Last night, for the first time in a while, I took a break from thinking about thinking about thinking about work. It has been something of a rough week, having been sick with a bad cough and dealing with looming deadlines, tax preparation, technical snafus and my oldest son's decision to trip-out. The bad news details of all of these matters suddenly materialize in my head at 5AM every morning and the suffering of another day begins.
So last night, with the aid of Southern Comfort, XBox and Robitussin, I self-medicated. And then I started coming back to gritty awareness via YouTube.
You see there's actually some really good stuff on YouTube, and this time I chose musical virtuosos starting with Victor Wooten. From Victor Wooten, I went next to Stanley Jordan, and from Stanley Jordan to Tuck Andress. After Tuck, I jumped over to Vladimir Horowitz and then to Lang Lang. Next came Herbie Hancock and finally Chick Corea. I went to bed at midnight. I still wasn't sleepy so I put on the Freakonomics podcast. Talk about the NFL crumbling put me to sleep. This morning I woke up at 7:30 and started work, feeling refreshed and purposeful.
Something happened in the middle of watching Horowitz. I realized that he was probably one of the greatest piano virtuosos I'm ever going to see - spanning generations perhaps even moreso than the other super extraordinary talentes I watched and would watch. His ability is so incredibly far from what I could achieve. Starting with Wooten, my mouth was open and I was just embarassed. With Jordan it was the same thing. With Horowitz it suddenly occured to me, as it must have to Plato, that I should just shutup and do the absolute best I can do with whatever it is that I do. As long as greatness exists and is recognized, then merit has its place.
Virtuosity inspires.
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