I love to sing. I sing
in the shower. I sing in my truck, drowning out Willie Nelson and
Luciano Pavarotti who live on my CD player all the time, and Fountains
of Wayne who are living there right now. I do not sing in public,
though, because it creates a scene.
The problem is that I sing very badly. I always figured that
was a matter of technique. After all, I have a deep and distinctive
speaking voice. And so, several years ago, I decided to take singing
lessons.
I believed that learning to sing well would simply be a matter
of learning the right way to do things. After all, anyone can
learn to sing. I believed that and so did my teacher.
Roger, my teacher, has an incredible tenor voice that reminds
folks who've heard it of the great Jussi Bjorling. He debuted
with a major opera company at the tender age of eighteen.
We both should have suspected there would be problems. In our
first session, Roger, hit a note on the piano and asked me to
match it. I couldn't.
Then he played another note. He said it was different than the
first one. I told him I couldn't hear the difference. We pressed
on, regardless.
For almost two years I took lessons from Roger. I got better,
but I never got good. He got frustrated, but he never got impatient.
One night we were sitting at my kitchen table after a lesson.
Roger started laughing. For a several moments he just laughed
and laughed. Finally he looked at me and said, "You know, you
are really very, very, very, very bad." And I started laughing,
too.
It was true. I'm really awful at singing. I'm really awful at
other things, too. I've got the sense of direction of a rock.
I dance like a windmill with power surges.
Fortunately, I don't need to do those things even passably well
to have a good life. I can build my life on things that I can
do well.
I'm good at gathering lots of information and putting it in a
sensible form. I'm a pretty good writer and a pretty good public
speaker. Over the years, I've made my money by concentrating on
the few things I do well and making the many things I don't do
well irrelevant.
If you want to do that, too, you must do two things. You must
identify what you're good at. There are several resources available
to help you. And you must figure out how to use what you're good
at in a way that makes you enough money.
That's not quite it, though. Where you use your gifts can be
as important as whether you use them.
My voice coach, Roger, had a marvelous voice. It was as good
or better than many of today's opera stars. So why was Roger available
to work with me not on album covers and tours of world class opera
houses?
It turns out that Roger was, and is, a great tenor, but he wasn't
comfortable in the world of professional opera. After several
years, and on the verge of a big break, he quit.
He was in Geneva at the time. He called his fiancé in California
and she flew to Switzerland to meet him. For most of the night
they walked around the lake and talked. Roger cancelled his engagements
and they flew home.
Later he enrolled in the seminary. That's where he was when I
knew him.
Roger had the gifts of the art of opera, but he was uncomfortable
with the world and the business of opera. So he took his musical
strengths and his fine mind and went in another direction.
It's not enough to have the gifts you need to succeed, you must
also pay attention to where you succeed. It is not enough to be
a good accountant, you must find where you are comfortable working
so that you can use your gifts to best advantage.
I love to sing, though I will never approach Roger's talent in
that area. But I can sing for fun and in the privacy of my truck
and my shower. I can build my life's work, though, around the
things that I do best. And so can you.
Top of page
The
Acorn Principle by Jim Cathcart synthesizes many of the techniques
developed over decades to help you identify your strengths and build
on them.
Now,
Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton
became a best seller because it provided scientific background
for the idea that building on strength was a good success strategy.
I'm recommending the audio cassette rather than the book. The
cassette contains the meat of the material without the "examples"
used in the book. The book's examples were simply not drawn from
real life, but the 'first-name-only working at a big company in
an unnamed industry" examples that I find unhelpful. Buy the cassette,
get the main points in less time. Then use the password that you'll
receive with the cassette to sign on to the Gallup site and take
the Strengths Assessment instrument.
Lest you think this is all new stuff, I refer you to The
Effective Executive by Peter Drucker which was first published
in the 1960s. This is my pick for the best business book ever.
Chapter 4 is "Making Strength Productive."
Frames
of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner
is about that Harvard psychologist's powerful and seminal theory
that we do not have a single intelligence (what IQ tests test),
but rather multiple intelligences. This can be heavy going if
you're not an academic or interested in the details of the theory,
but it's a book you should at least know about.
7
Kinds of Smart: Identifying and Developing Your Multiple Intelligences
by Thomas Armstrong is an excellent introduction to Gardner's
theory and includes exercises to help you figure out your own
strengths. I recommend that you buy both books, but if you're
only going to get one, make it this one. You'll get more immediate
benefit and you can always go back and get Gardner's book to fill
in any theory.
There aren't many Web sites out there that do a good job on this
topic, but I did find one I can recommend. It's called "LDPride"
where the "LD" stands for learning disabilities. Don't let that
put you off. At the end of this link you'll find a number of helpful
exercises and links about multiple intelligences.
Luciano Pavarotti
has been a world-renowned opera singer for forty years. His Web
site is way too flashy for my taste, but has lots of tidbits worth
viewing, including some wonderful pictures from the master's early
days.
Jussi Bjorling
had one of the most incredible voices in the history of opera.
Though he died in 1960 at the age of 49, his recordings can still
share the beauty of his wonderful, ringing, tenor voice. The astounding
thing about Roger's voice to me was that is was so much like Bjorling's.
3 August 2004
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