Sometimes people say to me, “I’m thinking of pursuing music.”
And I say, “Don’t.”
If you have to think about it, you shouldn’t do it. Do it only if you are compelled to do it.
I didn’t really have a say in what I was going to do. I did it and do it because I have to. If you’re considering a career in music, don’t bother. You need to have a passion, an insatiable passion that you won’t compromise.
There’s a gap between feeling compelled to do something and making it happen, though, and the bridge is an empowered sense of hopefulness. Ultimately I have an outlook rooted in optimism—but a fighting optimism, not a passive optimism. An optimism of agency. An optimism that I have the power to make my life what I want it to be—as opposed to just wishing everything turns out okay on its own.
The difference between someone who wants to be something and someone who’s actually going to accomplish it is also a sense of structure and a sense of steps—a process. It’s not enough to want something. We can want it all we want, but if we don’t have a sequence or a battle plan, it won’t work.
Take my friend Chris Jericho. Chris was told he was too short to be a professional wrestler. But he decided to ignore the rules. He decided he would work harder than anybody else—and he made it.
The rules only stand until they’re broken—and that is the essence of dreaming big.
I’ll never have the foundation, background, or technique necessary to be a great chef, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t go forward. The idea that I paint or don’t paint based on my knowledge of painting is self-defeating; whether I cook or not should also not be based on actually knowing what I’m doing. Again, that’s self-defeating—after all, who knows anything when they first start? We can’t get anywhere without taking that first step.
It’s been said that the secret to getting ahead is getting started. Though that doesn’t mean we can’t ask questions when we need to.
I like stumbling around when I get started on something. Actually, that’s kind of how I approached the guitar. I took a few lessons and then went off on my own. Later I tried another teacher, but I found that she didn’t want me to go ahead of her lesson plans. So if I was supposed to practice one particular thing before a lesson but ended up working on additional stuff, that wasn’t okay with her.
But that kind of approach just isn’t in my nature. I like people to be there if I have questions, but don’t tell me to slow down.
If we acknowledge, identify, and embrace who we are and what we are, then the potential is that much greater. I’ve painted entire pieces with a palette knife. In a sense, I wanted to tie one hand behind my back, not have the ability to add detail but rather to give the impression of things and then let the viewer’s eye fill in the rest. I did that purposely to steer myself away from what I don’t do well anyway. I’m not going to paint photorealistic pieces.
Identify who you are and what you are, and then embrace that rather than fight it in order to be something else.
If we define what we’re incapable of, then we embrace what’s possible. We eliminate the waste of going after what’s futile or the things that don’t represent who we are. By removing that waste, we embrace our full potential. It goes back to this: if I had decided to become a mathematician or a rocket scientist, I’d be broke. By eliminating the things that were out of the question, I gave myself that much more potential to do what was possible.
Of course, there were things I thought at one time were impossible for me, only to find later that my assessment had changed. For example, there was a time when I genuinely thought it would be impossible to be a good father, and yet I evolved.
Part of learning, part of exploration, is changing our horizons.
In the beginning, I just wanted to be happy. Simple, right? Well, that turned out to be pretty complex. And when I thought about being a parent, I knew I wanted to be a good parent, but I didn’t believe I had the wherewithal. Both of those things came with time and work—and, in fact, informed each other. After all, how good a parent can we be if we don’t know ourselves and aren’t comfortable with who we are?
Those sorts of transformations don’t happen overnight, but becoming a good parent and a fundamentally happy person have been perhaps the most rewarding accomplishments of my life. And they are also the sorts of transformations that led me to other possibilities: painting, theater, cooking, writing—whatever it is. I pursued becoming a famous musician with everything I had because, for one thing, I knew I was capable of it. When I saw the Beatles, I said to myself, “I can do that.” Well, based on what? I couldn’t play the guitar. I was deaf in one ear. And yet, without intellectualizing it, I innately knew: I can do that. The other thing pushing me along was that I was desperate to be happy. But I found out once I had achieved music stardom that I still wasn’t happy—and that realization moved me ahead of where I’d been.
Accomplishing whatever we set out to do is the stepping stone to another level. It’s another rung on the ladder. We never know where we’re going to end up. We can only start, and once we start, every step we take, we can see a little more clearly ahead of us.
Of course, oftentimes we need a guide. We need somebody to show us options, show us techniques.
When it came to singing in The Phantom of the Opera—when I took over the lead in the production in Toronto in 1999—I saw the challenges. I had difficulty figuring out how to remedy certain things vocally, so I met with a few vocal coaches until I finally came across somebody who got it. He understood, and he said to me, “They hired you because of the way you sing. Don’t change the way you sing.” Which was a relief, because another coach I’d seen had foisted a completely new technique on me. His technique changed my tone dramatically, which was difficult with only two and a half weeks before I opened in the show. Thankfully, here was somebody who said, “They hired you because they like what you have. Let’s just deal with the little issues. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s address what needs to be addressed.”
Experts in various fields can tell when someone is eager to learn something, and maybe they take that as an appreciation of what they do. It’s very inviting when somebody else is interested in what you do and wants to learn. I know it’s always appealing to me. I helped a young man get into college a few years back. He wanted to pursue music, and his family asked if I could help. I sat down with him, and he played me a song to impress me. My role, I felt, was to be constructively critical—not to demean him or to discourage him, but to help him. After he got over the shock of my not being bowled over by his music—he said to me later that everybody always told him how great he was—he wanted more. That quality is hard to turn away from—when somebody looks to you as a mentor. It’s not about my ego; it’s more about paying it forward—and another way to live on in another generation. With this young man, I got to help somebody achieve what he wanted.
These kinds of situations aren’t forgotten—by us or by the person we’re helping. They are opportunities for us to share our knowledge with somebody else to help them achieve their goals, their dreams.