Any artist must master their medium.If your art is managing people, what is the medium you use to make that happen? If your art Is music, is your medium your instrument? Your ideas? Your performance?No matter what your art is, you work with a medium to carry your ideas to those you serve.So often, people forget that.They forget they have a medium to master. What’s your medium?

Stress seems to be experienced right before something important happens. Then, the important thing happens, and we seem to laugh about how stressed we became.My thought, why don’t we cut right to the laughter and forget the stress?

I recently traveled to Omaha. I had a connection in Dallas which was 60 minutes, but got cut short to 20 minutes due to delays from Milwaukee. I wasn’t the only one that had a connection.As the plane arrived in Dallas, our connecting city, people got visibly stressed. I imagined they were asking themselves, Will I miss my flight? What if I do? How will I make my meeting? What, another day that I won’t see my loved one? How much more money will I be out? As we began to de-plane, some people barreled their way from the back of the plane in a desperate attempt to the get to the front. I don’t think they realized that their efforts only created a bottle neck which impacted others. Delays are going to happen - that’s part of life. If that’s true, why do we allow ourselves to get stressed? Seneca wrote something like, “Why should I suffer in advance?”I ultimately got where I was meant to go. A few hours later. Alive. Calm.

When you’re joining any new tribe - family, community, job, friend group, whatever - you must answer this important question first: How do the people like us act? What are the unspoken rules that people like us observe? Consider a new job. The people at that job have a mode of operating, a way of acting, a credo, a culture, a this is how we do things around here. Every person has a part to play, and they play it. For the new employee, their biggest and most important question to answer is, How do I play my part here? If that new employee doesn’t play that part, they’ll be shunned and ultimately fired. If they play the part too well, the group will become untrusting.If the new person plays their part just well enough, they’ll be welcomed with open arms. Learn the rules - learn the culture. Play your part - just well enough.

When you bring people together to solve a problem, make sure everybody wants to solve that problem.If they agree, at the meeting, relentlessly move towards that problem. The moment you waver from the outcome, you lose. The same goes for life. Relentlessly pursue your hopes and dreams.

Starting a new job? Don’t know where to start?Ask your manager, “what is the one most valuable thing I can do this week that will measurably help me be a more valuable contributor?”If you don’t have a manager, ask yourself that question and take your best guess. Reflect on the decision a few weeks later and to gather learnings. When you don’t know what to do, an well thought out hunch trumps a shot in the dark.

I finished a gig at 1am and headed to a hotel, arrived at 3am. The next day I had to wake up at 6am for an 8am church gig. Is that scenario similar to any other professional musician? Probably. Is it similar to you? Likely.The lesson I learned is that I pushed too hard. I gave 110% of my efforts during the night show, slept only a few hours, and then gave 110% of my effort at the church gig. I’m spent, exhausted, and running on adrenaline. How did I do this when I was in my 20s?Have you learned this lesson before?How often are you going from one thing to the next, staring at a screen, working ridiculously hard, and not sleeping enough? Our younger versions were foolish - that’s my opinion.I’m going to try not to push it so hard. Life is a marathon, not a race.

If you just stop and look at where you are going, you will be amazed at what is before. Being barefoot in an unknown environment, a form of vulnerability, is a way to force your mind and your body to do just that - slow down and observe.I almost stepped on this little entity trekking across a path. Before I put my foot down, my eyes zero’d in on it like a hawk - like it was some type of primal instinct. Instead of putting my foot down, I stopped, watched, recorded, and enjoyed every second.What more could you be seeing if you slowed down a bit?

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, often uses a mental model for decision making that I love. Howard imagines that at his board room table (that’s where he’s making decisions) there are two empty chairs.In the two empty chairs sit the metaphorical employee (Howard calls them “Partners”) and customer. When presented with a decision, Howard asks himself, “would the employee (partner) and the customer seated at the table be proud of our decision?” If the answer is “no,” then he has to go back to the drawing board and re-work the decision. What would change about the decisions you make if you applied a similar mental model? Who would be seated at your board room table? Would they be proud?

Marcel Proust, author of “In Search of Lost Time,” experienced multiple bouts of depression and debilitating illness. He spent a majority of his life reading books, aimlessly moving about society, and trying to find his life’s task. Later, he found some meaning translating the work of John Ruskin into French, and later still he would go on to write a book, “In Search of Lost Time,” which essentially accounts for his life and lessons learned in “wasting” time. “In Search of Lost Time” became one of his most famous works and was published in 7 volumes. Marcel didn’t realize it until later, but studying and writing about our society and the art of living were his life’s tasks, and doing the work of writing and studying brought him out of his deepest holes. What’s the lesson?Reflecting on Proust, I asked myself the question, “Can having a sense of responsibility to ourselves hack depression? Can it take us out of our deepest slumps?” Perhaps it can.Perhaps it can because what if owning a responsibility was a major component of the identity we create for ourselves? And, What if that responsibility (read: our life’s greatest responsibility), was something we could act on every day? And, What if acting that responsibility out every day, even when we would rather do nothing else, activated a part of ourselves that reminds us that we matter? And,What if realizing for ourselves that we matter is key to our feeling good about ourselves? A lot of “what if’s,” but a thought worth exploring. If it worked for Proust, what if it works for us?