Out on a limb

by Anton Zuiker on September 7, 2026

Today on the way back from a weekend road trip to Atlanta, where Oliver joined a gathering of his summer-camp friends, I listened to three mesmerizing podcast episodes that serendipitously overlapped with recent conversations and themes I’ve explored.

On Coaching For Leaders (Four Words That Set Successful Leaders Apart), host Dave Stachowiak explains the four words that he says differentiates leaders who thrive from those who don’t. The first two words, he says, are ‘show up’ which echo the Ted Lasso message I blogged about last night.

On The Daily (Classical Music Is in Crisis), host Michael Barbaro and NYTimes classical music critic Joshua Barone discuss the excitement and change that superstar conductor Gustavo Dudamel brings to the New York Philharmonic as he starts as music and artistic director this week. A few nights ago, my friend Michael and I were at Sharp 9 Gallery in Durham for live jazz. On the drive there, I told Michael about a high school friend, Rob Deemer, who was a talented musician and budding conductor. Rob contributed a musical score to the New Pennis literary magazine I edited and then invited me to juggle as he conducted his senior arrangement.

On The Ezra Klein Show (The Tao of Rick Rubin), a rerun of the 2023 conversation with the amazing Rick Rubin had me near tears. So much of this, about Rubin’s book about creativity and way of living, reflected what I’ve experienced in my beginning journey into mindfulness these last few years, and even longer. Ezra opens with a reference to the Stephen Mitchell translation of Tao Te Ching, a book I bought in 1991 in Columbus, Ohio. My friend Joe was in the bookstore with us, and yesterday Joe in Cleveland texted me as I wandered the food hall of the Ponce Leon Market in Atlanta.

Rubin also says this:

So there’s a belief and a suspension of disbelief that goes into all of the creation of art. If you want to make something new, there’s no template to follow. We’re really going out on a limb all the time. And we crash and burn a lot. We crash and burn a lot in the process, just hopefully not too often on a grand stage.

But the beauty of it is when we’re making things, we’re making them for us. And then it’s up to us to say, OK, this is something I want to share with other people, or this is something that not only do I not want to share with other people, this is telling me I want to go in this completely different direction because I found this is more of a dead end than I expected.

That’s the same vein of gold that Paul Millerd tapped in The Pathless Path, to go and make something. But the concepts of being out on a limb, and getting to a dead end, and crashing and burning, have been on my mind. Looking back over the course of my career, and mining my blog posts, I’m noticing a lot. Such as? Such as that high school literary magazine I lead, the embarrassment when half of the pasted-up pages got ruined by rain that came through my family’s apartment window, but also pride about our creative decision to put classical music across a spread of pages.

Perhaps I should start a magazine.

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