This is about music, but really it’s about success.

I miss David Letterman–for many reasons, not least because his show featured some remarkable musical performances.

Here’s one from five years ago: Future Islands doing “Seasons”

Whether or not this song’s your cup of tea, the performance generated a tremendous amount of buzz online.  Seemingly overnight and certainly borne aloft by their lead singer’s passionate vocal turn, Future Islands were suddenly on everyone’s watch list.

The truth, of course, is that they’d been at it for quite some time before that big night in 2014.

Success appears fully-formed and in full throat.  But dig deeper and you’ll find hundreds of small decisions and moments that gathered momentum until triumph was a foregone conclusion.

Before the big lift, a hundred smaller ones.
Before the clean bill of health, a thousand decisions to just show up.
Before the finish line, a million different starter guns.

We won’t all get onstage for Letterman.

But in the smaller venues we inhabit, we get our turn at the mic every day.