It is embarrassing to go back and listen to recordings of mastermind sessions I’ve been part of.

In a mastermind, a group of entrepreneurs takes turns being coached by each other. When it’s my turn to be coached, my current self cringes as I hear my past self blather on about my business and deflect useful ideas and feedback. It is so hard to believe that I couldn’t see in the moment that I was doing this.

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When I was sixteen, I performed for the first time with a band, a small acoustic trio we called Trip. We opened for our friends in Orange, a power-pop outfit, at the rec center of Star of the Sea Catholic Church in our hometown of York, Maine.

I had been playing guitar for only a few months. Our repertoire was mostly covers, including the Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”

Looking back, I cannot recall a moment in which I thought, “Maybe no one wants to hear us play a seven-minute song” or “Who am I to get up in front of people and play music?”

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I’ve learned that I can never assume that I know what someone wants.

I can’t assume that they know, either.

Interestingly, they might already have that which they say they are looking for, or at least the means to acquire it. However, they’ve been on their quest for so long, they don’t even notice this. Their eyes are fixed firmly forward, unable to see what’s around them.

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The other day, I wrote a song from scratch.

The music for the verses took about 90 seconds to compose. Then, the bridge took another 5 minutes. The lyrics, on the other hand, took another 90 minutes, and then I tinkered with them over the next day or so, changing “it” to “that” and “eventually” to “actually.” But the song was essentially done in one sitting.

It was incredibly satisfying to create something from nothing. I used to labor for days or weeks or even years over a song, hesitant to commit to completing something if it wasn’t perfect. As a result, I have a bank of song ideas and fragments going back all the way to high school.

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When I was a kid, I hung onto things. Candies, stickers, little soaps, fancy erasers and pencils, personalized stationery — instead of consuming them or using them up, I would hoard them and relish the perfection of their untouched, unblemished potential. More often than not, they’d be tossed or lost before I did anything with them.

It became the same with ideas. Rather than create the drawing, song, poem, story, or business offering, I would collect ideas for someday. And like my childhood collections, these would languish, unloved, in notebooks and on recordings until they were lost or forgotten.

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