Revisited: How to Turn Stress Into Creativity With Grammy-Winner Jacob Collier

21:12And everyone understands, okay, I get it. It's like looking at a landscape because it reflects the world so well. And then the deeper you go into music as a process of learning or playing, you kind of increase the resolution of these axes. So it starts with every kid. I think I was going to say, why don't we do it?

21:31Simon Sinek:Go to the piano. So you've got high and low, right? Yeah. It makes sense. And you've got, you know, wide and narrow. That makes a lot of sense. You've got loud and quiet. But then, for example, there's this idea of arrival and departure. Everyone actually understands. Everyone has departed or arrived. So if I'm in F, which is the key I was just talking about, and within the key of F I have localities, you could say. So I have next-door neighbors. So that's one neighbor, B flat. What do you mean by arrival and departure? So this is my home. If I'm in F, this is my home. I can exist in the key of F for a while.

22:15And even if I go somewhere else, like to Eto 'i flat, when I get home, you still feel like, ah, I remember this feeling from before. So the idea of arrival, you could say, comes from being not F, something that's not F, like C, arriving at F, right? and I'm home. And then you can kind of augment that arrival into something much more...

22:46colourful. And the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension and then resolve it. So even the most gnarly sounding like... like a chord like this, that's a weird sound. But if you're careful, then all those notes can move in directions and go, oh, I see. It's like the temperature of the shower has changed. Oh, I get it, you know what I mean? So this idea of essentially movement in and around axes is so interesting. And yeah, if you think about departure and arrival, or you think about inevitability, this is such a beautiful, very subtle thing to describe. One of my favourite things to do with the audience is I'll get them to sing one note.

23:24Simon Sinek:I'll say sing F, and they'll go like this. And then I put them in all sorts of contexts. That context. that context right it's weird

23:49and you know when you're home but the exercise that's so beautiful with that to me emotionally is you understand your position in things, the beautiful thing about the audience choir that I found in the last few years is that it works kind of regardless of whether you're a musician or not. I mean, the more musicians are in the audience, often the faster people can learn. But the challenge really is you need about, you need over 50 % of the people to know what's going on. The rest will follow. It's like, like murmuration. They'll kind of, they'll kind of follow. But I think the main thing about my audience now is that they are kind of just, they're open to it.

24:25Simon Sinek:I'm so curious how you explore different emotions, like real emotions that you have better than happy sad yeah like when you are angry yeah whether it's that that you know not that burst anger how does it show up when you sit down to let it out yeah yeah

25:14Simon Sinek:Is it therapy for you? Yeah. So as I'm playing, I'm like, oh, I see. Oh, oh, okay. Oh, I get it. I see. Because I don't know where I started. Somewhere down here. Or something. I think we all have our way of, and I'm going to go back to your mother, you know, her trying to get you to express yourselves and affirm your feelings. Yeah, yeah. And I think if you look at so many of the struggles that people have, we don't know how to express our feelings. So it comes out in frustration or anger or a burst. We say things we don't mean. And even harder than knowing how to, or as hard as learning how to express our own emotions is trying to help somebody else express theirs.

25:52Simon Sinek:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I think to find one's own therapy, some people go to the gym to get it out. Go for a run, whatever it is. Go outside and have a primal yell. Do you use your piano as therapy? Lovesick, angry, homesick. Is it your therapist? I would say so. Should we go and sit down in the chair? I'm so curious if it's... And this is where I'm getting at. like you know poets write poetry yeah even if that's not for anything is it the kind of thing that you just do all the time is it that you like like i'll give you an example right i've had a busy week you know i'd be like oh i haven't gone for a run in a while i need a run you know is it is it that for you like oh i haven't been on a plane i haven't i need to play i just need It's a bit like that.

26:47Yeah, it is a bit like that. There's an added layer when you're in front of an audience because there's something that happens as you do that, as you explore your feeling through, especially when it goes through other people and back to you. You kind of just learn how you're doing. Oh, I see, I'm feeling like that. But yeah, there's a feeling you get when you haven't played in a while. And you can sort of play, you can play shows. I mean, you can always tap your fingers. You tap your fingers and do some things. You can do that, but there's a particular kind of play that I was kind of getting into there, which is more about you take a starting point and often a starting point is a strange place or maybe it's a pleasant place or a gnarly place or whatever and then you sort of, as you untangle it, it's an immense phony of catharsis in a sense.

27:28You sort of think, oh, that is, that's the human in me singing, you know, and doing things. But there's an interesting thing that happens as a songwriter because improvisation is one thing, right? You improvise and all the great composers, someone like Johann Sebastian Bach, he was like a master improviser on the organ. I wish I could have heard him improvise. but a composition or a song or a piece or a production is like composition in in in stop time so i'm going to play this oh okay now i'll play this i'll play this now i'll collide it together and make it make sense sort of on the canvas and so there's a funny thing that happens i think as you're as a songwriter where you you you kind of deliberately put yourself in situations where interesting results or you try to put yourself in situations where kind of interesting results will come out that hopefully can crystallize but that could be kind of a hard thing to do I guess I'm curious maybe this is more of a question to you but just as somebody who thinks about ideas and puts them into words distills them into concrete ideas whether it's let's do a podcast or let's let's let's put this on the page or let's have a conversation or

28:29Simon Sinek:or let's put together a presentation there's something that happens to me on the journey from raw starting point energy life input to distilled output sensible kind of done quantifiable um where part of the energy required to make the idea kind of dies and falls away because in distilling the idea you have to kind of rid yourself of an amount of the infinity surrounding it but then you get you whittle it down to this thing i mean from my perspective in in my line of work you could say as a songwriter that challenge is always interesting it's almost like you have to court the idea and keep it alive for long enough for it to continue to sort of burn fuel as you move through the process of raw idea and to kind of whittle down a day and to particularly whittle down a day and to sharing the idea and then in your case into maintaining ideas across many, many years.

29:20Like you've said something at this point and then 15 years later someone wants you to give a keynote on the same principle in the same way that someone wants me to play a song I wrote 15 years ago. whatever like how what's your relationship with ideas of old yep their gestation and then their kind of continued life as you have always yeah so it's a good question for years when i you know after i wrote start with why that's all anybody wanted to hear from me but i wanted to talk about

29:47Simon Sinek:new things and they very much wanted to force me to talk about the old things and i i am proud of my old work. I still live by the principles of my old work, but I have zero interest in talking about my old work. I'll answer a question or two if people want. I'm happy to do that. But to give a talk, I actually won't do it. And there's a few reasons I won't do it. It's not just, I am a student and I love to understand things. I don't have to agree or disagree or even like or dislike. I just like to understand, right? And once I understand something, or at least I have a good framework that I'm like, I think I understand this.

30:26Simon Sinek:Got it. I want to move to the next thing I don't understand. And it's why I like engaging with audiences for new ideas because they ask me questions I haven't heard before and then I get to think. That's my favorite thing in the world to do. So yeah, I don't want to talk about my old ideas. I only want to talk about new ideas because I know my old ideas and I want to know new things. But there's a line from your old ideas to your new foundation. 100%. I don't disavow them. Right. And I'm proud of them and they are the foundations and all of my work is built on the work that has preceded it. But I want to talk about the new renovation I'm doing on the house, not the foundation I built 15 years ago.

30:59So are there any things you would thoroughly disavow? Are there any things you would say, I really don't stand with this anymore, something that you used to hold dear?

31:09Simon Sinek:There are the simple answers, of course. But there's nothing that upsets the whole thing. There are nuances and tweaks. and language that has evolved that I better understand my work and going through life that necessarily. So the simple answer is yes. Can you give an example? Give an example. Sure. So I define the why as a purpose, cause or belief. And now that the work has matured and I've built upon it, and I stumbled upon The Infinite Game, which was my last work, I now talk about a just cause. And I was like, ugh, I wish I didn't use cause to describe. It's just a purpose or a belief. That's still true.

32:00Simon Sinek:I see what you mean. But I want to reserve cause for this other thing, mainly to not create confusion because they're kind of different. So like little nuances like that. That makes a lot of sense. So here's another question then, or another point to make is, over the last three months or so for the first time ever I've had this analysis done of my audience who my audience is and it was really interesting and the questions it threw up were kind of beautiful and profound and for the first time ever really though I've always enjoyed to somewhat do this I've kind of been placed in a position of wanting to or being asked to or wanting to define what is it that I stand for essentially what is my why what is my driving course why Jacob, why come to a Jacob show so one interesting thing about my audience is that I sell far more tickets than my streaming numbers would suggest.

32:50And I think it's because a lot of the things I most enjoy about my work are experiences. I love having experiences with people. I love the audience choir. I love conversations at large with people. I love playing, collaborating. Maybe it's with an orchestra, maybe it's with a band, whatever. I just love it. And often I'll perform things in the shows that aren't even to do with the music on the record. It obviously depends on the show, but the questions that arise with regard to you know what is it that drives me what are my foundational pillars i have this this dual kind of experience with that where on the one hand i have this deep relief of knowing oh so that's what was always going on you know because it's like that beautiful michelangelo thing about you know everything within the sculpture is already there you just have to remove what's not the sculpture right right which i think is very much the case as an artist all you're all you're working with is what you already have it's me watching my mom conduct to age two that's always going to be there that's one of my raw materials but as i've gone on this process of analyzing it all i can't help but had that there's a part of me that that that enjoys not just sort of inherently will resist it but will enjoy resisting it because it knows as the creative part of me that there's actually creative juice on the edge of something enjoy resisting what it enjoy i would say resisting the idea that i i can be defined as this one thing and I suppose the question I wanted to pose to you was this idea of the irrational the completely irrational mind which as a creative person all of us have a relationship with and there is the part of us that can rationalise and I can say okay well I'm in the key of F then I do this, this is what's arrival, this is departure I'm making tension or here's how the audience works or here's how I think about my next whatever but still when I stand on stage or sit on stage and do it there is a part of me that just does not respond to any amount of data or analysis that I could ever possibly have done about who I am and where I'm not I'm curious how you feel about the cultivation of that part of you that is just an animal and doesn't want to kind of be put into a box but also enjoys you could almost say you you'd almost say being disobedient with regard to what is defined as you you're opening a Pandora's box I assume

34:55Simon Sinek:which I like. So, okay. So I define creativity as finding order in chaos. Finding order in chaos. Right? And so, and I would argue that, you know, 88 keys on keyboard is unto itself chaos, right? Because you take a, you know, you take somebody, a baby who doesn't, and they bang, I mean, chaos. And finding order in that chaos is what we call music. I would create the creative expression. and um and i think artists inherently have a comfortable relationship with chaos yeah i would say so too and i would argue that chaos is irrational you know we seek order we seek rational we seek we seek rules and structures and explanations that's all that rational stuff and the irrational the emotional the uncomfortable the unscripted the unknown the uncertain is where the artist plays and i think great artists understand that what they do is play yeah fundamentally what we're doing is playing we're playing with pieces of a puzzle mine might be words and ideas your might be keys on a on a piano somebody else might be colors and and we become facile in our own language yeah and the example i'll give is a have you ever hung out with dancers dancers yeah so so if you hang out i've gone to watch friends choreograph pieces and the choreographer will be like they will demonstrate something like do this and this then this then this then i want you to go here and i want you to do this actually no don't do do this, do this, then do this.

36:24Simon Sinek:And all the dancers, the whole room, does it exactly after they were shown once and there was a change in the middle. And I can maybe remember the first two. And I was like, but what, how, huh? And you realize it's a language. You know, if you say to me, repeat the sentence, you know, three balloons flew up into the sky and one of them burst and fell down. And I can go quite a while and repeat it because I understand the language. You understand the context for all the nuggets. I know how the pieces relate and I can put them together without any rehearsal. So here's one thing I'll say to that then.

36:56So if we take language as an example and you can say words or music, whatever happens to be, dance. So you speak that language, I speak this language, I speak that language. Sure, sure, sure, sure. I would say, you know, you spoke about creativity is finding order in the chaos but I also think an important part of, you could say, making art. This is a different thing from following the instructions of the choreographer or playing the parts as an orchestra member. This is more about as the maker of an idea, as the source of the why, you would almost say, is this concept of making or finding chaos in the order.

37:28I mean, you have this feeling, I think, of going through rules, regulations, self-imposed, you know, gatekeepers, things, our own structures that we're trying to resist, other people's structures we're trying to resist. In my situation, the music industry, which is a very strange, nauseating place at times. You think, okay, I'm going to take this rigidity and I'm going to scuff it up. That's creativity. So you're almost finding your way back to the chaos. Yeah, yeah. But I think one thing that people do.

37:54Simon Sinek:When it gets too ordered, you have to break it. Well, exactly. And to me, that, I guess what I'm wondering, what I'm challenging is, does the nature of creativity also go the other way? Yeah. Is it just when creativity transforms to order or vice versa? I think that's a great insight. And I agree with you. I think it's a cycle or a circle, right? Because if you take the infrastructure that exists, you take the system that we reject and we rebel and we break it. it's not enough to break it you have to then rebuild it back exactly so i think you're right i think it's the duality of chaos and order and the artist when there's excessive order seeks chaos and when there's excessive chaos finds order yeah and it's that it's that i kind of i kind of like that but i would also say i mean and here's an interesting analogy that's that's to do with creativity but but but also different is ai right so ai asks us to ask questions that's our fundamental way of interfacing with it the more interesting the question is the more interesting the result you'll get and it's kind of interesting process of of whittling away through deeply uninteresting things like mortally uninteresting results to get something that's actually interesting and i've spent so many hours you know for example just just generating images i spoke before about you know colliding unusual stuff i love it it's a beautiful place i've made so many different kinds of stormtroopers oh god yeah like dressed as vikings and just but it's the thing i used to do and you know my favorite era of it's so funny the era the eras of ai are so new my favorite era of ai was mid 2022 because darling 2 had just come out but it was before it got really good it was before it got a beat really obedient or extremely appropriate or reasonable i remember drawing it to draw a picture of children escaping from a garden by a torchlight that night and because it wasn't quite good enough yet but it kind of understood the nature of what i was saying it drew the feeling of children escaping a garden by torchlight but none of those things were present in the image wow but you look at the image you think that kind of a day if that's what it feels like to be a child yeah it's sort of like so early ai was actually better oh way better feelings but but this is the thing this interesting thing about music and high resolution people think when you learn music and the more you train the better you're going to get.

40:07Not true. Because whilst your technique can be refined the friction between understanding exactly what a thing is and not understanding exactly what a thing is that's where the most creativity happens because the most amount of change happens between order and chaos.

40:20Simon Sinek:This is brilliant. So the whole Malcolm Gladwell 10 ,000 hours. Yeah. Right? And this is what we're touching on. Yeah. Which is the more you gain mastery what ends up happening is ossification. Yes. You ossify. You know I look at people who are quote unquote experts They've been doing this for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. They are the best. And you realize they're stuck. You realize that they're bored. Stagnated. You realize that they are either afraid of change, don't understand how to change, or the money or fame is too good and they don't want it to change. Threatened, yeah. Threatened. But generally the feeling of boredom is there because they've done it so much.

40:55Simon Sinek:The joy was the figuring it out up to 10 ,000 hours. Right, right. And so I think you're 100 % right. which is mastery is, I think, probably creative is a devil to a true creative. There are different kinds of mastery, though, I would say. You can master, for example, the technique or something, the execution or something. You can also exhibit mastery by your ability to create containers. And this is the thing I'm currently obsessed with mastering, because I've always required the right container for my creativity to feel safe within. because if you pour creativity into the open air, it just goes and fizzles and disappears or there's too much infinity.

41:38So what you need is a container that holds you together. And I think this is something you can master. What's your container? Well, it could be a song, could be an album, could be a stage, could be a lyric, could be a collaboration.

41:51Simon Sinek:But I think this is right, which is though creatives are comfortable in chaos, they don't reject order until it's time to reject the order. So this comes back to the irrational thing though. Because you can't just improvise forever and have that be satisfying to you or the people listening. Without input. We do want a container, to your point. We want the song to be three minutes-ish. That's about a good time. So I'm sure everyone who's listening who's ever sat down to write a song or read a whole host of creative activities knows this, understands this feeling. It's like there's a part of your brain that just won't do the thing that you are telling it to do.

42:28I remember being at school and studying for exams which is something I really didn't like to do and I would kind of have to engineer through some kind of strange trickery that I would be revising for the exam by tricking myself that it was in fact procrastination that I was revising so I would say here's the task I'm just going to do this thing on the side I'm just going to make some music for one second and then if I managed to trick myself into thinking that the music was the task and that actually I'm just going to do a quick bit of revision it's like you have to you're dancing with this really abstract part of you it's like this chimp that's just like you know and it will react to kind of anything you give it but i think this is such an interesting conundrum in terms of creativity and it goes back to the thing i was saying to you before about how do you what's your relationship with your old work because i'm grateful that's how i if you made me sum it up it's gratitude yeah well i i would i was i suppose i'd say i'd say the same for your work and my my old work but but i would say like what what is it that keeps you being tickled it's It's like, how does one stop?

43:28I guess the question is, how does one stop entering into that thing that you described as now of stagnating, of getting stuck and of getting bored and of just sort of recycling the same old ideas? How do you keep someone sharpened? And I think to my mind, it's something about changing the container.

43:42Simon Sinek:But it goes back to the conversation we had before. And I have gone through periods of boredom and stagnation and, oh my God, I'm out of ideas. I've had all of that. And so how have you, if you had to say it in reductive terms, how have you got out of those? It's what you said, which is I have to break something. Yeah, exactly. I have to break it. And if I go back and look at my whole career, when I was in the corporate world, you know, my career would move well, I'd get promoted to a level where it was boring, and I'd quit. And COVID was a gift. I think I was at a period in my own self, in my work where I was bored.

44:15Simon Sinek:And COVID was this magical disruption where I didn't have to break it, it got broken for me. And then there was so much chaos. I was in such a I was in I was in I was thriving. Yeah, me too. Now, notwithstanding the sadness, the fear, the uncertainty, all at the same time, it was a jumble. But from a strictly creative standpoint, it was absolute magic. Yeah. And the stress of it was fuel. Is there something you've done, an album you've worked on, a concert you've performed in, just anything specific that was what you would consider the pinnacle, the ideal? Like when you look back, you'd be like, I wish every concert was like this one.

44:52Simon Sinek:I wish every album was like this like or every experience I've had was like that like if one was the stands out in your career Yeah, which one would it be? It's so hard to say I would say I'll start with album. There are two Albums that I think sum up the thing really the thing because we're all chasing the thing And you get close to it sometimes the oh that's the thing. I've almost got it So the first time I made was called in my room and I made it in my room in London in this very in this tiny room filled with instruments and I made it by myself and it was really exciting I toured it by myself with a circle of 12 instruments in a circle on stage and there was this visual element where I would sort of loop my skeleton in 3d using connect cameras and it was this multimedia thing that was really really fun and that was like day one in the office so everything was new everything was exciting and the metaphor of the room I stand by today as being a huge one for me massive everyone's got a room of some kind I was lucky enough to have a physical one the Alma just released this time last year it's called jesse volume four is the fourth album in a series of four albums so this was my reaction to um of to the solitude of in my room it was like i'm going to collaborate drastically i'm going to go big i'm going to go massive i'm going to really um experience what it's like to work with as many as as many people as possible the first song on jesse volume four has over a hundred thousand people on it wow and that's because not only are there i mean there's orchestra that my mum actually conducted on the album which is amazing there's all sorts of choirs, individuals, artists and things but I recorded audiences obsessively from 2022 to 2023 and I didn't tell them I was doing this really at the time but I would end up in a key and I'd be getting the audience to do certain things, singing up and down, whatever and in my mind I was playing the song that was half written in all these different parts of the world, every continent of the world and then I took those audiences home and I organized them into this kind of like anthem of a song that philosophically to me, it really thrills me because it's made out of people, but it's not, I didn't go in with a direct end.

46:54I didn't go in knowing exactly what I wanted to get. I went in with a container, with a concept of what would it sound like to have 100 ,000 people on one song? And then I figured it out. Oh, it sounds like this.

47:04Simon Sinek:So of those two experiences, what was the reason you decided to talk about? I mean, you've had many concerts. You've done incredible collaborations. You've written some brilliant songs like there's many things that you have done that are magical in your career What was it about these two specifically that you want to talk about them now? Well, I think that they both contain the thing which is which I think maybe is about the human voice I think is about being a voice and having a voice. I think that the first My first contribution this album in my room was about me exploring my own voice. Yeah And being like what the hell is this?

47:33What's the furthest I can stretch this? And and the result Though obviously I listen back to it now and I'm like, oh, let's just little jacob just figuring it out is just getting started and stuff. And I would, I guess to second your point, I'd say I'm very grateful for the album. But I so appreciate the thing that I was catching, which was this idea of like what I, if I close my eyes and listen to music in my head, what does that sound like? What is that? What does my inner world feel like? That was what it felt like. And I'm so proud of it. And I still go back to it and think, there is something of this that is in everything I ever do that is the truth.

48:05Because it's, I mean, I learned to walk in that room at home. It was my ultimate foundation. and then this album I did last year was kind of like the same principle but in the opposite which is the voices of everybody else but it kind of felt as faithful to the thing which is very mysterious and I'm curious how you define the thing for you but I think to me there's something about really being a self and through the voice and then accessing that through other people that feels like the thing I'm chasing Tell me an early specific happy childhood memory

48:35Simon Sinek:specific that I can relive with you There was a moment When I was Probably about Two years old as well I'm amazed that you have Memories from two years old Yeah Well I have kind of Two main memories From when I was two One is the memory I already gave you Right Which you already Read it Right But the second is I remember sitting On my mother's lap And she was playing The violin She's a violinist And I remember looking up And seeing the violin Above me And being like I'm the violin Like I'm I'm the music That's being played Like it's me that is I'm the source of the sound Because the violin was going into me and then that to me felt very very exciting and i mean yeah like like many memories of that age it's it's sort of in this weird dream half dream state thing so i think that's where the truth lies and because all those three stories that you describe of the two albums and uh and this experience of you sitting on your mother's lap i think is is the discovery that we are all instruments right and in the first album you're the instrument and you're looking to compose through the different sounds of you.

49:39Simon Sinek:And now, basically, you're your mother. And in the first example, you're sitting on your own lap. In the second example, the audience is sitting on your lap. And it's, I think, the idea of being a vessel, the idea of being a container. And the word container has come up a few times. But this idea, I think, of being the messenger for some sort of expression and discovery I think is your genius you've touched on it a few times which is you make musicians out of people who didn't know they were musicians you make music out of people who aren't musicians you said you know if half the audience is musical it just goes quicker they just learn quicker and I think that your music itself is so exploratory

50:34Simon Sinek:formful and formless oh thank you that i i think that what you give us is is a megaphone like you're the megaphone weirdly and not the the sound going into the megaphone oh i think that's so i think that's who you are and that's amazingly put i i i love i mean just listen to your podcast i love that moment at the end of the podcast when you say and his and basically he's the container and the reason I love it so much is because it's a thrilling thing to be kind of nestled into one concept and as a person who is the person they are, sometimes it's hard to see it but I love the way that you put that and I think it's interesting to me that I feel in some ways the most myself when I'm that megaphone for others but there's something about being that megaphone which also feels like it is me but it's also not me and there's that funny dance between yeah being one pixel in the image and yet also being the image.

51:34Simon Sinek:Well I think it's a healthy relationship with ego right? Which is if the music comes through you are you the music or are you just the vessel for the music and it's healthy to not know. It's healthy to go between the two. Hop yeah. You know it's healthy to have an ego but it's healthy to be humbled and I'm just a megaphone for the music. Sure. Not necessarily my music. Yeah. One question I have for you off the back of that I think is in regards to catching ideas Because you are Like a meister of Ideas but you're also a Kind of distiller of them And I often think about this idea of being a surfer One of the best ideas I've ever One of the best images I've ever encountered To try and describe what's going on here People talk about ideas coming to them from Above, some divine place And they're just completely a vessel This idea of I am just a vessel, I'm hollow Come through me That's not who you are.

52:28I've never experienced it in quite this way. But nothing you've explained or said here has that metaphor. Well, the way I think about it is, it is partly that. I mean, there is certainly a mysterious source, but there is not a lot of surfing as an analogy. Do you surf? I don't do anything on boards. Really?

52:43Simon Sinek:It's not that I don't want to. It's just, I'm not good at boards. Fair play. Skateboarding. I mean, I also don't do much on boards either, but I've surfed a couple of times and there's an amazing thing about it. It's mostly patience. You're mostly just waiting for the wave. just being like okay when's it coming and then and then when it but but then there's technique required psychological and physical technique required when it comes to know how to catch it right yeah and write it out correctly i think that's that's the difference so what you and i do that's similar people ask me what's my creative process and i always say that it's um it's days of guilt and self-loathing punctuated by hours of sheer brilliance the problem is i don't know when the hours will show up but the part that i never talk about is when they do i know how to write them exactly and i walk i carry a notebook in my back pocket because i don't know when it's going to strike i used to keep a dry erase pen in my in my bathroom and if i had an idea especially when i'm working on something because you know once you're working on something it stays with you it starts going and if i had an idea in the shower you lose it as quickly as you have it you're like oh i'll remember that later you don't and so i my my bathroom wall was covered all the tiles with ideas and I'd stand there brushing my teeth reading all these ideas but the point is is the difference of what you and I are doing I think everybody has the moments of inspiration what everybody's not doing is capturing them is catching them and I think that's and maybe the artist is the one who learns to catch it love it do you know any Bartok Bagatelle's?

54:13Simon Sinek:do you know that bum bum bum bum bum bum bum I don't think I do know that okay so I heard a concert and I'm going to play it for you and then do whatever you want.

54:53That's so beautiful. Come Bartok to the man.

54:56Simon Sinek:All right, so this is totally a selfish request. I've got a Grammy artist with me, and instead of asking you to play your music, I'm asking you to play Bartok. Okay. Is that wrong? No, I don't think that's wrong. So it was like...

55:27Thank you.

55:55Thank you.

56:24Thank you.

56:51Thank you.

57:21Thank you.

57:58Simon Sinek:Goosebumps. Oh. That was very generous. Thank you very much. I've never been asked that in my life, ever before. The Bartok is the man. Oh, so good. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much. Really a joy. It's such a joy. A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. Lovingly produced by our team, Lindsay Garbenius, Phoebe Bradford and Devin Johnson. subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts and if you want even more cool stuff visit simonsynic.com thanks for listening take care of yourself take care of each other