Busking in Berlin

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Terry Young

On a visit to Germany a few years ago, I planned to spend an evening at one of East Berlin’s famous jazz clubs. As I wound my way through the streets looking for the club, I heard the sounds of a guitar in the distance. Following the music, I discovered a street musician playing on a subway platform.

He played beautifully and, on the spot, I set aside my previous plans and decided to listen to this wonderful guitarist instead. He was playing a cedar-top Godin nylon-stringed guitar, and his small amplifier was powered by a car battery. It was a cold evening, and on both hands he wore gloves with the fingers cut out so he could play. He transitioned fluidly from classical to jazz to pop as his finger-style playing filled the subway platform.

I listened to him for quite a while — along with the revolving crowd of subway riders who stopped for a song or two on their way into and out of the station.

During a lull, the guitarist and I started talking. He was Ukrainian, but spoke enough English to make conversation possible. He asked if I played and, when I said yes, he immediately handed me his guitar.

I played and sang for a while as trains came and went. People stopped and listened and threw Euros into the guitar case he had propped open to collect his wages. The memory is clear in my mind since this was the first and the last time I ever played on the street. The fact that the crowd came and went worked well for me – since I only know the words and chords to a handful of songs from memory.

After I had finished playing a song, a man from the crowd stepped forward and asked if I would give his son guitar lessons. We lived in London at the time and it was difficult to get him to understand I didn’t live in Berlin. Understandably perplexed, he asked, “Then why are you playing guitar in the Berlin subway?” It was an obvious question and, at the moment, one for which I didn’t have a simple answer.

People have been performing in the streets for centuries (read about the history of “busking“). One such performer is singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey. He spent his early years playing and singing in the Boston subway. He credits that experience with molding him into the inventive guitarist and songwriter he is today — since a subway crowd is pretty unforgiving and will drift away the moment they get bored. I’ve seen him live a couple of times, once at a house concert in our living room, and he is a captivating performer.

After several years as a professional, he returned to the Boston subway and produced the amazing live CD, 10,000 Mornings, recorded where he cut his musical teeth. From that CD, here’s his cover of the Paul Simon tune, Stranded in a Limousine. You can hear a subway train in the background.

In a post on his website back in 1997, Mulvey shared the following list of learnings from the formative years he spent playing in the subway. He called it “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from My Subway Platform.”

Choose your battles carefully. Smile often. We are only what we give away. Pay attention. Do the best you can with the hand you’re dealt. Sometimes, all you can do is not enough. Try to learn every minute. Pace yourself. Know when to rest, and when to call it a day.

He noted that, at first glance, the list sounds like nothing more than platitudes. But he added, “I have a theory about platitudes: they only SOUND fluffy. Try to actually do any one of these things consistently, and you will be amazed.”

I think that’s a pretty good list no matter what your profession.

Netflux — Two Thumbs Down

Posted on September 20, 2011 by Terry Young

Let me start by saying I’m a Netflix fan. Where else will you find 12, a Russian retelling of the movie, Twelve Angry Men, next to Helvetica, a documentary on the most pervasive font in the world? Not at my local Blockbuster, that’s for sure.

My love affair with movies goes back to my childhood. When I was nine, my parents took me to see My Side of the Mountain and ever since I have kept my eyes open for a tree big enough to hollow out and live in. Later, my uncle took my sister and me to the Killarney Drive-In to see Paper Moon, Tatum O’Neal’s Oscar-winning debut. And then in a spectacularly daft move, I took my straight-laced parents to see Bill Murray’s movie, Stripes, thinking my dad would like it since he had been in the Army.

For me, Netflix has been too good to be true. It brought me a 160-minute movie about a French monastery without any dialogue, Into Great Silence, and a film in Dzongkha, the national language of Bhutan, called Travellers and Magicians. I’ve enjoyed a Columbian movie called The Wind Journeys, a Faustian tale about an accordion-playing troubadour, and I’ve watched so many Scandinavian movies on Netflix, I now have a favorite Danish actor (Mads Mikkelsen). The world’s best cinema is just a mouse click away.

So when this innovative company with a passionate following raised prices and separated DVD and streaming services into two separate payment plans, the ensuing outrage was predictable.

And just yesterday, the Netflix CEO added insult to injury when he announced in a faux-folksy blog post that he is splitting the DVD-by-mail service and streaming video businesses completely. That means two bills, two separate movie queues. Netflix will remain the name of the streaming business, and they have chosen the unfortunate name of Qwikster for the DVD service.

It’s not just the 60 percent increase in prices that has customers riled up.

If the streaming options were more plentiful, this wouldn’t be getting the same reaction. Many users relied on the mix of DVDs and streaming since many movies weren’t available for instant viewing. And that gap will get worse since Starz Entertainment declined to renew its streaming agreement with Netflix last month, which means the company would lose online access to movies from Sony and Disney.

A clever analogy showed up in a Netflix story on the National Public Radio website this morning:

It’s like a shoe company deciding to sell right shoes and left shoes for 12 dollars each where pairs of shoes used to be 20 dollars and thinking that customers will notice the 12-dollar price but not the fact that it buys only one shoe.

How do smart companies make such dumb moves? How does Netflix go from being Cinema Paradiso to Little Shop of Horrors?

Back in 2002, Scott Bedbury cast a wide net when he described the elements that make up a company’s brand in his book A New Brand World:

A brand is the sum of the good, the bad the ugly, and the off-strategy. It is defined by your best product as well as your worst product. It is defined by the accomplishments of your best employee – the shining star in your company who can do no wrong – as well as by the mishaps of the worst hire you ever made. It is also defined by your receptionist, and the music your customers are subjected to when placed on hold. For every grand and finely worded public statement by the CEO, the brand is also defined by derisory consumer comments overheard in the hallway.

Since social media didn’t exist as we know it when Bedbury wrote this book, you can easily replace the last phrase with “the brand is also defined by derisory consumer comments on Twitter and Facebook.” In today’s environment, when you have zealous advocates for your product, changes you make that loosen that bond can reverberate in social media space with a vengeance.

The fine folks at Netflix should have read Bedbury’s book. His credentials are pretty impressive. He was senior vice president of marketing at Starbucks from 1995 to 1998. Prior to that he was head of advertising for Nike, where he launched the “Bo Knows” and “Just Do It” campaigns.

The outcry of disenchanted Netflix customers is vitriolic, but analysts are pooh-poohing the response as not indicative of the majority of users. But the drop in stock price from a high of around $300 per share this summer to $143 today begs to differ. And while its subscriber forecast is for 24 million customers — that’s down 1 million customers from just a few weeks ago.

At this rate, their coming attraction just may be The Last Picture Show.

And a River Runs Through It

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Terry Young

I was reminded of the power of water on a pilgrimage of sorts to my hometown this summer. Having lived in the desert for four years – where a mere eight inches of rain per year is considered normal – I was struck by how green and lush Missouri was. And by the calming effect of the cool, clear streams that flowed through the valleys of my youth.

The dearth of water in Phoenix causes people to rush to the window when it rains, pressing their noses to the pane. It feels like settlers on a remote prairie, rushing outside to catch a glimpse of a long-overdue stagecoach. A month after moving here, I laughed when I saw people do this. Now I do it too.

On that trip back home, I took this photo of Marble Creek, which passed serenely through the farms of both sets of my grandparents when I was growing up.

I spent days as a teenager wading it, fishing for smallmouth bass with crawdads I caught in the creek for bait. This creek is where we used to skinny dip every year on Groundhog Day for reasons that totally escape me now. This creek also runs behind the cemetery where my parents, grandparents and great grandparents are buried.

I sat at this spot for a couple of hours reflecting on where I had grown up, remembering my family, and considering the adventures that lay ahead. The soundtrack to my reverie was the gentle music of the water cascading over the rocks and a cicada symphony. A smell of cedar was in the breeze.

It would be boastful to refer to that terrain as mountainous or to the waterways as rivers. Hills and creeks are a more honest description — and more in keeping with the modest, self-effacing temperament of the Midwest.

As I think back, it also would have been pretentious to bring a fly rod into any of these waters; a Zebco 33 was about as sophisticated as we got.

It was in a creek very much like this one that I was baptized in the spring of my eighth year. Linus Penturf, the pastor at Stouts Creek Missionary Baptist Church, waded with me out into the water and immersed me as my parents, the small congregation and a school of bluegill witnessed the entire event. Even in that most reverent of moments, I recall thinking I would have to come back later with my rod and reel.

So it was no surprise when Robert Redford’s beautiful film, A River Runs Through It, hooked me from the very first line: “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.”

The movie is an adaptation of a Norman MacLean story about his Montana childhood –much of which was spent fly fishing on the majestic Big Blackfoot River.

In A River Runs Through It, the taciturn father, played by Tom Skerrit, is a Presbyterian minister who describes Methodists as “Baptists who could read.” My spiritual journey continues to take me far beyond that chilly creek, partly because — as Tom Skerrit’s character would have asserted — I learned to read.

Since Missouri is a long way from any coastline, and since my parents were wary of venturing beyond Iron County, I was out of high school before I first saw the ocean. It was the Atlantic as seen from the shores of New Jersey – which is not the garden state their license plates would have you believe. But the memory that remains is a powerful one:

To a ceaseless cymbal crash of waves, Bill Latham and I ran along the beach, as if drawing energy from the ocean itself.

I now have gazed from the pier at Lake Michigan, dipped my hand into the Dead Sea and walked the footpaths of the Cinque Terre overlooking the Mediterranean. I have flown over the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Indian oceans — and the view from 30,000 feet makes me distrust big water. An ocean is an anonymous, indifferent crowd. But a creek has a personality, a sense of humor and a touch of liquid grace.

I think Norman MacLean would agree, based on how he ended his story:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

When Everyone Else Runs Out, They Run In

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Terry Young

In a moving ceremony last week, firefighters at the nuclear plant where I work were honored in a badge pinning ceremony. The haunting drone of a bagpiper playing Amazing Grace opened the ceremony as everyone in the room rose.

It was a fitting reminder of the event we commemorate today that claimed the lives of 343 firefighters at the World Trade Center a decade ago.

In the wake of that loss of life, the Federal Emergency Management Agency commissioned a Firefighter Fatality Retrospective Study. The study noted that every year approximately 100 firefighters are killed while on duty and tens of thousands are injured.

The preface to that report noted that, “The World Trade Center disaster represents the largest loss of firefighters in a single incident in the United States since 1947, when 27 firefighters perished in fires and explosions aboard two Texas City ships.”

One of the speakers at the badge pinning ceremony said firefighters are a different breed — that in a time of crisis they run in when everyone else is running out. As I ate dinner with those firefighters, I realized they are people like you and me, except they’re not. They go to work every day with the full knowledge of the extraordinary things they may be called upon to do. Put simply, their job — day in and day out — is to be heroes.

In a tribute last week to the emergency workers who died on 9/11, Deputy U.S. Fire Administrator Glenn Gaines said:

To those who provide for the public’s safety, there is sweetness to life that the protected shall never know. It is the honor and privilege of wearing the badge and being depended upon to save a life that only the bravest enjoy. They have one very simple job description: they’re expected to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the right stuff.

Firefighters provide a powerful example to act in the face of adversity. While you and I may not be called upon to rush into burning buildings, each of us can do more than we often realize. There are literally thousands of poignant stories about the power of a simple gesture that made a difference to someone shattered by 9/11.

David Wilcox, a singer-songwriter from North Carolina, wrote a song several years ago called Show the Way. It was written before 9/11, but it could just as easily have been written about 9/11.

He once described the song as a plea to not “give up on being the change, like a candle in the dark, just because the world needs so much light. But this song takes it farther and says: even our despair is cause for hope. There is a sacred voltage that burns in our hearts, in our awareness of all that needs to change.”

On this anniversary of 9/11, I offer my version of Show the Way. In response, I welcome your remembrances of where you were and how you felt on that day — and what insight you have gained over the years about the event that changed us all.

Mind Like Water

Posted on September 6, 2011 by Terry Young

Several years ago, I went to an exhibition of sketches by Francisco Goya, and was struck by the image that accompanies this blog. Appropriately entitled Man Carrying a Huge Load, I recognized the feeling expressed in that simple ink sketch.

I recognized it because it was me carrying my bulging briefcase back and forth from work to home every day.

Like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up a hill just to watch it roll back down, I lugged home heavy stacks of paper night after night. The burden I carried was a hodgepodge of things to be thrown away, time bombs in the form of urgent actions I hadn’t captured anywhere, and things that simply needed filing.

Each evening, I had the lofty vision of making headway on that stack which, in truth, had haunted me in one form or another my entire working career. More often than not, I lugged it back to work the next day – untouched.

A similar moment of recognition occurred a few years earlier while watching The Mission, the 1986 movie about the work of the Jesuits in South America. Captain Mendoza, played by Robert Deniro, killed his own brother and, in penance, drags a heavy parcel of weapons from his former life as a mercenary up a steep Amazon mountain.

It sometimes felt as if the physical exertion of carrying that briefcase – which often blossomed into two briefcases and a carryon suitcase – was penance for not having done anything with them. When someone would comment on my “luggage,” I would joke that, “This is the only exercise I get.” (That’s a topic for a future blog…)

This sense of overload wasn’t just coming from stacks of papers. The deluge of emails we all endure also added psychic weight.

The avalanche of email peaked for me this spring just after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. It was if the earthquake had also spawned a tsunami of emails. At one point, I had more than 3,000 messages, with more than 2,000 of those unread.

Like many of you, my bookshelves had become a graveyard for the latest treatises on improving performance. I studied Covey’s habits, spent sixty seconds on the One Minute Manager and lusted after the thought of The 4-hour Workweek.

But in the end, my stack continued to grow, my emails piled up and my sense of accomplishment waned in proportion.

I paint this bleak picture intentionally to put into stark relief the change I have gone through in the past month. This is going to sound like an infomercial if I’m not careful, but I recently read a book by David Allen called Getting Things Done that has changed my life.

Want proof?

I went from more than 2,000 work e-mails to zero. That’s right – zero, zip, nada, zilch. The stacks of paper – which had taken on the form of an archaeological dig – are all gone. The trash has been trashed, the actions have been captured and the reference material has been filed away. Not even a sticky note in sight.

Last time I could say that was, well, uh….never.

So how did I achieve this radical shift?

In a nutshell, Getting Things Done is about setting up a process to capture all the things you need to do – so you can get them off your mind. Allen describes this as achieving “mind like water,” a phrase found in Zen literature that refers to a state of mind not encumbered by all the things our minds “think” we should be doing. This enables us to focus on the moment, responding fully to whatever is happening right now.

As Allen says, our minds are really kind of stupid. We have thoughts about open action items whether we are in a position to do anything about them or not – which triggers stress.

To get those things out of the RAM of our conscious mind, it is necessary to put them into a simple, yet comprehensive system we can trust will remind us about them at the right moment. It entails thinking about each project you have – determining the desired outcome – and then identifying the next step you need to take to move that project closer to completion.

The final step is to review these lists of projects and next steps as often as needed to keep them “off your mind.”

Got a “to do” list?

I did. It was a 400-item blob of amorphous phrases. I hadn’t done the simple task of thinking through the next physical action that needed to happen to move the project forward.

As a result, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of that murky list, I spent any “free” time perusing my mountain of emails looking for quick hits to make myself feel productive. But my “important but not urgent” projects languished from neglect.

The fallacy of that approach, of course, is that important projects that languish become urgent, important projects – which is the textbook recipe for the stressful life I had cooked up for myself.

And that stack of papers that mocked me from the corner of my desk? Through the rocket science idea of setting up a filing system of alphabetized manila folders, every scrap of paper that I might need someday is filed away. It’s key that the folders are in a cabinet at arm’s reach. Otherwise, I’d be tempted yield to the old habit of stacking things on my desk.