“Work with people who respect you and who you respect. No exceptions.”
🍾 Take a bow. You made it.
Issue #208: How ‘Thriller’ was made and Always Be Finishing
There’s a quote I think about a lot: “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
It’s one of those quotes that gets thrown around a lot. It makes a great title. It’s an effective subject line. As far as I can tell, it was popularized by Martha Beck, who was raised in the LDS Church and left to pursue transcendental meditation (itself a practice of doing one thing well so it bleeds out into the rest of your life).
I love this maxim because it encourages me to think small. Subtle details matter. How you approach a seemingly “unimportant” task says a lot about who you are.
That’s why I keep revisiting Nora Germain’s list of 110 lessons from her career as a jazz violinist. She’s performed and recorded with artists like Sam Smith and Jon Batiste. Germain sees jazz as a metaphor for living, and if you listen closely, many of these music tips are are life lessons in disguise. A few of my favorites:
- Contribute, don’t rely.
- Work with people who respect you and who you respect. No exceptions.
- If people express limitations, those belong to them — not to you!
- You can always give yourself a chance. Book your own show. Give yourself the first solo.
From the archive: All Thriller, No Filler
Quincy Jones, the late Grammy-award-winning producer and jazz conductor who passed away just a few weeks ago, was many things. His daughter Rashida Jones remembers him as “a culture shifter” who “was nocturnal his whole life.” He kept “jazz hours,” waking up in the middle of the night to compose music with a notebook and pen.
One of his masterworks is Thriller, the top-selling album of all time (even now, 42 years later). Indie musician Daniel McClelland explains that Thriller began with a pool of 700 possible songs. Together, Jones and Jackson eliminated 691 of them, distilling the project down to nine bangers including its pièce de résistance: Billie Jean. What separates the scrapped songs (you can listen to one in the post) from those that made the cut? A feeling of forward momentum — the sense that a song is taking you somewhere you haven’t been before.
It’s also a lesson in quality control. The songs that were cut are decent! But they’re not as distinctive as those that were kept. Fifteen good-enough songs would’ve been worse than nine outstanding songs.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
If you want to write something — a book, a post, an email — aim for the ending. “Finish it badly. Just find an ending,” as author Sophie Lucido Johnson advises. “It’s shocking how scared we can be to say something is done.”
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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