Find Your Get Down

"What do you mean "get down"?

Let's start with a quick history lesson from the world’s most popular music genre: #HipHop!

To loop that rhythm continuously, he invented the “merry go round” technique switching between two identitical records. That created a pocket, a groove, a rhythm, a loop we call…THE GET DOWN!

Those 5 seconds on loop are all that’s needed to set the scene for magic. In Hip-Hop, the get down invites breakdancers, emcees, beatboxers and graffiti artists to throw their art in the mix.

August 11, 1973. It's another hot day in the boogie-down Bronx. T Clive Campbell, aka DJ Kool Herc, and his sister Cindy Campbell are getting ready to make history. They don't know that. They're just two kids trying to host a back-to-school block party. This party will launch a global music movement called Hip-Hop right from the rec room of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

DJ Kool Herc was the first DJ to use two turntables at the same time. To get the bodies moving and flowing, he would identify the dance break in a record. That section with no frills or lyrics — just a dope rhythm.

This teaches us that:

Your get down attracts. It doesn’t repel.

Your get down creates. It doesn’t destroy.

What does this have to do with tapping in to your innate gifts and talents?

Your get down is the core, the heart, the engine of your life.
Kill that and the show stops. Simon Sinek calls it your Why.

It is the poetic refrain. The call to action. The siren’s song luring the artist to adventure.

It’s pure hypnosis.

So, choose yours wisely.

What is an art, a subject, a form, a skill, a quote, a belief etc…ANYTHING…you could loop forever?

When we meet an artist…be they a controversial rocket scientist, talk show host, philosopher or king of pop…we may have never expressed an interest in their area of passion but we all experience the same impact…inspiration. We see someone so incredibly tapped in to their authentic self, we can’t look away.

This is how I fell in love with the clarinet. I was doom scrolling on Instagram when I came across Doreen Ketchens. She’s affectionately referred to as the queen of the clarinet. I have never seen a musician so at one with their instrument. She channels the voice of God through that instrument. More accurately, she channels her undeniable, New Orleans, soulful voice.

Have a listen:

That’s all it took. Within a month, I rented a clarinet. Within a few months, I bought a clarinet. Within six months, I was learning and playing her solos by ear. Turns out the clarinet might be THE instrument made for me. Who would have thought?

Your get downs will surprise you. Yes, plural. We don’t just have one gift to share with the world. We have as many to discover as our inner resistance will allow.

Your get down might be throwing awesome parties. The world might have lost out on an entire genre of music had the First Lady of Hip-Hop, Cindy Campbell, not put on that block party.

Find your get down and you might just birth a creative universe!

Hard Truths are Perpetual Boomerangs

Three The Hard Way:

1. Hard truths are perpetual boomerangs.

You can try to dip, dodge, or dive but there is…

2. No escaping ‘em.

Hard truths in education:
- a key function of school is babysitting children. Need somewhere for the kids to be for 8 hours.
- No babysitters. No workforce.
- Don’t nobody want these jobs…aka teaching is one of the least sustainable professions. Parents’ favorite line to teachers tends to be: “I would never do your job”.
- Manufacturing authenticity…the kind that unleashes student genius…8 hours a day, five days a week, and 40 weeks of the year…is not a sustainable ask for even a gifted teacher let alone an average teacher to achieve.

We tried, had some wins and a lot of failure trying to design with some of these problems as creative constraints during the golden time of the pandemic…that period of time when it seemed the bureaucracy was so overwhelmed, folks in power spent more time listening than talking.

I pictured imaginary civic leaders coming together with industry titans to redefine the definition of school/work, the role of parents in both those settings, and begin a new post-Covid age of sustainable work, schooling, and parenting.

It didn’t happen. Maybe it did and failed. I don’t know. What I know is once people stopped dying, the bureaucracy was hungry to return to the game it knew. (I’d love to learn from communities that did build and hold onto radical innovations.)

If I choose to enter the fray in public education again…to get off the sidelines and volunteer to wrestle with those boomerangs…it won’t be in a school building.

It has to be at the ecosystem level, at the level of community…with whoever is convening the priest, the doctor, the employer, the teacher, the parent, the kid and the city council to talk…start from scratch…and try to design a healthy sustainable way of life.

At Empower, we called it Wakanda in Aurora. You need to influence the design and flow of your own resources at the scale of a city or state to achieve what we’re picturing.

3. How do you catch a perpetual boomerang?

You spend your life trying…

OR…

The answer lies with the growing number of educators quitting their jobs….

You get out the field.

#leadership #education #design