go sideways. Odds are you did not learn it in a leadership course. A parent said it at the car door, a first boss said it in a hallway, a coach said it at halftime, and it has been riding with you ever since. The people who shaped how you lead have no idea they did it. Some of them are still a phone call away. Some of them are not.
We spend our Time thanking the people in front of us for this quarter’s work. The ones who handed us the instincts we run on never hear a word. They are the reason you stay calm when the outage hits at 2 in the morning, or ask the second question in the interview, and they have no way of knowing it unless you tell them.
…the guitar player who partnered for 50 years…
Rich Williams lost his right eye to fireworks on a Fourth of July between 7th and 8th grade, and kept playing guitar anyway. He joined the band that became Kansas in 1972, and 4 years later he was in a studio in a Louisiana swamp learning a song Kerry Livgren had brought in at the very last minute. In 1978 he stood on stadium stages opening for the Rolling Stones, the one moment, he said, he was ever starstruck.
In 2016 he called Leftoverture their breakthrough. In August 2025, with macular degeneration making travel hard, he told fans he was not stepping down or retiring, only slowing down, and that he would still play as many shows as he could. A month later he was on stage in Bonner Springs for the encore.
The partners who shape you rarely know they did. Tell them while there is Time.
…what it takes to partner across the years…
To partner is to know whose support you need to succeed, and to say so. In the first 90 days of a new role, that list is easy: your boss, your peers, the person who runs the budget. The longer list is harder. It is everyone whose voice is already in your head when you make the call.
The trap is assuming they know. They do not. A partner you never thank becomes a memory you never got to share, and the window closes without notice.
…a song that barely made the record…
Fifty years ago this Wednesday, Kansas released Leftoverture. Livgren wrote Carry On Wayward Son last, at his parents’ home in Topeka, and brought it in at the very end, as the band was packing up. Phil Ehart said that for such a special song, it barely made the record. Williams said the take on the album was probably their first correct run-through. Livgren called it an autobiographical song, a song of self-encouragement.
It came out as a single in November 1976 and reached No. 11 in 1977, the band’s first Top 40 hit. The album went to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and was certified 4 Times Platinum.
…the partner who helped me hear it…
My Dad also loved building things, and had given me a stereo at 14 with an FM band, and importantly, a huge T antenna we put up with thumbtacks on my wall – pointing to the station in Dallas that was just starting out. Programming long album cuts, often playing entire sides of albums with no commercials – to let you really experience what the artists had constructed.
Dad did that. And he said that I could be a Lawyer (my Debate partners all went that way)… “right after you finish your engineering degree.” Which I did, while also diving deeper into music as DJ, playing guitar at church, and beginning my life long collection of guitars 😉
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Name the 1 person whose advice you still carry from the day you left home, and tell them, or someone who knew them, before Sunday.
If that call is harder to make than it should be, and you want to think through what to say, let’s partner on it. Schedule Time with me here.
Make the call this week, and then just… Carry On Wayward Son
