Charlie and his harmonica

Charlie asks for a harmonica in the Alcatraz gift shop. My initial response is no. He plays trumpet and guitar already, but more importantly, he likes to make noise whenever possible.

The harmonica would only afford him a new means to annoy us.

But Charlie is also a remarkable independent learner. This summer, entirely on his own, he taught himself how to solve a Rubik’s cube by watching YouTube videos and memorizing a multitude of algorithms that speedcubers use to solve the thing.

He now solves it with ease and is working on getting faster. His current personal best is 53 seconds.

So I thought that if he liked the harmonica, he might turn himself into a real harmonica player before long. Admittedly, he owned a harmonica when he was little that he called an ahack-mahka, but he’s a much more focused, serious boy today.

So I bought him the harmonica, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.

About seven minutes later, he’s sitting beside Clara on a bench outside the cell house, playing the harmonica. He can’t really play, of course, but he knows enough about music to sound surprisingly good. He’s playing with deliberation and thought. Finishing off chords and ending bits in surprisingly satisfying ways.

Still, he’s owned the thing for less than ten minutes.

Then a family of three approaches. The parents ask if he’ll continue playing. Their son wants to hear more, as do they.

So he plays, and this family listens with rapt attention, thinking they are listening to someone who knows how to play the harmonica instead of someone who has been playing it for about 420 seconds and is simply improvising.

They love it. They thank him when he finishes before moving on.

Had Charlie placed his hat at his feet, they probably would’ve given him a couple of bucks.

It’s a lesson for us all. It’s one that I speak about a lot when coaching folks in business:

Everyone is improvising all the time. We’re all making it up as we go along. There is no playbook for how to live life a life. No correct way to run a business or invest. No proper way to parent a child. No gold standard for marriage. No Platonic ideal for building a life.

As a friend just said to me while standing over a golf ball, “In golf, there are eight different ways to get that ball on the green. That’s the beauty of the game.”

But he was only partially correct. He could see eight different ways to hit that ball onto the green, but there were many, many more that neither he nor I could ever see.

And all of them were correct.

Knowing this truth – that everyone is making up everything as they move through life – and truly believing it can be enormously liberating. No longer should you worry if what you are doing conforms to the expectations of others. If you do it well, you will become the gold standard. You can become the expectation of others. People will see you as the expert, the professional, and the guru, even if your choices and methods are entirely different than the rest of the world.

When Charlie was asked to play his harmonica for that family, his response was not, “I don’t really play,” or “I just bought this seven minutes ago,” or “I’m not any good.” He didn’t tell them to lower their expectations or that he would try his best.

He played.

He recognized that the people in front of him thought he was a harmonica player based on what they had already heard, so he allowed that assumption to stand and began playing.

He made it up as he went. He wasn’t worried about the right or proper way to play. He wasn’t concerned about what the family might think after listening for a minute or two. He wasn’t worried about being perceived as a fraud or a failure.

He improvised, as we are all doing every day of our lives. We are all just making it up as we move along. The best leaders and the most successful people know this truth and accept it sooner than others. They don’t allow convention, conformity, expectation, and history to dictate their path or stop them from moving forward in the improvised, invented, and novel way.

They are constantly making everything up, too, but are simply doing so with more confidence and a lot less fear. They embrace their inventiveness. Relish in improvisation. Look for better and easier and more profitable ways of doing business. They blaze new trails with excitement. Step out of line with glee.

The next time I find myself wondering if I’m doing something the right way, I’m going to think of Chalie on that bench outside a federal prison-turned-tourist attraction, playing harmonica for people who thought he knew what he was doing.

Because he did.

He knew that as long as he kept making it up as he went along, boldly, confidently, and assertively, everything would work out well.

He was right.