Jon Gordon is an American author and speaker on the topics of leadership, culture, sales, and teamwork.
The more energy you spend worrying about the people who didn't get on your bus, the less you will have for the people who are on your bus. And if you are worrying about the people who didn't get on your bus you won't have the energy to keep on asking new people to get on.
Everybody wants the quick fix, but it doesn't happen overnight. You have to be willing to put it out there. I call it 'the secret to being an overnight success,' which means there really isn't a such thing as an overnight success. ! The secret is you work really hard for 10 years, and then you become an overnight success.
Alan [Ferber] is a great trombonist and composer. I'm thankful that I got some associations like that through peers and former students. That's kind of what it is.
Phil [Wood] was known for having a little bit of a gruff manner, but he was all heart.
I did do an off-Broadway show for about 15 months. '91 and '92. It was nice to have a steady paycheck for a while. It was Oliver Jackson and Earl May, Art Barron and myself were the house band. I was 24 and 25 at the time.
Everyone wants to do what the great ones do; but very few are willing to do what they did to become great
I just think that I associated music with something that was healing and transformative as a kid.
Did you know you can take your bus anywhere you want to go? Say yes three times with me. Yes, yes, yes. You can take it to the movies, the beach or the North Pole. Just say where you want to go and believe that it will be so. Because every journey and ride begins with a desire to go somewhere and do something and if you have a desire then you also have the power to make it happen.
I was also sitting in from the middle of senior year of high school at Sweet Basil, it was a great club in New York.
You are not a true success unless you are helping others be successful.
I had a great year with Bob Mintzer [at Laguardia School of Arts]. Bob is great. We could have just brought the clarinet or dealt with classical stuff, or brought the flute or just dealt with comp and arranging. . . what a great teacher.
I don't want my children to be what I want them to be. I want them to become everything God created them to be.
[Manhattan School Of Music] didn't' have a jazz undergraduate program at the time so I played a semester in the big band. There was a graduate program. But I wasn't really that involved in jazz yet.
I saw that [music] reflected in my mother when we listened to these records [of Bob Gordon]. And I felt it too.
The Monk competition did open some doors. And I was thankful for that.
[Winning the Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition]definitely opened some doors.
If you are complaining you can't be thinking about or creating what you do want.
Sometimes I say to my students, "We get to come and listen to our favorite recordings and try to learn from them and emulate that and hopefully we can inspire other people the way we've been inspired. "
Leadership is not just about what you do but what you can inspire, encourage and empower others to do.
I went in [Sweet Basil band] and played with them, maybe half the gig for almost eight years or more.