So, I did a gig with a local garage band. I play with a bunch of professional musicians, but these guys are up the street and wanted to put together a horn band to play Stones, Chicago, EWF, and so on. We’re talking adults in their 40′s and 50′s starting their first band. After much drama, they booked their first gig.
They tore the place up. Packed house, kitchen open and cooking all night, three bartenders couldn’t pour the drinks fast enough. They were turning down jobs by the end of the night.
Meantime, Big Bands all over are struggling for jobs, at the Atlanta Wind Symphony we are struggling to maintain finances and improve audiences, and Duke Fame, a band with two CD’s and air play will take a gig for beer at this point. What’s up with that? And what does it have to do with The Physics of Success?
Well, The Physics of Success pretty much explains everything, so it must explain this. It does, but that’s not the point. The point is I feel the same way about the success of an amateur garage band compared to the plight of professional musicians as I do about the success of a lot of success books based on pretty flimsy science. The Physics of Success is not based on flimsy science.
I saw an interview with one of these fellows, who mumboed a lot of jumbo about quantum mechanics. A real, live, physicist asked him a couple of questions, all of which were answered in vague, fluttery language having to do with consciousness. The physicist said, “You keep attributing everything to consciousness, but the last I heard, nobody knows what consciousness is.“
[Three cheers for the physicist!] The answer was something like, “Consciousness is the superposition of quantum probabilities that expresses the infinite possibilities of being.”
When asked if he knew what that meant, the physicist replied, “I know what all of those words mean, but I’ve never heard them put together quite like that, so no, I really don’t know what that means.”
I would have just called baloney.
The correct answer is that we don’t know what consciousness is, period. I hope I made that clear in The Physics of Success. If not, I’d like to make it clear now. True enough, physics must be able to explain consiousness, and also explain why success principles operation, because eventually physics must be able to explain everything by definition. I like to think I figured it out a bit earlier that some other people.
The reason crowds like cover bands is because they don’t have to think. There’s nothing to learn. The reason people like the fluffy success books is because the books just tell them what to do, and people don’t have to think.
More to come…
