Apr 30 • Journal Entries
Giving Birth to More Than Life—How Creation, Struggle, and Renewal Shape the Way We Lead, Love, and Leave Our Mark
Journal Entry
Someone once said that giving birth is the hardest thing a person can do in life. It is the essential, living pain that women endure to bring something new into the world. I make no comparisons here to that trial. None at all. But isn’t it funny how they call it labor? I’ve always wondered what came first, that kind of labor or the work kind. The word carries weight either way. Because yesterday, my band gave birth to four new songs.
We spent about six or seven hours in the studio taking multiple takes of each song, wandering through final adjustment sections, reworking parts, tightening transitions, and ultimately arriving at the end of production for the new album’s base structure and formatting. We were guided, as always, by our ever present producer Scott Sharrard and Charlie Martinez, who shepherded us through the labor of getting these songs created and born into something real and finished.
And here’s the part that struck me. These songs started back in August of last year.
Nine months ago. On August 3rd, the very first idea for the first song was recorded on my phone. It was nothing more than a basic riff and a name. One More Time. I went back and listened to those earliest recordings of the album, the raw beginnings, and I was struck by how different we ended up from where we started. But the DNA was still there. The same name. The same simple chorus buried inside of it. The skeleton of the thing was visible, but the body around it had completely changed. Back on August 9th, it was essentially a thumbnail sketch, a rough directional signal of where the song might end up. From there, the idea went through so many iterations, so many changes, reformations, even full pace changes, until its final shape was born yesterday in the studio.
And that process reminded me of something I’ve seen over and over again, not just in music but in business and in life. The way an idea develops almost always follows this same pattern. It starts with a simple thought. Something small, barely formed.
And then as we move along, things generate that we didn’t expect. Connections appear that we didn’t plan for. Influences from the environment and from the people around us weave themselves into the space of the idea. It’s not that we anticipated any of these things. It’s that the process itself invites them in. And eventually the idea gets formed into something workable and usable. The DNA of the original thought is still visible if you look closely, but the end result is an output that has congealed around a solution that is often very different from the first draft.
I’ve seen this play out so many times now that I’ve stopped being surprised by it. We begin a process in earnest, committed to one direction, and end up somewhere else entirely because the stimulus and environmental influences along the way changed the concept. The thing you thought you were building on day one is not the thing that gets delivered on the last day. But it’s still yours. It still carries your fingerprint.
And this is the part that matters most. That means the things you are thinking about today, the ideas you’re forming right now, are quietly shaping what you will see a year from now. Maybe longer. That’s why forward thinking and being adaptable to big thoughts is more important than most people realize. The size of the idea you allow yourself to entertain today determines the ceiling of what you can build tomorrow.
Back in the day, when I was running my agency CustomerBloom during a stretch where we were growing fast, we were bringing on new customers and new clients at a pace that felt exciting but manageable. We could scale quickly. We went from one new client a week to two clients a week to ten new clients a month. And at some point I challenged the team by saying I want to get to a hundred new accounts per month.
Now that was a ten times increase, and it sounded irrational. I certainly got some looks of terror on my team’s faces. How in the world could we even do that? But by the summer of that year we had made it to almost fifty new accounts per month. That was an astonishing level of growth, and while we didn’t hit the hundred, the size of the ambition is what pulled us to fifty. If I had said let’s try for twenty, we would have landed at twelve. The scale of the thought shaped the scale of the outcome.
And speaking of scale, Elon Musk wants to put a data center in space. A so called tera fab production facility of such unimaginable scope that it would require launching a rocket every five minutes just to build the thing. That is an idea so large that most people can’t even process it. But that’s the point. The people who change things are the ones who let the idea be enormous before they start trimming it down.
So what is the idea you’re giving birth to today? Is it large or small? Because nine months from now, whatever you planted is going to look very different from where it started. The DNA will still be there. Your fingerprint will still be on it. But the thing itself will have been shaped by every influence, every conversation, every unexpected turn between now and then. The question is whether you gave it enough room to grow.
Lesson Learned
Every meaningful thing we build follows the same arc. It starts as a small, almost unrecognizable seed of a thought, and over time it gets shaped by forces we didn’t plan for and couldn’t have predicted. The DNA of the original idea survives, but the final form is always something different from what we imagined on day one. That’s not failure. That’s the process working. The real leverage is in the size of the thought you’re willing to entertain at the beginning. Think small and the process delivers small. Think unreasonably large and the process pulls you further than you thought possible. The things you are thinking about today are already forming the shape of what you’ll hold in your hands a year from now. Give the idea room. Let it be big. And trust the labor.
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Giving Birth to More Than Life—How Creation, Struggle, and Renewal Shape the Way We Lead, Love, and Leave Our Mark
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