You regular readers of my blog may have noticed that I’ve changed the header title yet again. I think, at long last, I’ve finally articulated my purpose. Life is very much about occasionally “making the leap” into a new level of consciousness and/or capability. Many people, I have noticed, have great difficulty in making these transitions. This is understandable; we actually teach people to be afraid of such things. And I’ve recently come to realize that all of my books and lecturing are really about overcoming these obstacles to “making the transition.”
This journey to awareness all started with Arthur Fiedler. When I worked with him, I could not, for the life of me, figure out why this guy was so famous. In the context of all the industrial era training I had received up to that point, he should have been a complete failure, and yet, he was (and still is) the most successful conductor in history.
It wasn’t just him. I consistently noticed this extreme dichotomy between a handful of superstar conductors, for whom everything was effortless and immediate, and a great many also-rans, who could barely get the orchestra to notice them. There was no middle.
And then of course, there is my own story. How did a self-taught kid from a farm in Ohio get to play bass in the most famous orchestra the world? How did I manage to go from that soybean immersed existence to being one of the busiest professional freelance musicians in a major East Coast city in just over a year? I had no decent instrument, no connections, no clothes, and no social skills. How did I make that transition? And furthermore, why is it that other people, who claimed that they wanted to, could not make that “transition”?
I have since discovered that this is a common emotional fractal that applies just about everywhere. Some people “make the transition” into that higher level of consciousness that makes them a superstar, while the majority of people get stuck. They place their faith outside of themselves, in mechanical “systems” that will spare them any exposure of their personal vulnerability.
And so that’s really what my books “Principles of Applied Stupidity” and “Getting in Touch with Your Inner Rich Kid” are all about: they are about recognizing this pathology of limitation, and helping people to “make the transition” to a space where they are less afraid, more connected, and more trusting of themselves and the universe they live in.
Just reminder, I’m on the Jordan Rich Show on CBS radio (WBZ AM1030) tonight, I will be cohosting all night, but I will be featured around 1 a.m. Eastern time, talking about arts education and my Berlin premiere!
–jl
