You Make Music
“Has it been only six years?”
A friend asked me this yesterday over coffee, when we realized we started this chapter of our careers around the same time. We were talking about how we each feel in flow, not only in the work itself, but in the structures we’ve built around it. Somehow, each of us has found a way to play our own infinite game.
In Yet Another Year in Review — Year 04.5, I wrote:
By now, I’ve realized that the best way to describe what I do is perhaps the simplest—I work on projects I care about with people I respect.
This still feels true. But over the past few weeks, I’ve started using even fewer words (and a different metaphor) to explain what work looks like for me:
I make music.
Sometimes I’m featured on a song, like emceeing Outset’s Outliers conference in September. Sometimes we make an album together, like the Mastering Product Discovery series with Adam Fishman. Sometimes I join a band for a while, like my current residency at The Browser Company.
No matter the configuration, two questions help me decide what work to pursue:
Who do I want to jam with?
What kind of music do I want to make?
I didn’t start out getting to make any kind of music I wanted. When I left Slack, I started with projects that looked like work I had done previously, but I tried to focus on only the parts I liked. Each project gave me more signal about what I was good at, what nourished me, and who I wanted to work with.
Over time, I earned the chance to play new kinds of music, with new people, and, increasingly, music that excited me or would teach me something.
Six years and dozens of partnerships later, I’ve realized that being hired to care is less about finding the perfect title or packaging myself into a clear offering, and more about finding places where I’m encouraged to contribute and not just play someone else’s sheet music.
While labels like consultant, advisor, coach, or fractional leader are useful, they tend to describe the configuration of the work rather than the work itself.
The most helpful thing about the music framing is that it doesn’t force a specific shape onto a project. It reminds you to let the partnership emerge as you work, respond to each other, and discover what you might make together. You start doing the work, and the shape comes from that.
So, for those of you who are also consultants, advisors, or some other version of me-as-a-service and who struggle to explain what it is that you actually do, here’s another answer:
You make music.