About this article:
The Side Project is a reflective, personal essay about the people, places, and passions that keep marketers creatively alive outside of work — and what those pursuits give back in return.
So much of adult life asks us to operate with an objective. Work has goals. Families have needs. Calendars have obligations. Even the things we choose to do for ourselves can start carrying expectations. Are you good at it? Are you getting better? Is it productive? Could you monetize it? Should you be doing something more useful with that time?
I am particularly susceptible to this way of thinking.
I have a tendency to think strategically. To map out objectives and paths and to make clarity out of the unknown.
This is a useful quality as a marketer and as a leader.
It is slightly less useful when there is no real answer to find.
A few weeks ago, I spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding whether a harmony should begin in the first chorus or second verse, or whether percussion should fade at 3:50 or 3:52…
Outside of work, I make music. I like to say that is my side quest.
There is no right answer. No data to consult. No audience insight driving our decisions and no stakeholder with ownership over the outcome – because no one asked me to make the songs in the first place.
I just care. A lot.
When I make music, a lot of the time the entire strategic rationale is: oh, that feels right.
I’ve been making music for most of my life. After college, I was in an alternative rock band, Waking Elliot, with some of my best friends. We played constantly - four or five nights a week at times - and built a following around New England. I married our guitarist. Two of our other bandmates also got married.
I swear it wasn’t as Fleetwood Mac as it sounds.
Eventually, careers got bigger. We had kids. Life did what life does. Music became less central for a while, but over time I found my way back to it.
These days, I get to make music with my best friend Mary in a duo called Carlyle. We write, record and play shows simply because we really enjoy doing it.
And I can get completely lost in it.
A song can start with a line someone wrote down or recorded in their voice memos. Then we get to build around it.
I can sit down to work out a piano part and suddenly hours are gone. Mary can sing something differently than I expected and I'll hear a harmony underneath it. We can make one tiny change and the whole feeling of a song shifts. We can add six things and realize it was better with two.
Sometimes we'll try something and both immediately know: that's it. Other times we'll listen to the same ten seconds over and over and have absolutely no idea.
I love all of it.
There's something satisfying about starting with nothing and making a thing that didn't exist before. Collaborating with another person makes it more interesting. I bring my instincts, Mary brings hers, and together we make something neither of us could have made alone.
There are endless directions we could go, and no objectively right answer. We're just listening, trying things and following what feels right.
No brief. No approval process. No client. No KPI telling us whether the bridge is working hard enough. We get to decide what good means.
The obvious way to tie a bow on this article would be to say that making music makes me better at my job.
And I'm sure it does.
But I don't really want to make that the point.
Maybe the value is that music asks something completely different of me.
Your side project or hobby doesn't have to be restful. It doesn't have to make you more productive. It doesn't even have to make sense to anyone else. Maybe it gives you somewhere to be competitive, meticulous, curious, physical, artistic, social, quiet, ridiculous - whatever doesn't get enough airtime in the rest of your life.
Mine happens to be music.
I spend a lot of my life looking for the objective. Music gives me somewhere there doesn't always have to be one. I can simply get lost.
I'm starting to think that's the value of any side quest. It doesn't have to take you anywhere at all. It just gives another part of you somewhere to go.
If you want to listen to this particular side quest you can find Carlyle HERE