r........s

I learned something incredible today. I was flipping around Amazon Prime trying to figure out how best to kill off the rest of my Saturday of cat-sitting at my soon-to-be ex-wife’s house, when I came across the suggested title "Yes – Songs from Tsongas," a live concert film. The concert starts and I'm hearing new things. I’ve been listening to Yes for decades, and I’ve heard these songs countless times, but tonight, watching this video, I’m just picking up on all this extra stuff. And it got me thinking about Yes really deeply . Then it hits me: none of these guys are Mozart. You can tell by the way they play, especially live, that they have to work really hard to play the things that they write. It’s complicated music originally written and performed by very young men, comparatively speaking. Now, as grandparents, they can still play it, but you get the sense that it takes a great deal of effort just just to hang on. What I’m saying is you can see the work that it is for them. That’s when I realize a thing about famous people that I never understood before. People like me see what famous people do as something one can only do if you're born with a little extra....something. And, sure, there are plenty of examples of prodigies who clearly have some god-given talent from birth. Mozart. Bobby Fischer. Stephen Hawking. But this Yes concert made me realize that that’s only true for a microscopic cohort of famous people. For the vast majority of humanity, the difference between the people who watch TV (like me) and the people who are being watched (like Yes) almost completely comes down to one thing: a willingness to do an extraordinary amount of work. Because that specific work brings you joy, even as you're failing at the onset. You become obsessed with mastering this thing you are driven to. The journey to be great at something fuels your soul. Because the pursuit, and the breakthroughs, provide you with the most joy you can imagine. The joy is so essential to your being that you’re willing to go on the road for half a century and it’s not all about the money. It’s because it made you really happy to be this awesome at something. I’m terrible at a great many things. And only very late in my life did I decide to really make as extraordinary an effort as I possibly could trying to get better at something. The feeling of elation you get when you do this, when you stick with it through all of the doubt and failure to achieve even microscopic gains, is the reward. And it's worth it. So I’m watching Yes and I see five people who could’ve been any of us, but they’re the only ones who tried hard enough to get there. So hard that, most likely, other parts of their lives weren’t nearly as successful. But if we knew what it felt like, and how this feeling is only accessible to you when you're willing to try obnoxiously hard to do it, how many more of us would achieve something more than what we've done with our lives? So yeah, get yourself a one-hitter and pack it a little GMO. Get yourself a Greek salad, and prepare to come face-to-face with your inadequacy, like me. But in a good way.