The reason I still play trumpet (for better or worse)
Interesting story for you.
In May 2021, my wife Sana and I were riding in a taxi from our apartment to a mall in Hanoi, Vietnam for a relaxing Saturday lunch and stroll through the mall.
I had been active playing trumpet for pretty much my entire life, yet the trajectory of my professional career had me beginning to believe my trumpet playing days were over. I was getting heavily involved in producing podcasts for folks in the health and fitness sphere (still am), and I was thinking it might be time to let it ride into the sunset and call it a career.
It’s not like there’s a shortage of trumpet players, so I would not be missed if I were to put it away for good. Perfectly reasonable line of thinking looking back at it.
So I was sharing this with Sana while in the cab, and she said, “I think you should keep playing it.”
“I would need a really good reason to do that,” I replied.
“I’m your wife, isn’t that a good enough reason?” She said.
That may not be a 100% verbatim recollection of the conversation as it was almost 2 years ago, but you get the point.
I suspect she said this because she has secret fantasies of having tv cameras zooming in on her while I’m the featured soloist with the Vienna Philharmonic, but that’s beside the point. My beloved spouse said I should keep doing it, and that’s good enough for me.
So I made the decision to keep at it and just see what happens.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I woke up with the word Ikigai on my mind. Ikigai is a Japanese word that loosely translated means “purpose” or “live a meaningful life” in English. Probably not the best translation, but you get the idea.
I had heard that word Ikigai only a few times prior to this moment editing podcasts with Ben Greenfield and probably a few other times by other clients. I don’t remember who, but I do remember hearing it from Ben (and also narrating his 650 page book Boundless not once, but twice, but that’s for a different email altogether.)
Now I’ve had experiences like this before, where a word, or maybe a song suddenly appears in my mind seemingly out of the blue. And I’ve learned that to ignore such mental or spiritual impulses is to do so at your peril.
So I did an internet search of the word Ikigai and found a book with the word as its title by Hector Garcia. Although it’s become fashionable to use the word Ikigai in the self-helpk, personal development so-called influencers, Hector was among the first to write on it in depth. I believe his book was published in 2014, so you see it’s a new concept to us in America, and the West, but an ancient concept in Japan and other regions in that part of the globe.
So I contacted Hector and asked if he’d be game for a podcast interview, and he was. I originally published the interview on my Trumpet Dynamics podcast because that was the only podcast I published at the time. But now that I’ve launched my Gone Newclear show this month, I decided to break it out of the vault and play it there too.
Interesting how things like that work out 🙂
Here’s the link to listen to the audio interview. It’s nearly 2 years old, but it has aged well (and it might have some weird bumper music spread throughout the audio, fyi).