by Pete Wright
Last night, we hung out with Tyler Stenson. He’s a musician, a guitarist and troubadour, and he joined Curt Siffert and myself for the innaugural episode of the 2009 season of Acoustic Conversations. The AC show itself hasn’t been posted yet, but stay tuned… it’ll be up online soon. Read on for a little Stenson present.
This post isn’t about the music. The music is great. Go listen to it. Buy it. Enjoy. I’ll even help out as a shill here for a bit. See how nice I am? Instead, this post is about success. It’s about what it means to be successful, what it means to know you’ve made it.
Making it casts a broad net, and it’s a theme that continues to come up in the AcConvo shows as we talk to more artists — what is the general expectation of acceptance and success, and how will you know you’ve achieved it?
“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star like everyone else,” Stenson told us. “I’ve grown up a bit since then.”
And this is the bit that struck me. You’d think that a musician, fresh from quitting his day job to pursue music full time, struggling to find a model around his own music business, would be looking for the fastest way to stardom, to sponsors, to chicks and groupies and all the trappings of celebrity. As it turns out, there’s a more human approach.
Stenson says he’s shooting for relevance. “My goal is not to make you bob your head and snap your fingers. It’s to put a lump in your throat. I try to stay true to my character, my brand,” he says. There are people who email him, who reach out to him that tell him his songs have changed their lives in some way, people he’s never met. “I’ve had to ask myself, ‘Tyler, how big do you want to get? Because you know if some people think you’re a rock star, you are.’ … I don’t want to play 300 songs a year. I used to have dreams of stardom, but now, as long as it’s a livelihood and as long as I’m changing some peoples’ lives — I don’t need my face on TV to feel like I’ve made it.”
There’s honor in modest goals. You’ll hear in the show that Stenson in no way totally dismisses the throngs of screaming fan thing. But what’s clear about him is that you can tell he’s thought hard about what it mean to be successful, what it means to be happy. Sitting there talking to him, it’s hard not to ask yourself the same tough questions.
I had lunch with a dear friend an mentor, John Patton, yesterday afternoon, before the interview with Stenson. We get together to talk about careers, business, books, and such every six months or so and this time, he asked this question: “How big do you want to get?”
That’s a tough question. See, the challenge in a question like that is that it presumes you’ve thought about what you want to be doing from day to day some time out there, sometime when you’re confronted by future you.
I told him my work right now is pointing me toward education. Not in the classroom sense necessarily, but in the more archetypical fashion. Then he told me about Dr. Nicholoson.
Apparently, Nicholson was one of Patton’s professors in college. In one of the first class sessions, he told the class the following: “Each of you will profoundly affect the lives of 11 people in your lifetime.” He explained to the class that they would affect these people not just in the yeah-I-have-a-best-friend fashion, but in a way that something you do or say, or some invisible influence or intervention you serve that will dramatically change the course of life for 11 people before you die.
Patton’s response: “I realized, 11′s not enough for me.”
For the last 30 years, Patton’s served as CEO of a company that teaches others how to manage projects. For the first 15 years, his work was mostly domestic. Scale changes everything, and now his company serves companies around the globe, and has lisenced his methodology to others on almost every continent. This is his contribution to the arithmatic of expanding his 11 people to hundreds… thousands.
I don’t know my 11 people. I have an idea who a few of them might be, a few of the chance encounters or run-ins with others that I feel may have changed their lives. I think it’s important to think about, but I doubt I’ll ever know for sure. It’s far more important to keep trying, to keep moving in a direction of helping and supporting others, to serve as someone with the power to help profoundly.
Here’s what I do know: I know the people who have profoundly changed my life, the souls for whom I am one of their 11 people. Kira, Sophie, Nick. Lloyd and Debbie. Brendan Murphy. Orion Ross. Chris Lowell. Don Heider. Dogan Barns and Trent Adams. The list goes on, and on, and on, and for each of them, just as I’m sitting here, I can pinpoint a moment in my life that changed as a result of a moment in theirs. For better or for worse, I’m a different person as a result of them.
What Stenson said about being relevant, and what Patton said about invisible influence, these are things we should stop reflect on. Because the ripple effect of our actions is always broader than the net we cast with them. Our businesses, the stories we tell, the relationships we cultivate, the brands we follow and collect, the politicians we respect — and those we don’t, the network of interactions and the reactions we will never see, these are the trappings of success.
If you haven’t thought about your 11 people, about the people for whom you’ve changed the course of their lives, do so. Just stop, sit quietly, and take a minute. Do you know who they are? Do they?
At the end of the session, I asked Tyler to play his favorite cover tune. As it happens, it’s also one of my absolute favs: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. It’s a bit of a low rent recording, but I dumped in the raw audio from the performance mics. Hope you enjoy.
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