{"id":529,"date":"2009-06-01T05:30:47","date_gmt":"2009-06-01T10:30:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/?p=529"},"modified":"2009-05-29T15:44:29","modified_gmt":"2009-05-29T20:44:29","slug":"music-appreciation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/01\/music-appreciation\/","title":{"rendered":"Music Appreciation"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was Jonathan Nelson<\/strong>, the richest man in Providence, Rhode Island, who gave me the perfect phrase for the second commandment in The Richest Man in Town.<\/em> We\u2019ve all heard the advice, \u201cKnow thyself.\u201d Nelson, like many of the RMITs I interviewed, took that very wise advice to the next level. He learned the importance of the second commandment in school\u2014in a course on Beethoven at Brown University<\/strong>\u2014but this lesson was not on the syllabus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew very little about classical music when I signed up for the class,\u201d he told me. \u201cI thought it might be fun and easy.\u201d It turned out to be neither for the future CEO of Providence Equity Partners<\/strong>. \u201cOn the first day of class, our instructor played a few notes and asked the class who could identify the notes,\u201d he said. \u201cThe professor called on someone: \u2018C-sharp,\u2019 the student responded. How, the professor asked, did he know that? \u2018I have perfect pitch,\u2019 said the student. It turns out that was the only way to know the key. Those students with their hands up all had perfect pitch.\u201d Nelson came up with the answer\u2014not to the question the professor had asked, but to a problem all would-be RMITs have to face.<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew two things at that moment,\u201d he told me. \u201cFirst, 25 percent of the class had a significant advantage over me. They had a talent I could not acquire and it made them better equipped than I to do well in the class. Second, I realized that this class would not be easy for me to ace.\u201d No matter how much he wanted to\u2014and he barely passed the class\u2014he would never have that ear. In true RMIT fashion, however, he got something from the experience. \u201cEven if I knew then where I wanted to be in ten years,\u201d he said, \u201cthis class would not have directly helped me get there. But I did learn the lifelong lesson that while perfect pitch is a real talent, so too is recognizing one\u2019s relative skills and abilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike Nelson, Hartley Peavey<\/strong> had a passion for music. He wanted more than anything to be a great rock guitarist, but \u201cthe sad fact was that I was probably one of the world\u2019s worst guitar players,\u201d he recalled. So Peavey took the lemons he\u2019d been handed and made the proverbial lemonade: \u201cI had an intervention with myself and said if I can\u2019t be the world\u2019s greatest guitar player, maybe I can build the amplifiers that make the best musicians sound even better.\u201d Today his company is synonymous with music equipment, and he is the richest man in Meridian, Mississippi.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of those lies parents tell their children<\/a> that we can do and be whatever we set our minds to. Both Jonathan Nelson and Hartley Peavey recognized that without identifying and exploiting your unique talents\u2014your own \u201cperfect pitch\u201d\u2014you\u2019ll never find your groove.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was Jonathan Nelson<\/strong>, the richest man in Providence, Rhode Island, who gave me the perfect phrase for the second commandment in The Richest Man in Town.<\/em> We\u2019ve all heard the advice, \u201cKnow thyself.\u201d Nelson, like many of the RMITs I interviewed, took that very wise advice to the next level. He learned the importance of the second commandment in school\u2014in a course on Beethoven at Brown University<\/strong>\u2014but this lesson was not on the syllabus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[191,153,157],"tags":[195,197,192,198,199,124,193,196,194],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=529"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":534,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/529\/revisions\/534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.richestmanintown.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}