In Rick Rubin’s documentary with Paul McCartney, the two of them sit at a soundboard with some of the Beatles' classics. As a song plays, Rubin drops all tracks except one, isolating a single sound.
Listening to While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Rubin points out that the bass line is distinctively different from the sounds of the other instruments on the song. He says, “It’s almost like two songs are happening simultaneously” as he transitions back and forth, contrasting the bass line with the acoustic guitar and tambourine.
Based on McCartney’s response, it appears that he had never noticed this before. How many times had McCartney played that bass line without hearing what Rubin heard?
Rick Rubin is one of the most prolific music producers of the last 30 years, yet he doesn’t play an instrument and doesn’t touch the soundboard during recording sessions. He admits he has no technical ability in creating music.
His skill is creating an environment, both physically and emotionally, where the artists he works with can create their best work. His success comes from his ability to draw out the best individual sounds from an artist or band, removing what shouldn’t be there and then combining what remains to make an incredible song.
The right sounds, at the right volumes, at the right moments, change the impact of a song.
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A concept that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and that comes up frequently in my coaching conversations, is the idea of creating our own definition of success.
Success isn’t one-size-fits-all. What looks and feels like success to me might not feel like it for you. The problem is that if we don’t define what success looks like for ourselves, we’ll end up following somebody else’s definition.
Living by someone else’s definition eventually leads to disappointment. It’s reaching the top of a long ladder only to discover it was leaning against the wrong wall.
The objective is to create our own definition of success and work towards living it out. The default metric for success in our society is financial. But I think this is short-sighted. If you’re burning out, destroying your health or sacrificing relationships to hit a financial target, that’s not success.
There are 5 main areas of life that, when in harmony, create our definition of success:
Relationships
Work
Health
Play
Finances
Imagine a soundboard with dials. Each of these areas of life is an individual track that we have control over. If we turn each track up to max volume, it will be an overwhelming sound. It becomes noise, not music.
We’ve experienced what life is like when our levels are off. We’re focusing on one area at the expense of others.
Creating our own definition of success and living into it is about finding the right mix among these main areas of our lives. Maybe we need to turn one down so that we can bring up the level on another.
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Rick Rubin’s first gig as a music producer was on LL Cool J’s debut album. On the back of the original album, it said ‘Reduced by Rick Rubin’. Rubin has talked about this album credit on several occasions, pointing out that his role as a producer is as much about reducing as it is about adding.
It’s about finding the right sounds, at the right volumes, at the right moments.
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Watch the section of the documentary where Rubin & McCartney listen to While My Guitar Gently Weeps.