Author: Joël Dubé

My layover to New York deboarded 65 minutes late, and the initial itinerary gave me an hour and twenty minutes to make my connection. Uh oh. Everyone knew they had 15-20 minutes to get to the opposite end of the airport and make it through US customs.  Half the plane had to wait and let… Continue reading Should You Be Running?

Growth rarely feels good; the thing that’s painful to think about doing is often the thing you should. Discomfort can be a good heuristic to check if you’re moving in the right direction.  

A stage musical requires a high amount of friction to lose retention. A viewer has to overcome caring they spent good money on a ticket, the time traveling to the theatre, and the imposition to the people around them if they leave any time other than the intermission. A recorded work is a low friction… Continue reading On Retention

More good will never be good as less better.  

Writing songs for any sort of theatrical project is an act of service. Service towards the story, service towards the character, and service towards the project as a whole. Beautiful things get cut, that’s just how it is. There’s any number of reasons a song could be cut that has nothing to do with its… Continue reading The Service Industry

In baseball a batting average of .300 is considered great, and it is great. But everything has a batting average, and in many areas .300 is unacceptable. What’s a great batting average for showing up to work when you don’t want to? .800? If someone doesn’t work a fifth of the days they don’t feel… Continue reading Batting Averages

Professionalism has the most value when everything is burning down around you. It’s not hard to be professional when things are going well.  

All skills are born out of incompetence, we’ve all heard adages about how the professional has made more mistakes than the amateur. But there’s a caveat.   Someone who is very skilled likely doesn’t repeat mistakes, because the tension between the mistakes they’ve made and  the standard they set for themselves is so painful they… Continue reading Incompetence

Is there a benefit to being well-informed? Sometimes, it depends. A maxillofacial surgeon who is well-informed beyond the point of what is required to earn their title has, by necessity, divested time from their specialization. I don’t care if my surgeon is well-informed; that’s a GP’s job. A specialist’s job is to be myopically hyper-informed.… Continue reading Hyper-informed

If you don’t have a system for cloud backups of your ongoing work you either have terrible risk assessment or you don’t care that much—both are a bad look. Life will come to kick you in the teeth at some point. Just buy the mouthguard and be done with it.