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I have a serious question.

Are you only as good as you need to be?

Before you answer, I offer the observation that, in my experience, none of us is as good all of the time as we can be part of the time. Try as we might, we can’t be at “our best” every hour of every day. And this is just fine.  Sometimes it is really important to be at your best, at other times it is not as important.

So the real question is, “How do you allocate your attention and energy so that you can be at your best—your peak performance—when it’s most important?”

For me, the most important daily task I engage in which I always want to be my best at is driving.  As I told each of my children when they were first learning to drive, if your attention wanders for half an hour in class your grade may suffer.  If your attention wanders for five seconds while you are driving a car, the consequences could be far worse.  In five seconds of inattention you could be dead, or confined to a wheel chair for the rest of your life.  I always aim to be as good at driving as I possibly can every time I drive.

Whenever I walk down a flight of stairs, I’m equally careful.  I pay strict attention to my balance and hold on to the railing (if there is one).  Physical safety is my number one issue, and in this area I always want to be as good as I can be.  An accidental fall, especially one that involves hitting your head on a hard surface, causes many premature deaths.

My father is a world-renowned teacher of brass instruments.  I have seen him, in just a few minutes, help hundreds of students dramatically improve their playing of any wind instrument.  A typical lesson with a new student often ends with my father’s standard advice, which he himself has lived by:

“Even if you’re practicing on a desert island and there is no one within a thousand miles to hear you, you still must pay strict attention to what you’re doing.  You must approach each practice session as if it was the most important concert of your career.”

That makes perfect sense to me.  When you reinforce a bad habit in practice it will inevitably creep into your performance as well.

It is said that “life is not a dress rehearsal.”  Today is the real thing.  You only have one shot at today and, if you’re lucky, tomorrow.

Consider how much fun it can be to perform a task, even a simple one, to the best of your ability.  Please note that I am not talking about perfection.  Far from it.  I’m simply talking about doing any task, such as my writing this blog, in the best way I can today.  Hopefully, the habit of doing my best will help me to write even better for next week’s blog, and even better than that for my blog the week following.

Think about it.

Are you only as good as you need to be?  Or are you as good as you can be?  The concert is today.

Alan

I’m writing to thank you for The King and I, which I attended a few hours ago at the Lincoln Center in New York City.  The performance was outstanding, with terrific acting, great directing, and a wonderful orchestra.  Of course, all of this was in performance of your beautiful words and music.

I first saw The King and I sixty-odd years ago when I was a teenager.  My father treated my mom, my little brother, and me to balcony seats. I was transfixed, just as I was tonight, not only by your songs, but also by your characters and story. Your musical was even more moving than I recalled.

Just as each of us is trapped when we reach a certain age, the king himself is ensnared between his inescapable life experience on the one hand, and his early dreams, challenged by the demands of a real and continually changing world, on the other, a world which seems very different when viewed through the lens of enough experience.

For example, when I was young the two-way radio watch was a fiction, born of a dream, on the wrist of Dick Tracy, a cartoon detective.  Now that fantasy is real, a two-way wrist cellphone which also displays your heart rate.

Every love story is personal and, for that reason, intensely private, as it exists solely between two human beings.  Anna, a teacher, and the King certainly loved each other, but faced inescapable difficulty, separated, as they were, by position, culture, and gender.  Of course after the final curtain, when the entire audience rose in a standing ovation for the orchestra and cast, I felt I had been an eyewitness—a participant, if you will—, to, or in, an unlikely love story with twists, turns, and ultimately, a poignant realization at the King’s death and Anna’s departure.  Like the two of them, I have found love in my life, but mine, as theirs, has been far-removed from the fairy tale ending of “happily ever after.”

Back in my hotel room I’m thinking that our dreams naturally pull us toward love, toward fulfilment, while our own limitations and a constantly encroaching world are barriers that none of us can fully overcome.  In your words tonight, “No man is as good a king as he can be.”

I know you never heard of personal computers, the internet, or Wikipedia, which contains an entry about you that says, “Their musical theatre writing partnership has been called the greatest of the 20th century.”  But I will tell you from my own experience that your musical Sound of Music is one of the best-loved movies of all time, and each summer plays to a packed house of more than fifteen thousand people at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.  I wish you could see the thousands of pinpoints of light from cellphones waving in unison, as we sing along with your song Edelweiss, performed larger than life on the big screen.

I hope you were happy . . . no, elated at the success of your work.  Had I created even one of your musicals, notably including The King and I, I would be entirely satisfied . . . no, thrilled . . . with my career.

I would continue, but it’s past midnight and I have an early morning appointment to do something not nearly as important, or fulfilling, as seeing and hearing your masterpiece this evening.

Rodgers and Hammerstein, you did good.

Thank you.  And love,

Alan