Piano man

Billy Joel, and the minute you know that you're successful.

Billy Joel won an Emmy award this week. So, I'd like to share my Billy Joel story.

It starts many years ago from my perspective, when I was graduating as part of my college’s 50th anniversary class. We were excited, but some of my classmates and I were also a bit disappointed. Reason:

• The class before us had Billy Joel as their commencement speaker, during a time when he was probably one of the most broadly popular and successful musicians on the planet.

• But our commencement speaker was a retiring professor, given the honor because he had been teaching at our relatively young institution from the very beginning.

Now, as it turned out, the professor gave a fantastic speech. He won over skeptical audience and ending on a note that I still remember vividly decades later.

However, in remembering and writing about my graduation speech years later, I took the chance to look up what Joel had to say the year before.

It turns out that the artist-formerly-and-probably-still-known-as-the-Piano-Man had an inspiring message that answers a key life question: what marks the difference between successful people and those who only dream?

I've embedded a video of his speech below, but I think this is the most important part:

"I didn't graduate from high school. ... I'm a graduate of the University of Rock and Roll, class of 1970. ...

My diploma was a check: a week's worth of wages earned from playing long nights in smoky, crowded clubs in the New York area ... enough to convince me that I no longer needed to work in a factory, or be a short order cook, or pump gas or paint houses, or do any of the other day jobs I'd had to do in order to make ends meet.

That check meant that I was now able to make a living solely by doing the thing that I loved most: making music.

It meant that I had become self-reliant as a musician.

I will never forget that day. I consider it to be one of the most important days of my life."

Classic question right? Follow your passion? Yay or nay?

People have difference perspectives:

• Steve Jobs said it was a requirement: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust."

• Mark Cuban said the exact opposite: "Follow your passion? No. Follow your effort. No one quits anything they're good at."

• And a study out of Harvard Business School -- actually, a study of previous studies -- suggested a bit of a semantic change: don't follow your passion, but do look for your purpose.

But I think what Joel had to say, all those years ago carries is very insightful:

Yes, follow your passion. But don't follow it blindly. Find a way to practice it that pays off enough to support your effort.

It's poignant to think that we have an opportunity to look now at how Joel, who is 75, gave a speech when he was 42, in which he shared a pivotal moment he experienced when he was 21.

Some lessons are timeless. And that makes them worth remembering over and over.

Here's the 33-year-old video of that Joel's speech:

---

7 other things …

• Kamala Harris and Donald Trump met for the first time on the debate stage in Philadelphia, where they fought to sway 2024 election voters on the biggest stage in U.S. politics. The candidates, sparring on politics and personality, showcased their starkly different visions for the country as they meet for perhaps their only debate before November. (AP, Understandably link with poll)

• Conservative activist Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightward shift on the Supreme Court under Donald Trump, is making a brand new $1 billion push to “crush liberal dominance” across corporate America and in the country’s news and entertainment sectors, Leo said in a rare interview. (Financial Times)

• Extremists keep trying to sabotage the electrical grid. What would happen if they succeed? (The Hill)

• Online platforms have overtaken TV channels as the most popular sources for news in the UK, according to figures described as a “generational shift” in viewing habits. More than seven out of 10 UK adults (71%) consume online news, said the UK’s communications regulator, slightly ahead of TV, which is used by 70% of adults. (The Guardian)

• Google lost attempts to overturn multibillion-dollar rulings in the European Union on Tuesday, marking a win for competition authorities in the bloc in their efforts to rein in alleged abuses by big tech companies. The European Court of Justice, the bloc’s highest court, upheld an order for Ireland to recoup up to 13 billion euros, equivalent to $14.35 billion, plus interest in taxes from Apple. (WSJ)

• When a recent visitor to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico dropped a bag of Cheetos inside one of the caves, losing a snack was probably an inconvenience. But to the tiny microorganisms who call the cave home, the food can be a “world changing” force, park officials stressed in a post on social media last week. (Washington Post)

• Happiest states in America: Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, Utah, and Delaware. I am open to the possibility that I might be skewing New Jersey toward a higher happiness score than it might otherwise have. (WalletHub)

---

Thanks for reading. Photo credit: D. Benjamin Miller, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.