I saw an interview with Ellen Langer and Simon Sinek a few days ago and she said something that kind of broke my brain a little.
Ellen’s a Harvard psychologist and honestly one of the more interesting thinkers I’ve come across in a while, and she made this point that sounds simple until it isn’t. She said that in actual everyday application, 1 + 1 doesn’t always equal 2.
And honestly, the first time I heard an example like that I was about six years old. My grandfather used to ask, “if you have 10 flies sitting on a sandwich and you swat one of them, how many are left?” And I said, “9, Grandaddy, duh.” certain this was another of his pop-quizzes he loved to give. “Nope, just one. The one you swatted.”
Langer uses laundry piles and clouds as the same kind of lesson. One pile plus one pile doesn’t give you two piles, just like pushing two clouds together doesn’t give you two clouds. You just get one big pile of laundry and a big ass cloud. So yeah, sometimes 1+1 = 1, just like 10-1 = 1. Sure, math has strict rules…it’s just that the real world could give a shit.
I’ve been saying a version of this for years, usually when I’m on the phone with someone who’s just had some completely unreasonable experience in this business and they’re trying to explain what happened like there should be a sensible explanation for it. I’ll stop them halfway through and say it: “You’re trying to apply logic where logic isn’t allowed.”
It usually gets a laugh and I’ll admit I’m poking fun at the situation a little, but the reality is that sometimes shit just happens for no rhyme or reason, especially when you’re dealing with real people. And if you’ve spent any time in this business you already know exactly what I mean by that.
The Education We Got Doesn’t Work Here
Think about what we spend the first couple decades of our lives being taught.
Work hard, get rewarded. Show up, get noticed. Be the most prepared person in the room and the room will recognize it. Follow the rules. Color inside the lines. Put in X, get out Y. blah…blah…blah.
That framework works in a lot of places. Well, school mainly…and maybe a few certain corporate structures. (Probably most of the jobs our parents had.) But that’s about it.
It certainly doesn’t apply in entrepreneurship, and it sure as hell doesn’t work in the music and entertainment business, at least not in any straightforward way.
Those are the kinds of worlds where you can truly do everything right and still lose. The opposite is also true…you can do everything wrong and somehow win. The most talented person in the room frequently doesn’t get the deal. The best song doesn’t always chart. The best business doesn’t always survive, and sometimes the worst one thrives for decades.
None of this is fair. None of it is logical. And the sooner you stop expecting it to be, the more effective you become.
What Actually Happens When You Try to Logic Your Way Through This Business
You exhaust yourself constantly trying to solve an equation that doesn’t have a solution…that’s what happens. You replay the meeting over and over in your head trying to figure out what you said wrong… you tweak the pitch deck for the fourteenth time looking for the thing that’s costing you the yes… you wonder if it was the timing, or the relationship, or the way you opened the email, or whether Mercury was in retrograde.
Sometimes it was none of those things. Sometimes it was all of them. Sometimes someone just wasn’t in the mood that day and the whole trajectory of your career shifted because of someone else’s shitty lunch.
You’re not gonna logic-proof your way out of that…the variables are out of your hands.
Okay…okay…okay. Even I feel like this is turning into a bitch session.
So what CAN you do?
You build a completely different set of operating principles for it.
Let’s get into it.
The Rules of the Illogical World
Here’s what I’ve learned, not from books but from years of watching this industry work, watching people succeed and fail in it and failing in it myself enough times to have some useful scar tissue.
Relationships are the only currency that doesn’t depreciate.
But let me be clear about one thing…I’m not talking about the “polite business transaction” that everybody in this industry wants to call a relationship. “Brother!!” doesn’t always mean what you think it does.
I’m talking about the real ones. The ones where if you called them right now and said “I need help moving a couch Saturday morning” they’d show up with coffee and not even think twice about it.
Those are the ones that actually move the needle and they’re also the ones that are genuinely hard to build, which is exactly what makes them rare.
Timing is almost always more important than quality.
This one hurts to say out loud, but it’s true. A great idea at the wrong moment loses to a mediocre idea at the right one every single time. This doesn’t mean quality is irrelevant…it just means quality without awareness of context is a car with no steering wheel…you can have the best engine in the race and still drive it into a wall.
The answer is almost never in the contract.
I’ve watched smart people spend months negotiating deals that fell apart in execution because the relationship underneath the paperwork wasn’t solid. And I’ve watched handshake agreements between people who genuinely respected each other outlast every legal document either of them ever signed. The contract matters, sure…but what it says about the relationship matters more.
Perception isn’t a soft skill. It’s the whole job.
You can be brilliant in private and completely irrelevant in public, and this industry runs on what people believe about you before you ever walk in the room. That’s not cynical…that’s just the physics of how attention works. Your reputation, your narrative, the story people are telling about you in rooms you’re not in…that’s not vanity. That’s infrastructure.
The no you got today isn’t the no that lasts forever.
The music business, the entertainment world, the startup ecosystem…these are all small towns disguised as big cities. People move. Priorities change. The label head who passed on you last year might be at a completely different company with a completely different mandate next year. The investor who said it wasn’t the right time might be looking for exactly what you built eighteen months from now. The no is real. It’s just usually not permanent.
So What Do You Actually Do With This?
You change the question.
Instead of asking why isn’t this working the way it’s supposed to, you start asking what is actually true about how this works.
You stop trying to find the formula and start trying to understand the terrain. You get curious about the irrational parts instead of frustrated by them. You start paying attention to what consistently produces results in this world, even when, especially when, it doesn’t make sense on paper.
And you give yourself permission to let some things just be unexplainable.
Not everything that happens to you in this business has a lesson in it. Sometimes a deal falls through because two people just didn’t click and they’re not gonna tell you because it’s uncomfortable.
Sometimes an opportunity disappears because of some internal political bullshit that had nothing to do with you and they just can’t tell you. And then sometimes you got the yes just because somebody was in a great mood that afternoon.
Accept it. File it. Move on.
The people who last in this business aren’t the ones who figured out the formula. There is no formula. They’re the ones who got comfortable operating without one.
One Last Thing
Dr. Langer’s laundry pile example is funny until you realize how many times you’ve worn yourself out trying to separate what was always going to combine.
The music business is one pile of laundry. Your expectations are the other. The sooner you stop trying to keep them separate and just deal with what’s actually in front of you, the more you’ll be able to do with what you’ve got.
Logic is a great tool. Just know which rooms it’s welcome in.
This one isn’t always one of them.