There Is No Speed Limit

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? What the heck of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of such new laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. There's No Speed Limit by Derek Sivers. Whether you're a student, teacher, or parent, I think you'll appreciate this story of how one teacher can completely and permanently change someone's life in only a few lessons. I met Kimo Williams when I was 17, the summer after I graduated high school in Chicago, a few months before I was starting Berklee College of Music. I called an ad in the paper by a recording studio with a random question about music typesetting.

When the studio owner heard I was going to Berklee, he said, I graduated from Berkeley and I taught a few years there too. I'll bet I can teach you 2 years of theory and arranging and only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in 2 years if you understand there's no speed limit. Come by my studio at 9 tomorrow for your first lesson if you're interested. No charge.

Graduate in 2 years? Awesome. I like his style. That was Keemo Williams. Excited as hell, I showed up at his studio at 8:40 the next morning, though I waited outside until 8:59 before ringing his doorbell.

Recently, I heard him tell the same story from his perspective and said, my doorbell rang at 8:59 one morning, and I had no idea why. I run across kids all the time who say they wanna be a great musician. I tell them I can help and tell them to show up at my studio at 9 AM if they're serious. Almost nobody ever does. It's how I weed out the really serious ones from the kids who are just talk.

But there he was ready to go. He opened the door, a tall black man in a Hawaiian shirt and a big hat, a square scar on his nose, a laid back demeanor and a huge smile, sizing me up, nodding. After a one minute welcome, we were sitting at the piano analyzing the sheet music for a jazz standard. He was quickly explaining the chords based on the diatonic scale. Within a minute, I was already being quizzed.

If the 5 chord with the flat seven has that tritone, then so does another flat seven chord. Which one? The pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me, keeping me in over my head, encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up quickly. I was learning so fast.

It had the adrenaline of sports or a video game. He tossed every fact back at me and made me prove I got it. In our 3 hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berkeley's harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next 4 semesters of harmony and arranging requirements. When I got to college and took my entrance exams, I tested out of those 6 semesters of required classes.

Then as he suggested, I bought the course materials for the other required classes and taught myself, doing the homework in my own time, then went to the department head and took the final exam, getting full credit for those courses. Doing this in addition to my full course load, I graduated college in two and a half years, squeezing every bit of education out of that place that I could. But the permanent effect was this. Kimo's high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me the standard pace is for chumps, that the system is designed so anyone can keep up.

If you're more driven than just anyone, you can do so much more than anyone expects. And this applies to all of life, not just school. Before I met him, I was just a kid who wanted to be a musician, doing it casually. Ever since our 5 lessons, high expectations became my norm and still are to this day. Whether music, business, or personal, whether I actually achieve my expectations or not, the point is that I owe every great thing that's happened in my life to Kimo's raised expectations.

That's all it took. A random meeting and 5 music lessons to convince me I can do anything more effectively than anyone expects, and so can anyone else. I wish the same experience for everyone. I have no innate abilities. This article wasn't meant to be about me as much as the life changing power of a great teacher and raised expectations.

Kimo knows how much he means to me and we're friends to this day. What Derek was lucky enough to stumble on at the age of 17 was that the system is set up for average people. The system is set up so that the average person can keep up. He stumbled on the fact that most constraints really are artificial constraints. We have these scripts in our mind, the way that we think things are supposed to go or that things have to go.

In Derek's case, the well established script was it takes you 4 years to get a degree, but then he happened across this great teacher that said, hey, man. There's no speed limit. This script that you're following, it's artificial. It doesn't matter. You can do it in 2 years.

Let me show you how. And there are so many well defined scripts out there that we think they're canon. We think this is the way that it has to go because that's what the conventional wisdom says. Derek's was about college, about it take having to take 4 years. And I think for most of us, it's too late to flip that script.

But there's another one that maybe, at least partially, we're all still buying into, and that is go to college, pick a smart major, get a safe job in that field, and stick it out. Work your way up, get your 3% raise every year, work for 40 years, and then retire and be happy. But why? Because that that's the script that society has sold us. You have to go the speed limit.

Well, you haven't been here a year. It's not time for your promotion yet. That is absolutely what my experience in public accounting was like. You get promoted based on how long you've been there, and you all move up together. The system is set up for the average person.

So if you're great, you get promoted in a year. If you're a dummy, you get promoted in a year. But you don't have to put up with that. You can just get out. That's what I did.

I just quit. I quit a field where I had 2 degrees and a professional certificate to go into a field where I had exactly zero formal training at all. No degrees, no classes even. But in this field, there's no speed limit, and you may wanna flip the script even further. You may wanna take some job where you can work remotely, buy a tiny house, and drive all over the country, and that's okay.

Let the artificial constraints be artificial. You can be as successful as you wanna be, and that's the great part. If you expect mediocrity, if you expect I'm gonna be bummed out, but I'm gonna work here, get my 3% raise every year, and then be happy when I retire, that is exactly what you're gonna get. But if you expect to go faster than the system allows, if you expect excellence, that's what you're gonna get. If you look at the system and say, f that.

How am I gonna get ahead? How am I gonna go faster? You're gonna find a way because now your new expectation of yourself is not, oh, I need to keep up with the system. Your new expectation is the standard pace is for chumps. I don't wanna be a chomp.

I don't wanna follow the standard pace. Then don't. You don't have to. Take a look at your life and try to figure out what invisible scripts am I following. What am I doing because that's how the system is set up?

And then have a frank discussion with yourself and realize that the only thing that's keeping you following the standard pace is your expectations. Stop expecting average out of yourself, and you'll stop getting average. The Musicmakers podcast is released twice weekly on Mondays Thursdays at 10 AM CST. Here's a sneak peek from the next episode, work versus life, greatness versus family. We've been placed at the peak of a pyramid 10000 years tall, and we act like we can't call a truce with our inboxes for long enough to go spend meaningful time with our kids.

You can subscribe in Itunes by searching for the Music Makers, or visit us online by going to musicmakers.fm. And as always, you can reach me at Aaron@musicmakers.fm.