The Greatness Is Still Inside of Me

There is a particular moment in the great symphonies — you know it when it comes — where the whole orchestra gathers itself and the brass opens up, and a wall of sound rolls out over the hall like something with weight and heat. Brahms does it. Bruckner does it. When I hear those moments now, wherever I am, I am not in my kitchen or my car anymore. I am nineteen years old with a trombone against my chest and a full breath in my lungs, and I am one of the people making that sound. For a few seconds I am back in the life I trained my whole young self to live. And then the passage ends, and I am back in the one I actually got.

I was good. I need to say that plainly, without the false modesty people expect, because the whole meaning of this story depends on it being true: I was very, very good. As a boy I dominated every ensemble I sat in, won every competition I entered, took every audition I walked into. At fourteen years old I was chosen to perform a solo for the President of the United States. Let me say that again, because I have spent so many years swallowing it: at fourteen, I played for the President. By the time I was eighteen my résumé was grander than what most people accomplish in an entire lifetime. I worked side by side with musicians from great orchestras. I was not a kid with a dream and a lot of hope. I was a kid with a dream and the proof, in trophies and programs and the memory of a nation's leader listening to me play, that the dream was earned.

I believed in a simple and beautiful thing back then. I believed that if you were the best, that would matter. That the world was, at bottom, fair — that dedication and excellence were a currency the universe honored. I had every reason to believe it. Everything in my young life had confirmed it. I practiced until my lips bled and my back ached, and the world kept handing me the first chair, and so of course I believed the two things were connected. Of course I did.

I learned otherwise by watching. There was a player — not a good one, honestly, not close to what I was — who at a certain point simply began to win. Everything. Every competition, every part, every professional invitation. And I could not understand it, until I did: this person had changed teachers, moved to study with someone who was very politically connected in our world, and the connections did the rest. We had come up in the same place. In every room where we were judged on the actual sound coming out of the actual instrument, I won. Then the game moved off the stage and into a back office I wasn't invited to, and I began to lose to a lesser player, over and over, and there was nothing — no amount of practice, no perfection of tone — that I could do about it.

I want you to understand what that does to a young person. It was not just losing. Losing I could have taken. It was watching my decades of pure dedication get quietly overruled by who somebody knew and who liked them. It was the collapse of the one belief my whole identity had been built on — that being the best is what matters. That apple was very hard to chew. In the real world, I learned, getting ahead is not about being the best. It is about who you know, and who they know. And if you are not in that arena — if you are only in the practice room, only on the stage, only good — you are left to the sharks.

I gave it one more honest try. I went to a highly acclaimed conservatory, telling myself that at that level, surely, at the very top, it would be about the playing again. It was not. I watched the same thing unfold a second time. The political favorites got the parts. The political favorites got invited to perform. And I stood on the sidelines and watched, again, and this time I understood it was not going to change, not for me, not by playing better, because playing better had never been the variable.

So I changed the entire trajectory of my life. Not out of surrender — out of arithmetic. I needed an income. I needed a career. I needed health insurance. I needed a retirement someday. These are not the words of a dream; they are the words of an adult, and I had to become one earlier than I wanted to. I went back to college and earned an advanced degree that would give me the stable ground the trombone never would. I built a life on it. It was the responsible thing, the mature thing, and I do not regret the safety it bought me. But I want to be honest about the cost of it, because a story that pretends there was no cost is a lie: I set down the thing that had brought me the most joy, the most love, the most sense of being fully alive, and I did it because the world had made it clear it would not let me live on it.

For a long time, when I heard that big brass sound, all I felt was anger, and sadness, and hurt. Why can't we live in a world where, when you are the best, that matters? I still don't have a good answer to that question. I'm not sure there is one.

But I have finally found something to say to the eighteen-year-old I was, the one with the impossible résumé, watching his life dissolve in rooms he couldn't reach. I would sit across from him, and I would tell him this: Let it go. Let go of the very thing that brought you so much happiness — because it is not worth selling your soul to have it. That is the bargain the world was actually offering, and it is the bargain too many artists make. They sell their souls to make their art. I would tell him that the greatness he feels burning in his chest is not the trombone. The trombone was only the first place it lived. The greatness is him, and it is portable, and no rigged room can take it, because it was never in the room. It was always inside him.

I know this because of what came after. I did not stop being that gifted, dedicated, relentless kid. I just poured him into new vessels. I built things — I built Life Story Compiler, the very place you are reading this, and other things I am proud of — and I discovered that the same fire that once filled an auditorium could fill a different kind of room. And somewhere in there, the story stopped being only about me. I spend a good part of my life now helping other people reach for their own full potential, and I have come to think that might be a bigger thing than the first chair I never got to keep. It is not all about me anymore, and there is something in that worth celebrating, even if it took me half a lifetime and a broken dream to learn it.

The last thing I would tell that boy is the hardest, and I offer it gently, because he would not have wanted to hear it: as much as you want to control your destiny, your destiny may already have been decided long before you ever knew. The life you are fighting so hard for may not be the life that is yours. And the cruelty of that — the sheer unfairness of being denied what you earned — can, if you let it, become something else. It can become the exact pressure that forges the person you were actually meant to be.

I would have been a fine trombonist in a major orchestra. I believe that to my bones. But I might never have become the man who built this, who lifts other people up, who learned that being the best is not the same as being at peace. I lost the life I trained for. I am still angry about how. But the greatness is still inside of me — I only redirected it — and on my better days, I understand that a dream doesn't die when you set it down. It just goes looking for a bigger place to live.