Who is going to play your music if you don’t play yourself?

I recently met Michael Jones, a famous pianist and leadership educator who has spent a lifetime at the intersection of music and leadership. He told a story from years ago of a stranger who came up to him and said: who is going to play your music if you don’t play yourself? It was at a time when he was planning a more traditional life as an organizational consultant. This single question re-directed his lifetime career as a pianist.

Whether we are social activists, business leaders, writers, entrepreneurs, consultants, each of us has our own music. The challenge is society gives us immediate rewards to tell someone else’s story, not our own.

I recently was honored to be interviewed by No Country for Young Women  on my work in next generation leadership for companies and individuals. What resonated with readers most was my sense that young leaders need to stop idolizing certain power players like Sheryl Sandberg or Oprah and putting them on a pedestal. Rather we need to do our OWN unique work in the world. As Nilofer Merchant said to me, “Until we own our onlyness, we can never own the agency to create change / innovate.”

For each of us, we were put in this world to do our own work. The beauty is that sometimes unexpected life experiences, such as a question from a stranger, leave us with the real question. The key to showing our gifts is our own aliveness, to feel most engaged into what we are doing. It’s when we feel, this is who I am, this is why I am here. Living life is about the sense of aliveness. When we are most alive, we are most in our gift. The analytical world promotes how we do it, and what we choose to do needs to come from a deeper intuition. When we are following our own aliveness, what guides us is a thread more than a plan.

So, who is going to play your music if you don’t play it yourself?

To start playing, here’s an exercise for you from the Domino Project: When did you feel most alive recently? Where were you? What did you smell? What sights and sounds did you experience? Capture that moment on paper and recall that feeling. Then, when it’s time to create something, read your own words to reclaim a sense of being to motivate you to complete a task at hand.