CreateWorkLive

I am a piano player, that’s what I do.

Workwise, I’m some other things as well: A writer,  a teacher, and an occasional photographer and a once-in-a-while public speaker. Related to work, because they are the things I write about and teach and speak about and photograph and love doing: I’m also a long distance backpacker, a scuba diver, and a traveler. 

You undoubtedly have the same-but-different weird mix of things you do that is part of what makes you YOU. And it’s part of makes your work uniquely YOURS.

The balance changes over the years: In my case, I’m doing more diving now than hiking.  Some years, I do a ton of public speaking, some years not so much. Some years I do more writing, some years more teaching. There’s an ebb and flow with no real plan to it. Things change, and then they change back. But over the course of my work life, the things I listed are the things that are constant. In a very real way, they are a big part of how I define who I am.

What all of this boils down to: These are the things I do, and I do them whether someone is paying me or not.

Which is how I found myself sitting at the piano, playing blues and Chopin, at what used to be called the Troutbeck Travel Writer’s Conference (It’s now called Travel Classics Conference).  I was at the conference to convince editors to buy my stuff; I was at the piano because I play the piano. 

A couple of years later, one of my fellow writers got a lead from an agent who was looking for a piano-player/piano teacher/writer to write a book for the Idiots Guide’s series on playing piano chords. She thought of me because of that night at Troutbeck, and just like that, the Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Piano Chords fell into my lap. At the same time, the same agent was looking for a bass-playing writer to write a bass guitar book, so the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Playing Bass Guitar fell into David’s lap. And now, they’ve come back to us with the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Music Teaching, and the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Rock Guitar.

There’s a nugget of a lesson here: We writers and artists spend a lot of time alone. We day dream, we create, we turn over ideas, and some days we don’t get out of our bathrobes  (Okay, I don’t work in my bathrobe, but I KNOW some of y’all do…. I will however cop to not getting out of the house).

And we need to: We need to put what we do in front of people, even if our only motivation is “Hey! There’s a piano piano! And I’m a piano player: Maybe I should play it.”

Good things happen when we put ourselves and our work into the world — when we share what we create  – by design, on a whim, in any way we can.

And now, I’ve got a book outline to complete….