Life lessons from a rock star
Wow!
It’s September! September 2021! I remember Feb 2020 and then it got all blurry, but here we are, living life with all its pain, joy, loss, and love. Thank you for being here. Writing to you is one of the highlights of my week. I appreciate your reading and your responses. They mean a lot to me.
Over the last year, I have started to intentionally spread my spend in order to support a variety of businesses. In late July, I decided that we needed a new duvet. Actually, I’d decided that last year, but I am slow on some things. In my search, I came across Karoo Creations who make woollen duvets.
I subsequently discovered that Karoo Creations was born out of the covid-triggered demise of their previous business, the Richmond Karoo Small Hotel. I liked their courage. Then, our duvet arrived, and it was delivered like this. I liked them even more. Being more intentional about how I spend has added richness and diversity to my life. It just requires switching off life’s autopilot and looking around a little.
Today’s letter is inspired by Elton John’s autobiography, Me. We can learn a lot from studying great artists and musicians. Of course, it’s fun to immerse oneself in the sheer exuberance of a life lived large, but there are many other themes. Their success has all the requirements that organizational success needs – strategy, good people, clear leadership, persistence, courage – and because it’s all distilled into one person’s life, we can often see the themes more clearly.
/ Strategy
John’s story as a musician accelerates from the beginning of his collaboration with the legendary Bernie Taupin. Not that either of them were legends at that point. John (then known as Reg Dwight) and Taupin had both submitted work to Liberty Records. Both had been rejected.
John describes what happened next, “Almost as an afterthought, or a consolation prize after rejecting me, Ray had handed me an envelope. Someone responding to the same advert had sent in some lyrics. I had a feeling Ray hadn’t actually read any of them before he passed them on to me.
The guy who wrote them came from Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire, hardly the pulsating rock and roll capital of the world. He apparently worked on a chicken farm, carting dead birds around in a wheelbarrow. But his lyrics were pretty good…Crucially, none of them made me want to rip my own head off with embarrassment, which meant they were a vast improvement on anything I’d come up with.”
And so, John contacted Taupin. They met. They connected and they started collaborating. Taupin would send the lyrics from Lincolnshire and John added the music. They weren’t an overnight success. Indeed, at that point, they decided that they would give it a proper try, and Taupin moved to London, they hadn’t sold a single song.
John reflects that “… we hadn’t actually managed to get any other artists to buy the bloody things yet, and if we committed to it full-time, we’d be broke. But other than money, what did we have to lose? A wheelbarrow full of dead chickens and ‘Let The Heartaches Begin’ twice a night, respectively.”
It’s worth pausing here to reflect.
Instead of leaving Ray Williams’ office overwhelmed by rejection, John took the consolation introduction to Taupin. He looked for the next opportunity to advance his musical career. They had an intuition that they could work together and given their lives, it was a low-risk undertaking, so they could dedicate time to it. They were open to opportunity, they persisted, they managed risk, and invested time.
John and Taupin started writing songs, sharing bunk beds in John’s parental home bedroom. They sold the occasional one. Dozens were rejected. John recorded a single. It flopped. They kept going until the studio manager at the record label said to them, “You need to stop this rubbish. You’re not very good at it. In fact, you’re hopeless. You’re never going to make it as songwriters. You can’t do it at all”.
As depression flooded through them, he pointed them to a song that they’d written and said “You need to write more songs like that. You need to do what you want to do, not what you think will sell.” Discovering that you’re bad at something is useful information, whether you’re a person or a business, invest your energy elsewhere.
He backed them to record an album. They did. It wasn’t a runaway success, but the reviews were positive. An American band covered one of the tracks. And now John had material that he could perform live. A new front opened up. That album led to another, one entitled Elton John that made it into the charts, and then a US tour, and Taupin and John were on their way.
This part of their story is an intriguing mix.
They were producing work according to an idea of what would sell, but that was not where they were strongest. Their best work was something else. That was the work that would really sell!
It took their studio manager, Steve Brown, to point them back to the parts of their work that had the kernel of something unique. They’d written it, but they didn’t see it. To their credit, they had surrounded themselves with people who gave them opinions, listened, and took the opportunity.
/ Self
As John started performing more, he was clear that he wanted to be a ‘frontman’. This was the era of Hendrix, Jagger and others – the bar was high.
I loved this description of his initial efforts, “bitter subsequent experience has taught me that if you get carried away and try and smash up a piano by pushing it offstage, you end looking less like a lawless rock god and more like a furniture removal man having a bad day”.
So, there he was stuck behind the piano but determined to find a solution.
We all know that he pulled it off.
He drew inspiration from fellow pianists – Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He kept experimenting. Who do you draw inspiration from? How can you work around the limitations that are inevitably there?
Of course, he transformed how he dressed. Before he went on his US tour, he went to Mr. Freedom, a Chelsea shop, filled with outrageous clothing.
John remembers that “Wearing them, I felt different like I was expressing a side of my personality that I’d kept hidden, a desire to be outrageous and over-the-top…”
He wore them for his first US appearance, “I put them all on at once. So instead of an introspective hippy singer-songwriter, the audience was greeted by the sight of a man in bright yellow dungarees, a long-sleeved T-shirt covered in stars and a pair of heavy workman’s boots, also bright yellow, with a large set of blue wings sprouting from them. This was not the way sensitive singer-songwriters in America in 1970 looked. This was not the way anyone of sound mind in America in 1970 looked.”
It is something that rock stars excel in. They adopt a look to inhabit their role. Fela did it, Skin did it, Elton John did it. There is power in it. It says, ‘this is who I am’. You might not start wearing bright yellow dungarees, but asking yourself, “How do I want to do life?” and “how might I best represent that to myself and the world?’, will open new possibilities.
As John and Taupin learned, it was by being the best version of themselves that they unlocked the world.
(As an aside, does your company have innovation as a value, and a dress code, and spend money on image consultants teaching you how to dress to conform? Just asking 😉)
/ Soul
John is remarkably frank about his failings and struggles. I found it liberating to know that even with all his success, he experiences doubt, that he has irrational outbursts of anger, that he still grapples with childhood pains, that all of us are just finding ways to manage being human.
He reflects on how, at a point, he had surrounded himself with people to ‘make his life easier’ but in truth, he was simply hiding from himself, his behaviour, and reality.
He comments that “the more isolated you are from reality – the more removed you become from the person you’re naturally supposed to be – the harder you’re making your life and the less happy you become.”
He ends the book by saying “what running away from Reg Dwight taught me is that when I got too far from him, too removed from the normal person I once was, things went horribly wrong; I was more miserable than ever. I need – everybody needs – some connection to reality.”
This week, I hope that you get the chance to meet your Steve Brown – the person who sees what you uniquely bring to the world. If you’ve met them already, thank them. If you haven’t found them yet, start looking. They’re out there. In fact, they’re in you. Listen.
If this is the first time you’re reading strategy, soul, & self, you can subscribe here. You can follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Karl
PS: Last week’s letter focused on the Netflix story. During the week, I shared more about their approach to innovation and giving feedback. If you’d like to know more about Netflix, this Masters of Scale podcast with Reed Hastings is also worth listening to. Thank you for all the messages, it was good to know that you found it useful.
(this letter was first sent on 5 September 2021)