Friday, Mar 25, 2022 • 5min

John Legend: Do What You Love

Play Episode

Grammy Award winning musician John Legend is our special guest host all week! Today, John Talks about the importance of doing what you love, even if it isn’t your 9 to 5.

Talking about

Speakers

(1)

John Legend

Transcript

Verified

Break

John Legend

00:47

Hi, my name is

John Legend

and welcome to Radio

Headspace

and to Friday morning. Today we're going to talk about doing what you love. I really love my job and it's brought me so much pleasure over the years but it wasn't always this way.

01:04

There was a long period where it wasn't even clear that I'd make it as a musician. So today I'm going to tell you how I went from working a white collar job to working in music. Why having a job I love has made my life better and I'll offer you some ideas for how you can gently move your life in a more positive direction.

01:30

I wanted to make music for a living as long as I remember being alive, pretty much, and I would watch, you know, the Grammys or I would watch Star Search and I would be like, "I should be up there on the stage".

01:43

I started practicing at an early age. I started performing at church, at school, at talent shows, wherever I could and I loved it. I kept feeding off of that energy that I would get every time that I performed in front of someone. It made me want to practice. It made me want to get better. It made me want to keep going as a musician.

02:04

I was a nerd in high school. I was like salutatorian of my high school class. I had great SAT scores. I didn't know what it took to become a successful musical artist. I wanted to do it, but I didn't know if it would work out and I figured, why waste the fact that I had really good grades and could get into a really good college, why not actually go to one, and I decided to go to the

University Of Pennsylvania

and I moved from my small town of

Springfield

Ohio

to the big city

Philadelphia

Pennsylvania

02:35

And not only am I a small town kid from a working class family, I also was two years younger than most of my peers because I had been homeschooled some of the time, skipped a couple grades in grade school and by the time I got to the end of high school I was 16 years old. So I show up at

Penn

, definite fish out of water and music was my main outlet at

Penn

that made me feel connected to everyone.

03:03

I joined an a capella group. I also started working at this church as the Minister Of Music there. And so music was always the way that I kind of broke the ice, and then I was always doing music on the side and hoping that music would be able to take over and that would be all that I did.

03:23

So as I'm getting close to college graduation, I'm looking at all my friends are all, like, applying and dropping their resumes to all these banks and consulting firms and I started applying to a few consulting firms and then I eventually got an offer to work at Boston Consulting Group.

03:42

At night I would play gigs in

New York

and at one of those gigs my roommate's cousin came to the show and his name was

Kanye West

. He was a pretty unknown guy at the time as well. He was an up and coming producer who also wanted to rap but no one knew he could rap yet. We started working together, both of us were trying to make it as artists and we helped each other out. And a couple of years after that I was finally able to get a record deal. No more parallel tracks, no more backup plans. I'm a full time musician.

04:21

Hopefully you can find a job that interests you, that excites you in some ways that you feel like you're putting something interesting out into the world. That you're working with interesting people who you enjoy collaborating with and stimulate you. Everybody deserves a chance to feel fulfilled by their work and to be compensated well for their work.

04:43

That doesn't mean everybody's job is going to be their number one passion. Sometimes you can create lanes for yourself within your current job. Just by being creative and having some ingenuity. Going outside of what your boss tells you to do, and actually coming up with something that's fresh and innovative, that will actually make the company better and cooler and will make your job more fun.

05:06

And if you can't do it in your job, make some time to have some activities outside of work that stimulate you and excite you and make you want to wake up every morning.

05:17

Alright, that's it for me today. I just want to say thank you for having me this week, it's been such a pleasure to guest host Radio

Headspace

and I hope everybody out there has enjoyed themselves. Thanks so much for listening and have a great weekend.

Add podcast

Leave feedback

🇮🇹 Made with love & passion in Italy. 🌎 Enjoyed everywhere

Build n. 1.38.1

John Legend

BETA

🌎

About