We know them today as one of rock’s all-time greatest bands, a group that has withstood the changing times and fads since the late 1970s, surviving through disco, punk, new wave, hair bands, and grunge. They own the record for the most profitable tour of all time, have won twenty-two Grammy Awards, and continue to record, tour, and influence musicians worldwide. Beyond music, they are a political force and a voice of change. They are U2. With Bono’s passionate vocals, Edge’s jangling guitar, and the tight, pulsating rhythm of Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton, U2 appears to be a band of musicians who were born with a ridiculous amount of talent. But that’s not the case at all. When the boys first started playing together, they … well … sort of sucked.
When fourteen-year-old drummer Larry Mullen Jr. put a notice on the school bulletin board that he was looking for musicians to form a band, it was 1976, and the big musical style of the day in Ireland was punk rock. The punk sound had captivated frustrated young people all over the UK and was spreading around the world. Punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were loud and angry. Musical skill seemed very secondary. So when Bono, Edge, and Adam responded to the ad, they weren’t all that concerned about having any significant musical talent. If their punk rock heroes didn’t seem to exude any obvious proficiency at their instruments, why should they?
It turned out that even the seemingly simple punk songs were harder to replicate than they thought. U2, or Feedback as they initially called their band, wasn’t good enough to do other bands’ songs. So they wisely came to the conclusion that in order to be a band, they would have to write their own songs, easier ones that they could perform.
Just two years after first jamming together in Larry Mullen’s kitchen, U2 won a talent contest. Aside from the much-needed £500 cash, one of the prizes was recording studio time and a guarantee that their demo would be heard by CBS Records. CBS liked what they heard enough to release the band’s first songs to the Irish public in 1979. It would only be another year or two before the band started to grow beyond Ireland, eventually becoming one of the most successful rock bands on the planet. It is hard to imagine any band starting from less and achieving so much.
Nearly all of us are just like U2 in their early days: we don’t really know what we’re doing! We have a clue for sure, and we want to succeed, but we are full of self-doubt. We are convinced that other people know much more than we do. It becomes our mission to prevent people from catching on to our dirty little secret … that we really don’t know what the hell we are doing.
Certainly most of us know what we are doing for the most part, most of the time. But nobody, even the most seasoned expert, has all of the answers all of the time. What separates rock stars is their ability to learn on the job, ask the right questions, seek out direction, and, to a degree, “fake it until they make it,” because they intrinsically know that they will make it, and make it big.
U2 decided to be a band. They were undoubtedly unqualified, and learned quickly that they lacked the skill needed to be a band. So they learned on the job. They didn’t decide not to be a band because they lacked skill. Instead, they acquired skill as they went. They rehearsed hard. They played gigs for free at high schools and churches, and they immersed themselves irrevocably into their craft. With so much practice and hard work, U2 gradually got much, much better. When they won that talent contest and got their music in front of CBS, the ball was rolling for U2. But it only started rolling because they committed to improvement and never stopped improving. Giving up because they were unqualified would have been the easy way out. Deciding to not be a band until they were world-class musicians would also have failed miserably. Becoming qualified while already on the job was hard but came with a much bigger payoff.
Learning doesn’t stop after you get hired. Any successful person in any career field will tell you that they are lifelong learners and perpetual students. For U2, learning was, and remains, a continual process. After the success of their debut album, Boy, and the world tour that followed, expectations were high for the band’s second album. That album, October, came out in 1981, but the expected momentum wasn’t there. October didn’t sell nearly as many copies as the band and their record label anticipated.
U2 recorded October under tremendous pressure from their record company, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the first album. Recording the dreaded sophomore album is always a tough act for any band, but adding to the challenge was a lack of songs to record. They already had studio time booked when a briefcase containing lyrics to many completed songs was stolen backstage while the band played a concert in Portland, Oregon. That meant that they went into the studio without any finished songs. Bono had to re-create and sometimes improvise lyrics to many of the songs as the clock ticked away on expensive studio time. Another wrinkle in the recording of October was that both Bono and The Edge had become more involved in the church around the time of the album’s recording, leaving it with an underlying theme of faith, religion, and spirituality. The overtly Christian themes didn’t resonate with mass audiences the way the teen angst themes on the debut album did.
The lack of success that greeted October led U2 to once again focus on learning and improving. Giving up was never an option. Their songwriting skills improved. Their focus was narrowed. Their live show got even tighter. The band was determined to make the follow-up album, War, a massive success. The album was more political and rugged and less obviously spiritual. Songs from War connected with fans in a big way, and songs from that album, like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “New Year’s Day” continue to be vital elements of the U2 collection.
They had to learn on the job once again when creating their breakthrough album The Unforgettable Fire. They learned how to layer and texture their sound, creating the foundation for their massive album The Joshua Tree a few years later. After that album established them as the biggest band of the ’80s, they spent time educating themselves about the history of rock ’n’ roll in America and created Rattle and Hum, an album and movie that explored roots and blues music, collaborating with B. B. King and Bob Dylan. With every new album, the band was learning and growing while on the job.
Those on-the-job experiments and evolutions didn’t always go well. In the 1990s, the band got carried away with electronic and industrial elements and started to alienate some longtime, core fans. After a few years of making less commercially successful music, U2 regrouped and decided to return to their roots. Bono was very vocal about the band’s lack of focus and publicly declared that U2 needed to change in order to “reapply for the job as best band in the world.” They did reapply for that job, and by all accounts they landed the gig. Since that statement was made in 1999, U2 has gone on to record classic songs like “Beautiful Day,” “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out Of,” and “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.” They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and they completed the highest-grossing tour ever, the twenty-four-month-long “360” tour. The band was also an early promoter of the now-ubiquitous iPod, licensing their song “Vertigo” for Apple commercials and partnering with the company to release a special iTunes boxed set of the band’s music.
Learning on the job was a hallmark of U2 from their very first jam session.
Richard Branson didn’t know everything about publishing when he started his first business, a magazine called Student, when he was sixteen years old. But he was passionate for the idea and did it anyway, learning what he needed to learn while on the job. By age twenty he was running a mail-order record business, and two years later he founded a chain of record stores and a record label called Virgin.
What education did Richard Branson have in the music business when he started out? None. Branson hardly had any education at all. He was dyslexic and found traditional school challenging. He left school at sixteen and started into business. Even the name of his company, Virgin, was chosen in part because it reflected the fact that he was entirely new to business and had little clue as to what he was doing. He learned a lot on the job in those early days of publishing and turned the profits he earned and the knowledge he gained from the record store into a record label. And so it went with Sir Richard Branson, a man who is now, according to a 2011 list in Forbes magazine, the fourth richest man in the UK. Not bad for having learned nearly everything while on the job!
In 2008, a twenty-five-year-old rising young product designer named Jake Fischer was hired by a manufacturing company to oversee product design at their Cincinnati, Ohio, plant. His resume certainly credited him with the experience required for the job, and Jake aced the oneon-one interviews with the confidence and composure of a veteran. Even Jake was convinced he had the knowledge and talent to do the job.
That balloon of self-confidence was pierced quickly the first week he was on the job. The company was planning to launch a new product, and Jake was put in charge of overseeing large-scale customer research and consumer analysis that would determine many of the defining characteristics of the end product. Jake had overseen research studies before, but nothing this massive—not even close. At first, he was overwhelmed with the scope of the challenge and considered asking his new supervisor to put someone else in charge of it.
Fortunately, Jake took a deep breath and decided to move forward in the same way that U2 and Richard Branson did. First, he learned absolutely everything he could about the project and his role in it. He met with key people, both above and below him in the corporate structure, and asked endless questions, some of them wise and some of them probably pretty basic. “I kept reminding myself that it didn’t matter if some of my questions were stupid,” said Jake. “My only goal was to completely understand the task ahead of me. People would eventually forget that I asked stupid questions, but they would never forget it if I completely blew the project.”
Jake also stepped outside of his company and spoke to a trusted network of friends and advisers. Without breaking company confidence, he was able to learn more about how others handled similar projects in the past. Jake’s biggest takeaway from those discussions wasn’t a clear-cut path to success, but instead it was the knowledge that there was no clear-cut path to success. “The most important thing I learned from those conversations was that there was no single right way to do things. I learned that there are all kinds of different nuances and styles, and none of them are 100 percent right or 100 percent wrong.”
Once Jake had acquired enough information, he established a core group of smart people that he could consult with along the way. Decisions were never made by committee, but they were also never made without consultation and discussion. When decisions were made, Jake was able to confidently make them with authority and conviction.
In the end, the project was a success, and Jake gained tremendous confidence, both within himself and within his company. He also created a model that he continues to employ to this day. “Even though I did those things out of necessity at first, I still do them. I still have those conversations, create those advisory teams, ask those basic questions, and consult with people who know more than I do.”
