Demystifying Excellence:
The Courage To Fail
I will never forget the question asked by one of our school administrators when the Pinewood Singers returned home from Disneyland with an absolutely giant winners' trophy. She asked -- incredulously, skeptically: "Well... were there any good choirs there?"
"They were excellent," I said. But what I thought was this: Your question -- which subconsciously assumes that our small student body is not capable of true competitive excellence -- is why no previous Pinewood choir has ever won anything, and the music program had dissipated from lack of interest. It astounds me just how much most people don't truly believe, deep in their gut, that the cliché is true: You can achieve excellence with focused passion, persistence, and hard work. If you do those things, it resonates with people. It's infectious and it's more than most people will do. The opposite is also infectious. I left the school after that year, dedicated to forming a company -- Doctor Noize Inc. -- that would never, ever ask such questions.
So now I've reached my life's primary work, Doctor Noize. I love being Doctor Noize. I love making our products. I love playing the shows. Everyone knows this. I will not go into crazy detail here about all things Doctor Noize, although I could do so for hours. There is an extensive Doctor Noize website with free educational content, a line of passionately produced products, and a menu of totally unique shows for kids and families for you to check out if you want. And I hope you do. The only thing I want to communicate here regarding Doctor Noize is this:
I will treat your kids as the smartest, most adventurous, most curious, and most important people in the world. Because that's what they are. And if you believe your kids are capable of excellence -- as I do -- then I hope you'll support what I do, and what people like me do. There are a lot of people, and an entire children's multimedia industry, out there who will feed your kids products that assume they're incurious simpletons with two-minute attention spans. They do this because either they themselves are incurious simpletons -- as many adults become -- or because they are afraid they can't sell something more.
The truth is, this fear is justified: It is far easier to sell something unchallenging to overextended parents. We live in a comfort food culture, and that extends to the arts. As our technology has become more sophisticated, mainstream art has become less so. Many of the people selling simplicity to kids will be more commercially successful than Doctor Noize. Treat your kids like simpletons and they will grow up to be simpletons. They will create a world where truth is casually treated as opinion and the title of excellence is bestowed upon those creations which make us feel comfortable the fastest. The world will be worse off for it.
As long as the culture allows me to make a living as Doctor Noize, I don't care about quantity of sales. I care about quality of influence. As Doctor Noize, I communicate to kids on every album that they're smart enough to tackle complex things. At every show I perform, I try to combine that magical "we're all family" feeling with a direct dare to kids to get onstage and do something unique and outside their comfort zone. My brother would love Doctor Noize Inc., and it would not exist without his sophisticated influence on my life. I've tried to do him proud.
Read the next Chapter -> My Compass.
Return to the Table Of Contents.