I’ve read a couple articles recently that got me thinking, and that seemed to fit well together. The first one was a blog post linked from the site Lifehacker. The post was about taking responsibility for your shortcomings. We are tempted to explain away our failures by external circumstance rather than by actions for which we bear responsibility. I didn’t have a big audience when I played Campfire at Passim, because one member of the 10-person group who was supposed to be coming to the show got sick so none of them came, and another family on their way got stuck in traffic and didn’t make it. I was playing first, early in the day, on a Sunday (and on the one day of the festival that the first act of the day wasn’t a multi-person music class to seed the audience), and also it was a holiday weekend and lots of people were away so it’s harder to get people to come to a show. But the post pointed out that although all those things may be true, and although it’s understandable psychologically why we would to come up with such explanations, they’re actually disempowering. Instead, you should own the situation: I didn’t manage to turn out a crowd to that show because of things I did – or didn’t – do. Because that means that there are things I can do differently the next time around to change the situation. Sometimes they might involve doing things you don’t want to do – I absolutely hate contacting people to try to convince them to come to a show, and calling attention to myself in the process of getting publicity out. But that’s how you get people who might want to come to a show to be there. And sometimes the process can involve asking even more difficult questions: am I putting on a show that will entice people who know about it to come see it? But even asking that hard question restores agency: if I’m not, what can I do to make my shows more appealing to an audience? I certainly fall the “it’s not my fault!” mindset sometimes, and I’m sure that some of it is psychological self-protection from the slings and arrows of the difficulty of a music career. I don’t do well when playing in bars or at farmers markets, because I write lyrically-dense and story-driven songs that don’t make sense if you don’t pay attention to them and those are contexts where people aren’t there to pay attention. Both those things are true, but are they inherently intertwined? And since I don’t plan to change the way I write songs (because I think my songwriting is my major strength) can I change the way I choose or present them in that kind of setting? No one writes songs more complex or lyrically-dense than Bob Franke, and I’ve seen him get a noisy room where no one had heard him before pay rapt attention. I should learn to do that, and I can’t learn it if I don’t own the problem in the first place. The second piece I read was by Atul Gawande (a surgeon) in a New Yorker from last fall (I’m behind on my reading), about coaches. He was musing about the fact that athletes at the most elite levels all have coaches, but that most professionals in others disciplines don’t . . . and that maybe the rest of us are missing out on a great thing. He took the opportunity to put himself into a coaching relationship and was writing about how useful it was. But also difficult, because it requires confronting things you’re not doing as well as you could be. But that’s the whole point – if you can figure out what those things are, you can change them, and you can become better than you currently are at what you’re trying to do, and sometimes having someone else point them out is the best way to notice them. It’s hard to admit that you’re not doing something as well as you could be, and especially to put yourself into a situation where someone is in charge of telling you that you’re not doing something as well as you could be. But if that is all done in a context of agency, in which the whole point is that it is within your power (sometimes with the helpful advice of others) to get better at what you are doing, it’s a really good idea and something we should all welcome.