Yeah, I’d say just a little more detail for folks, he had four fingers on his left hand and two on his right hand. And so when he was a kid, he really wanted to play piano and his mother who had a beautiful voice and could play piano, got him lessons. And I think he was in lessons for six months. And the teacher said, “I can’t teach him anything else. He’s learning too fast. And everything requires five fingers on both hands.”
And so my grandmother switched him to trumpet, and he was an excellent trumpet player. But then, high school came around, he was a teenager, and he’s like, “To hell with this, I want to play piano.” And he taught himself. Nobody would teach him, He taught himself. It was one summer and he taught himself. The thing that I think that—the lessons I took from that experience was a lot of passion and a lot of grit. So he would sit at the piano all day long, his fingers would be bleeding at the end of the day. And he taught himself how to play in one summer.
I’d listened to his jazz, I have other friends, the company gets to hear it every now and then. And he does an amazing job of using the pedal to fill in where he doesn’t have the fingers. But the melodies are just amazing. He hammers it out. And what I learned is that every note counts. He made every note the intentionality of every note, you heard it, because he had not as many notes to play and every note had to count. So that was something I took from him.
And then it was really the grit and just the stick-to-itiveness of saying, “Look, if I’m passionate about something, I will find a way to make it happen.” And a little corollary to this is fast forward to when I was about 10 years old, Chuck Mangione had a song called Feel So Good, a great song. It was on a flugelhorn. And my dad, I’d heard that my dad played trumpet. There were trumpets in the house, but he never played when I was a kid. He heard that song on the radio. That next Saturday, he drove to the music store, he bought a flugelhorn and he played a song just as beautifully as Chuck Mangione. And I was just like, “Oh my god.”
Another example of him just saying, I have passion around this. I’m going to do what I want to do to be successful and enjoy life and to make a difference in the world. And so he took that same passion, that same grit into his work into serving customers and that was something I learned from him and something I carry forward every day. It’s like, you know, never give up. If you have passion around something, make it happen.
