Let The Music Play | Ashton.Gustafson

Feb 03 2014

The Cost of Music as Compared to Noise

One of the great pursuits of this life is to determine and discover what your music is and is to be. You do this by using your God-given talents, pursuing your passions, and adhering to the ideals that you find worthy of such pursuit. These are also known as your instruments.

But there is a cost.

To say yes to one thing, one must say no to another thing.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Which is why so many choose noise. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s a quick fix. It’s a life of instant gratification.

Music, on the other hand, requires romance…a long waltz in time with one’s instruments.

It’s the worth the cost as dividends are a friend of music.

Tagged blog, dream, go, ltmp, START, The Cost of Music as Compared to Noise

Jan 28 2014

The Point

“But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than the present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.” Alan W. Watts

This moment is the point.

This hour holds the point.

And the next hour will hold its own point.

Moment to moment, connection to connection, conversation to conversation, hand to hand, and soul to soul….to be IN and to be ONE with our moments is the point.

All of your experiences thus far point directly to this reality: You were meant and created to make your music right now.

There’s a billion points the world will convince to bet the farm on, but there’s truly only one to go all in on: your music.

Let it play.

Tagged Ashton Gustafson, blog, change the world, dreams, goals, ltmp, success, The Point

Jan 14 2014

Accelerate Serendepity

My favorite thought from last year was in an article on Tony Hsieh’s thoughts on ‘accelerating serendipity’.

The last thing we want from our days is for them to be consistently similar.

In the end, our lives and our businesses are ideas about ideas and more often than not our new ideas come to us when our paths have hints of randomness and serendipity.

Read the random book.

Shake hands with the stranger.

Take the long route to work.

Listen to the weird tunes.

This is how one accelerates serendipity.

And then you will…

See what you never saw and hear what you never heard.