Wanzology

Keepin The Pace

Hey, what's going on? Welcome to another episode of WANZ-OLO-GY!!! I am your host, The Wanz, and I'm at a crossroads. How are you doing? You good? You feeling alright? Alright, I hope everything is going well for you. I am ‘putzin’ right along, and today I wanted to talk about keeping the pace.

Keeping the pace is an interesting little mind experiment for me, because it involves comparisons. Comparisons are, for me, they're, they're my, they're my Achilles heel. This all started for me in middle school when I thought I play football. I mean, I play street football and could catch and could throw and I watch TV, I see how they do it. Totally forgetting that I'm small, like four, eight, four, nine. This is an eighth grade. Probably way a good buck 10 at best. Very small, very scrawny. I really, really, really did not have any way to prepare myself to launch my body into other people who were bigger than I was. So needless to say, I kind of got my ass handed to me. It was not fun.

I'm not really sure what I did after that. I knew that I didn't play and I think I waited until basketball season. Cause I had a, I had a hoop at my house and I'd practice shooting and dribbling and so I thought I'd try basketball because there were a lot of guys that I went to school with who played basketball.

(SIDEBAR: I really didn't play basketball with them and they never asked me to play ball with them, so I just kind of was winging it.)

Okay. Court's back. So, I go to try out for the team and I don't make it, I get cut. And I was really disappointed. My mom sensed that and asked what was wrong and I told her that I tried out for basketball and and got cut. Well, she took it upon herself to go up to the school to talk to the coach even though I pleaded with her not to do that. Cause I knew what was going to happen. She didn't. It got around very quickly that my mom had gone up to plead my case to the basketball coach getting an explanation as to why I wasn't good enough to be on the basketball team. Why did I get cut? Because I didn't have the same abilities as a lot of other boys. What happened next? You got it. Word got out, and ‘Mr. Small Scrawny’, with a hair trigger temper, got made fun of, a lot!! “Ooh, look, Wansley's mom came up, she talked to the coach! Uh, maybe your mom can play, eh, heh, heh!!”, it was horrible. Got into a couple of fights. Spent three or four days out of two or three weeks in the principal's office trying to explain this. But I got over it. I got through it. Didn't play basketball any, very much anymore I, I got interested in tennis and that was something that I could practice on my own and I didn't really need, you know, in order to hone my technique, I really didn't need to play with someone else.

Even though I did find a couple of people to play with. One of which, you know, ended up getting on the team and I was at least on the team, but I was Like second string second, third string. It wasn't bad but it still wasn't I wasn't getting any better compared to the first string players on the team, so I quit. I mean it wasn't fun to trying to compete and not see myself get better Thought I’d take up golf. I played golf with my dad a lot. So, ninth grade, I'm trying out for the golf team. Wasn't good enough and didn't make it, so it became apparent to me that singing was the thing that I did, and no one else really seemed to be…I didn't have very much competition there, and the competition that I did have was different. It was more like a camaraderie. We were already on the same team. The competition was such that we would compete with each other in order to make our section better. Everybody was kind of rowing in the same direction. I wasn't actually competing against other guys, I was actually figuring out where I fit in with them so that we as a section could represent. And now that I really think about it, I never really ever got into the whole, it's me against whoever mentality. I mean, I ran track in eighth grade and ninth grade. I was a dash guy, but not a distance runner. And I did okay, because I was kind of fast, but I wasn't really fast, which was fine. I didn't mind 3rd, 4th, 5th place.

I was on a team and, and, and that made me feel better. I had a little circle to kinda hang around with. But once track season was over, all those people kind of disappeared. Disappeared and I was left to where I had been before. Not really having anybody.

Now, I say these things because that's where the pattern kind of started and as I got older, I mean, if it didn't have to do with music, it was very, very difficult for me to be motivated to try to do it. I mean, I just didn't see the point. I didn't feel that I would be qualified enough. I spent most of my secondary education trying to be a part of, keeping the pace, keeping up with others, where do I fit in? Where is my place among the people? It was a long and sometimes very painful search because I couldn't find a place outside of music where I could fit in and by the time I graduated high school and started going to college, it had, like dumped itself into my subconscious.

That whole compete thing, that whole comparison thing, even though I had auditions in college for jazz choir, regular choir, I had auditions for different bands or orchestras and, but it was different. It was different because I was older and the people that I was competing against were actually my equal, if not slightly better than I was. I didn't feel like I was totally out of my league, so it didn't bother me if I didn't get a solo and some concerto, or if I didn't understand how to phrase correctly on a jazz song, I ended up learning all those things and it led to dividends, that's, that's fine, ut let's now fast forward 25, 30 years. Now, I've been in the populace for a while. Had a few dozen…no, just, I've been in like six or seven bands up here in Seattle, and I was desiring to be in a popular band that people wanted to come see. That would earn enough money to go into a recording studio and make a record and, you know, people would actually show up to shows. But, that really didn't happen because once again I'm comparing myself to, let's see, at that time I was comparing my band and my abilities to Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains and Sweetwater and, uh, My Sister's Machine, The First Thought, Silly Rabbit. There were all these bands that were friends. Who just seemed to be better, and it was all I could do to figure out how to keep up with them, how to keep pace, how to put myself and my bandmates in a position where we would learn, how to be more successful. But I got impatient, I got arrogant, I pretty much damaged a lot of the friendships that I had in bands and ended up not being in one.

Finally, I get into a band, content with the fact that I'm playing with some really nice guys. We're not playing a lot, but I've looked out over the landscape and once again the comparison bug comes in and I don't see anybody out there in the music industry who has a low register voice like mine who has a different take on pop and hip hop and R& B music like I did. I knew that without a lot of people behind me, without numbers, it didn't matter. I wasn't going to be the thing that I'd been told I was going to be since I can remember. I wasn't going to be famous.

I was reminded by a buddy of mine, an old friend of mine named Earthquake, “You know, we don't do what we do to be famous. We do music because we love music!”, which made everything better for me. It was easier for me to let go of the dream of being famous. And then all of a sudden out of nowhere comes the whole Macklemore thing, and kaboom!! All those experiences that I had dreamed of, I was actually doing. But again, I was comparing myself to Sleepy Brown, and B.O. B., and Tech Nine, and 2 Chainz. These are people who were getting asked to do features for established artists, but I never got that invitation. And that kind of messed me up. I didn't understand why. I was featured on one record and it became a smash. So why wouldn't anybody else want to work with me or at least inquire whether I was available? I have no idea. All I knew is that I wasn't able to keep pace.

Keeping the pace means you're as good as anyone else at any given thing. And it doesn't matter what that thing is. I mean, you're an accountant. Great, so you crunch numbers, and you have the lowest error rate. Or something like, you're the truck driver, but you have the least amount of accidents. Keeping pace with others who do the things that you do. Not too far forward, not too far backwards, but being in the middle was difficult for me. I didn't see those things. If it wasn't tremendously successful, it was a complete and utter failure. And it really messed me up.

What's the importance of keeping the pace? Never forgetting, you set YOUR OWN pace. It's not that you have to keep up with others as much as internalize and measure your own improvement, regardless of others. Does that make sense? You are who you are. They are who they are. Those two things never going to cross paths really, but if you can understand and be okay with whatever your deficiencies are, if you can figure out an improvement plan and then get better to lessen those deficiencies, then what happens? Well, you're better, so you're happier to be around other people who do the same thing.

I was always totally digging being in choirs and groups to sing because I knew I could do that. But when it came to things like sports or art or math, Spanish, any other topic, man, I was totally not mentally equipped to be there because I just didn't feel qualified.
So it doesn't matter what you do, whatever your profession is, whatever your main job is that puts food on your table and gas in your tank, whatever it is, I bet you compare yourself with others. And when you do that, how do you do that? What grace do you give yourself to let yourself be yourself? It's an individual thing, but, I would like you to ponder this for a minute, how would you compete if the only person you had to compete with, or keep pace with, was you? If the only competition you really had was in that six inches between your ears? How would that change how you look at keeping the pace?

Sometimes it's really easy to forget what's important, so don't.

Life is, yes, sometimes a contact sport. It's an interaction with other people and figuring out where you fit in. True. True. But I question whether that little mechanism that compares yourself with somebody else's self is actually credible. Since you can't be someone else and they can't be you, how much sense does it make to compare yourself with someone else? And I get it. I get it. It's nice to have motivation. It's nice to have the competition that helps you improve whatever skill you're trying to improve, I get that. But if you're not careful, if you're not careful, you can get lost in the competition. You can get obsessive about competing, you can get regressive about self-evaluation. All of a sudden, you're working out more because you saw a guy or gal at the gym who had better legs, flatter tummy, broader shoulders, perky breasts, a nice chest, guns on them arms. But you work and you work and you work and you work and you work and you don't see the changes. Feel better? Whoopee. That doesn't mean I look as good as fill in the blank. This is where keeping the pace gets to be a little unhealthy.

Remember, the only person you're in competition with is yourself. Everybody else can compete against you if they like, but that's none of your business. Your business is everything inside the six inches between your ears. How do you see yourself competing with yourself? And if you did that, how would you do it? How would you challenge yourself to get better at chess or backgammon or poker? How would you challenge yourself to get better? Play more? Probably. If you play in an instrument or sung, how would you challenge yourself to get better? Well, you'd probably pick pieces of music and learn them. Teach yourself or learn with a friend or take lessons. So after you've done all those things, then how do you measure? How do you measure yourself against other humans? Cause if you do it in the way that it's like, they’re better at knowing when to hold them and when to fold them at poker, if you're not careful, these things can overtake your subconscious and then you'll be living in what I call ‘the pit’.

The pit is, if you've ever been on a sand dune, and you're trying to run uphill, every time you put a hand in to pull yourself up, all the sand that's in your hand starts to roll down.
You make a little progress, but not a lot. And when you, like, expand this to, All for your appendages, you're expending a lot of energy, but it doesn't really feel like you're getting very far. That's unhealthy. That's unhealthy.

Guilty as charged. I mean, I still do it and catch myself after I've already blown past that stop sign. I compare myself with people I really have no business compared with. Why in the world am I comparing The Wanz to Lady Gaga, or Bruno Mars, or Ed Sheeran. Why am I doing that? All of us have walked a different path.

I'm teaching myself to play guitar again. And I say again because this is like the eighth or ninth time I've tried to do it. I can play a few things, but I don't really feel like I can…I wouldn't call myself a guitar player, but I know how to play guitar. My competition is myself. Perfection is not my friend. Consistency is.

Consistency is our friend because we keep track of our consistency. When we start comparing our consistency to someone else, my experience has been, you don't turn out as well. It's easier to get discouraged, it's easier to just give up, it's easier to be disappointed in your own abilities. What would happen if you were upstairs and then you, you're going to go downstairs and you get like three steps in and you stop? Well, you've now broken the consistency of working those steps. How are you going to get down? Re-establish.

Re-establishment is the key to keeping the pace. Just because you've fallen behind other people, doesn’t mean that you've fallen behind yourself. Just because you think you've fallen behind other people, does not mean you have fallen behind yourself. ‘your-self’…two words. Because you always have the ability to try again, to start reengaging with consistency. That is how you keep pace. Consistency is how you keep the pace.

Amazing, isn't it? Try it, see how it works out for you.

Keep on keeping on and I'll see you next week!

Later.