July 5 A Universe made of music
Hello, I'm George Caylor, TeaWithGeorge.com, and today's session of Get Real, is a special treat for me today, maybe for you as well. I'm visiting with a fellow musician (that's almost like a mouse calling a lion my fellow hunter." I'm just an old rock and roller. A lot of you remember me from the 60s, but I'm talking to a true musician today. His name is Adam Smith. Adam, you're with Masterworks. You earned music degrees from two of America's most respective conservatories. You became a business owner like I did and an entrepreneur. We have a lot of background that's the same, except you're young and good looking and I'm old. You're actually a classical musician. I was a Motown rock and roller. Was that a detour from God's plan or did you eventually realize it was His plan? It's a great question. George, it's a pleasure to be with you today. Thank you for having me. I would say that that question does get asked a lot because when people find out my business background, they might put me in a bucket of, well, is he a business guy or a music guy? But a lot of times, I don't play that card. There's certain tact in how you just relate to people and what you're talking about. I don't tell everybody that I've got seven years of conservatory music training. Some people would expect that I've got MBAs and various business degrees or whatever. So I went to school at a prominent conservatory in Cleveland where I met my wife and that was a music theory degree that I got there. And then my wife and I got married and thankfully I got a full scholarship and stipend and all to a prominent conservatory in Rochester, New York and did that for three years. I got out of there, I had underestimated the job market as a music theory professor. So it was like, okay, you can make 30 grand a year. I was like, wow. And I was I was making good money on side work during school, doing multimedia, doing some sound design, some custom audio work. And I ended up working for a friend of mine who bought us an auto repair and body shop. And it was a little bit of a proving ground for me to reset my expectations of what I had just gone through with school. But I, you know, I loved doing that. And after that, I worked for an Internet company for a year. And that sort of dot bust around 2000 was what I experienced there.And it was at that moment in around 2000, I just said, Lord, what am I supposed to do? And I knew that what we do for a living as our vocation was important. Some of you all might realize that when Jesus called his disciples, none of them were rabbis. They're all business guys. They're all just working guys. You got fishermen, tax collectors, doctors, lawyers. You got you got just working people. That says something, right? Principle of God honoring your vocation and your vocation being important to him. I knew that, but I wasn't sure which realm to pursue. I actually ended up just praying and worshiping and reading scriptures and singing the scriptures because that's a talent I have as an ear trained. I can improvise and play for hours and play anything that I hear on the radio. And now I can tell you what all the chords are because I have music theory background. But I just spent time in prayer and worship. And that ended up turning into an album that I produced called Worship at Work. And I toured around the country and I've led worship in prominent venues. And through that, I was presented with the opportunity. To go be a Christian artist with management and all that. And I was going to be like the workplace ministry worship leader guy. And I'm praying over the contracts and the Lord says, you can do this if you want to, but I'd rather give you a business. And I said, okay, obviously, Lord, the way you're saying that, I think I know what I'm supposed to do. And I pushed the contracts to the side, told my wife what the Lord said. She said, okay. I called the management. I said, listen, I know this looks like a layup, but I've got another direction. I started getting on the phone and networking and I had some web design skills. And I just started calling businesses and friends and saying, hey, can I build a website for you? Just started my own thing. My company is called Soundpress because I was doing the audio work. And I was like, okay, well, I'll just keep that name for a while. The word Soundpress, like a printing press, creating sound, that was where I was doing a lot of that creative. So I ended up starting my own marketing business in 2000. And I look back 26 years and you say, well, was that a detour from God's plan? Or did I eventually realize it? So many things have carried forward in my life from those foundations that I know absolutely that I'm on his plan now. But if you asked me back in 2000, 2001, 2002, and I was thankful to have a $20 bill in my wallet and to provide food for my wife and my baby, I was constantly asking, Lord, is this the right pathway for me? And trusting him all along the way. But he's built a fantastic business for us and now I absolutely see his purposes. That's a short story.There'll be a longer story, but that's a short story. You know, my daughter, one of my twin daughters, when she was in college, she said, Daddy, I think I'll major in philosophy. I said, you know, honey, that degree comes with the food stamps stapled to it.And oftentimes a music degree as well. In fact, when I was a touring, recording rock and roll musician, I played with some fabulous musicians. And if they didn't play tomorrow night, they wouldn't eat the next day.Very, very bad business. And it seems that God gave you both sides. And I don't know why it's almost exclusive that if you're an artist, you're a bad businessman.Somehow you avoided. How's your music training shape the way you lead people and solve problems and run a business? And are there any principles from the practice room that apply just as much in the marketplace? A hundred percent. So when I was in grad school, my stipend was to teach the undergrads.That's kind of how that works. So I got used to standing in front of classrooms and lecturing and teaching and working with students, some boneheaded students, you know, how students can be. I was one of them, right? But I honed a lot of people skills, right? I was under authority.I had my, you know, my advisors and all that. I still was taking classes. I had teachers I had to report to.And, you know, in grad school, you can't get anything below a B, you know. So you got to work hard. And then teaching gave me some public speaking chops, right? So that alone.But the musical analysis of music theory to break down a symphony and analyze everything that's going on there, I see that correlation to me solving complex software information architecture and various e-commerce needs where we have a lot of systems integrations. You have data coming from various places. You have financial things coming in.You have integration to marketing engines as well. And various softwares in that space. So to orchestrate all that together for success and analyze the data of the results, you know, those things are not dissimilar to analyzing a symphony with all its parts and its form and its structure.I will say this, though. The comforting thing about music theory is that it hasn't changed. Technology has changed.But I can still go back and do an analysis of a Beethoven symphony the same way it's always been done. Even though today in a tech stack, if I'm building architecture for e-commerce and marketing, there's so many different tools and things to use. I got to stay abreast of that stuff.But it's the analysis of that. And then the leading people, you know, just from whether a conductor is a leader, which I'm not a conductor, but understanding how to present and to teach, you know, sort of comes into bear. One of my side hobbies is quantum physics and the nature of time, energy, space, and matter.In fact, in the book of Colossians, chapter 1, verse 14, in the language of a physicist, Christ came before time, energy, mass, and space. Created energy, time, mass, and space. And by him, the fabric of the universe is held together.He's holding it together, all of it, the universe. And the atoms in you and me together. And what we're discovering now that the energy that makes up matter is almost certainly musical notes, arranged in equations, but it breaks down to musical notes.And right now, I'm looking across the table at you, and I'm looking at musical notes that have formed a good-looking man. And you're looking at musical notes of an 82-year-old man here. So no wonder that we gravitate towards this.We're made of it. We're made of music. In fact, Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan, who represents Christ, sang the universe into being. (Click on link to listen to continue)

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