I couldn’t concentrate in class. I kept thinking about my guitar, lyrics to songs I was working on. I’d daydream about performing in front of thousands. Old high school classmates in the crowd. My junior high crush apologizing for not noticing me: “If I could only go back, Aaron,” she’d say, “I’d do things differently.”
“It’s okay,” I’d reply in my daydream. “It was for the best. I’m engaged now to the most popular movie star in the world.”
Snapped out of it, I’d see a statistics professor and a room full of classmates staring. What was the probability of the car running out of gas in 2.7 miles, uphill, at an angle of 23 degrees?
I didn’t know.
I’m a parent now. I get it. I’m so concerned my own kids might want to pursue music that I wrote an entire book about how to improve their chances of earning a living. Even with that—and every connection I have—the odds are still pretty much zero. (Hey, who’s using that statistics course now!)
But if I had to reference two people to model my parental response—two people who gave me a good goalpost to kick toward—I’d choose my mom and dad.
(Cue the Disney music from Frozen here and replace “Let It Go” with “Let Him Go.”)
My parents had plenty of opportunities to discourage me. In high school, for example, I flipped my bed on its side and turned my bedroom into a makeshift recording studio. Most parents would have at least asked, “Where are you going to sleep?” But I don’t remember my parents saying anything.
Or that time I called them from the middle of Nebraska because I blew my car’s timing belt on the way to a (non-paying) gig. They had every right to ask, “Are you sure dropping out of college for this was a good idea?”
But they didn’t.
Yes, it was partly because they are stoic Midwesterners who don’t express their feelings or opinions much. But they weren’t passive or non-present. When I asked for help, they helped. My mother, a pianist, taught me how to read chord charts so I could play worship music at church. I would mess up all the time and get angry with myself. But she was calm and patient. And that broken-down car in Nebraska I just told you about? My dad used a couple of his vacation days, drove 12 hours in the middle of the night, and helped me get it going again. If ever there was an opportune time to remind your son about alternative career paths, my dad missed it.
For all they didn’t say, they still communicated something important. What that was exactly is hard to explain. It’s just a feeling. Like I was bowling with the gutters up. I knew it was up to me to pitch the ball, but I had a sense that the worst that could happen was I’d only knock down one or two pins. If I failed, at least I wouldn’t fail completely.
I can’t overemphasize just how valuable that feeling was—not just as an aspiring singer-songwriter, but as a person. Maybe that seems like a pretty low bar—not failing completely. But in the music industry, not failing completely over and over again—well, that’s the definition of success.
Love,
Aaron