In April 2023, I picked up my son’s alto saxophone and took my first lesson.

This past Friday, I performed in public for the fifth time. An eight-piece band — Dire Straits, Pearl Jam, the Eagles, the Rolling Stones. The set closed with a two-minute sax solo. It was mine.

I play tenor now. I am not yet good. I am much better.

That distinction matters. In fact, it is everything.

Improving is Not About Perfection

I love the process of improving. It’s not clean. In fact it can be incredibly unpredictable.

One of the strangest thrills I’ve discovered is screwing up on stage and recovering in real time, surrounded by people I’ve practiced with for months.

That used to terrify me. Now it’s oddly satisfying.

Because that’s the real skill, isn’t it? Not perfection. Recovery.

The capacity to lose the thread, find it again, and keep playing.

That is music. That is leadership. That is life.

Happy (and Never Satisfied)

Was I happy after the show? Incredibly.

Was I satisfied? Never.

There is always more to learn. Always more to practice. Always something I could have played better.

But if you only measure yourself against where you are going, you will always feel behind.

So I try to pay attention to two things.

First, how far I’ve come.

Second, the occasional moments of bliss along the way.

I cherish the moments when I forget myself and the music is just happening. When the band locks in. When nobody is thinking. When the song plays us.

There’s nothing quite like it.

I enjoy the practice. The practice is necessary. The bliss is the gift.

Forever a Beginner

I will never be an expert. I started at 58. But I can get better. I can pull more satisfaction out of my playing every year for the rest of my life.

That’s enough.

Actually, I think that’s the point.

There Is No Hack

Early on, I was talking to a friend a little older than me. He was winding down his business and had more free time.

He told me he had always wanted to learn guitar.

I told him what I was discovering — the strange joy of going back to the beginning with something I loved.

I asked him if he thought he might start playing guitar. He said: “I’m not willing to suck for two years.”

He couldn’t remember the last time he had done something where he wasn’t already competent.

And I remember thinking: Then you’ll never feel this.

Not because he lacked talent. Because he wasn’t willing to begin.

Whatever you actually want — the band, the book, the company, the relationship, the conversation you’ve been avoiding — there will be a stretch where you suck.

There is no hack for that.

The willingness to suck is the price of admission.

At my first concert, I spent the first song and a half trying to get something, anything, to come out of my horn. Mostly squeaks. Then I finally got my footing and played something. Badly out of tune. Because that’s where I was.

Last Friday, I improvised a two-minute solo. Mostly with good tone. Mostly in tune. (Or at least much more in tune than that first time.)

As my teacher says, there is no substitute for playing in front of people.

And there is no substitute for what that teaches you about yourself.

So here’s the question:

What are you not willing to suck at?

And what is that costing you?

Stuck Deciding?

Hesitating to move forward on something you know you want to do?

Try this for thirty days, and watch everything change:

The Pick Now Decision Sprint

#PickNow

A client of mine (let’s call him Blake) has been trying to hire an assistant for months. Someone who can help him across three enterprises.

He’s interviewed candidates. He’s run personality assessments. He has someone he genuinely feels good about.

There is no new information coming.

Meanwhile, he’s still making last-minute travel bookings. Still dropping balls. Still carrying the low-grade fear that never quite shuts off: What have I forgotten?

I asked him a question I’ve been holding for weeks.

“I notice you keep not hiring an assistant. Do you know why?”

He didn’t answer right away.

Which was the answer.

Pick Now Isn’t Really About Action

It looks like an action tool. Make the choice. Stop deliberating. Move.

But underneath that, Pick Now is a flashlight. And the question “Why am I not picking?” is what turns it on.

When Blake stays with that question, four levels of answer become available. Each one more true than the last.

The first level is the situation.

This is where the logical reasons live. Blake has three.

The training time. “I’d lose more hours getting someone up to speed than I’d save in the first quarter.”

The wrong-hire risk. “The cost of a bad hire is huge. Better to wait than to redo it.”

The financial commitment. “I’m not at peak revenue yet. I should hire from strength, not from need.”

Each one sounds reasonable on its face. Each one dissolves when you look more closely.

The training time? He’s already spending more hours than that on the things an assistant would handle — and he’s doing them in the worst possible window: late at night, sleep-deprived, rushed, and resentful.

The wrong-hire risk? He has a candidate he genuinely feels good about. He’s done the diligence. At this point, the biggest risk is no longer the unknown candidate. It’s the unhired one.

The financial commitment? Before peak is exactly when you hire; it frees up the capacity that helps create the peak. Hiring after the peak means doing the peak alone.

Which is what he’s already doing. Poorly.

That’s how the first level works. The reasons sound rational until you put weight on them. Then they collapse, and you’re standing on the second level.

The second level is the pattern. This is where the answer becomes: I do this. Not just here. Anywhere there’s a consequential decision, I find a way to keep the door open.

This level is heavier than the first because it can’t be retired by hiring one assistant. It travels.

It shows up in hiring. In sales. In relationships. In strategy. In any place where choosing one thing means letting go of the fantasy of every other thing.

The third level is the engine. Why does this pattern keep running? What is he avoiding? What is he afraid to admit?

Maybe it’s fear of making a mistake. Maybe it’s fear of losing control. Maybe it’s fear that someone else could do something better than he can.

Maybe it’s fear that if the easy things come off his plate, he’ll be left with the harder work he’s been avoiding.

Usually, it’s not one clean thing. It’s a knot.

And then there’s the fourth level.

Identity.

This is the one most leaders would rather not look at. Because the fear isn’t always about making the wrong decision. Sometimes it’s about making the right one.

Who will Blake have to become if he hires the assistant? What can he no longer hide behind?

If he has an assistant, someone else can handle a lot of the things he has been using to feel necessary. Someone else can book the travel. Track the details. Remember the loose ends. Protect the edges (and the calendar).

Which means Blake has to face the work only he can do. The strategic work. The relational work. The creative work. Actually working on the business rather than in it.

And maybe that’s the real threat.

Not that the assistant will fail. That the assistant will succeed.

Because if someone else can hold what Blake has been convinced only he can hold, then the whole identity starts to wobble. The version of him that has been valuable because he is indispensable begins to lose its job.

That’s where the actual weight sits. That’s why he can’t pick.

Not because the candidate is wrong. Because picking would change who Blake gets to be.

One Question. Four Levels of Answer.

The point of the question wasn’t to get Blake to answer me in the moment.

The point was to start the question working on him after I left.

A leader who has been deferring a decision for months usually doesn’t need more information.

He needs the question that turns the deferring itself into the data.

If you’ve been “still thinking about it” longer than the situation requires — and most of us are, on something, right now — try the question on yourself:

Why am I really waiting?

Sit with it. Give it time.

The first answer will be about the situation.

The fourth answer will be about you.

Want Access to Pick Now?

Here’s how you can get it.

https://mailchi.mp/c26f62666ec4/the-pick-now-decision-sprint

It’s not just a tool. It’s a way to shine a light on how you keep holding yourself back.

I’m sitting with my mom in her nursing home in Iowa. Celebrating her 90th birthday.

And I’m unsettled.

Some of it is probably too much caffeine. Some of it is being back in an old emotional field. The kind where the body remembers things before the mind can explain them.

Memories of not quite being enough.

The gifts I gave that got returned.

The interests that got dismissed as strange.

The awkward attempts to become someone they’d finally approve of.

One memory came back hard.

Senior year of high school, I was playing offensive tackle on the football team. I was 5’11”, about 195 pounds, and had tried to make myself bigger so I could belong there.

It didn’t work.

I was too slow for guard and too small for tackle. The guy ahead of me was 6’5″ and 250.

I wasn’t going to start. I probably wasn’t going to play much at all.

I was just grinding through practice every day, waiting for the season — and my football career — to end.

At the same time, I sang bass in one of the best high school choirs in the country.

Our conductor approached me about playing a major role in the musical, Li’l Abner.

Earthquake McGoon. The villain.

Big part. Real opportunity.

I wanted it.

And I hid.

My father had a rule: if you start something, you finish it. So in my mind, quitting football wasn’t an option.

But that wasn’t really why I stayed.

I was more afraid of being seen as a musical kid than of wasting months pretending to be a football player.

The jocks were the cool kids. The choir kids were not.

And even though I fit much better with the choir kids, I wanted the approval that seemed to live somewhere else.

That’s what came back this morning.

I wasn’t choosing football.

I was choosing an identity I thought would make me acceptable.

And I’d keep doing that for a long time.

Get the grades. Go to the right school. Join the right law firm. Bill the hours.

Take the next approved step.

From the outside, it looked like ambition.

From the inside, it was compliance wearing a good suit.

That pattern ran me for decades.

Until I finally saw it.

Once you see the rules clearly, you stop mistaking the mask for yourself. And finally you can choose something different.

My mom and I are in a much better place today. But the memory remains. The decades I spent making myself look like I thought others wanted me to.

It was exhausting. And in a moment at my mom’s kitchen table, I heard the echoes that are still there.

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A few years ago, Eric bought his dad’s company.

His dad was a good businessman. Careful. Protective of what he’d built. And very clear about one thing: growth costs more than it’s worth. More to manage. More that can go wrong. Stay small. Stay safe.

Eric had run the company that way. But he kept watching peers of his grow — and actually enjoy it. He started to wonder if his dad had gotten that part wrong.

Then a big opportunity landed. One that could double the size of his business. It meant hiring two senior people — the largest investment he’d ever made.

Eric had found me through another client. His company was smaller than many of my other clients, so I suggested he start with two days and we’d talk about more from there.

“No.”

He didn’t hesitate.

“When I start, I want to be all in on the full year.”

Sometimes I hear that and I know it’s a delay tactic — a way of saying not yet while sounding decisive. With Eric it was the opposite. He meant it. He had one thing to handle first, came back exactly when he said he would, and we had our two days in Denver at the end of August. Two sunny days in the eighties. The kind of weather that makes everything feel more possible.

The shift happened at lunch on the first day. Outside. Sun reflecting off the glass buildings around us.

We’d been talking about the opportunity — what would happen if the investment didn’t work. What would happen if it did. He’d been going back and forth on it for a while. Weighing it. Protecting against it.

And then, midsentence, he stopped.

He smiled.

“What am I so worried about?”

That was it. Not an answer. Not a plan. Just the worry losing its grip.

In the months that followed, he hired the two senior people. A critical team member left — and instead of scrambling, he saw it immediately as a chance to rethink the role entirely. He redesigned it for the company he was building, not the company he’d inherited. He started developing a young protégé to eventually succeed him. The right people started appearing for the roles he was creating.

His dad wasn’t wrong, exactly. Caution kept the company alive. But Eric had been running someone else’s fear. And once he saw that, he couldn’t unsee it.

He continues to take on more and more.

And he’s having fun doing it.

An Opportunity for Deeper Work

I’m opening a small group for founders and other high achievers ready for this kind of work. A full year of my coaching and peer support at a fraction of my normal coaching rate. If something in this story landed for you, it might be worth a look. Book an application call here— https://calendly.com/jeffmunn/pick-now-mastermind-application