When Caring is Not Enough! Biden, Inauguration and Elvis
What does Elvis missing a word teach you about being perfect? If you never miss one, you practised too much, and it is probably not coming from the heart any more.
What does Elvis missing a word teach you about being perfect? If you never miss one, you practised too much, and it is probably not coming from the heart any more.
Perfectly imperfect never made sense to me until I got older. Listen to Are You Lonesome Tonight and you hear it. He cares whether he gets the words right and he cares whether he hits the notes, and the caring is the bit that lands. The wobble is not the flaw in it. The wobble is the evidence somebody meant it.
One thing to try: Let one thing today be slightly imperfect on purpose, and see whether anybody minds.
In this episode
(0:03) Four years earlier, and the conclusion I could only come to
(2:26) Perfectly imperfect never made sense until now
(5:02) Are you lonesome tonight, and what is in that recording
(7:18) Caring whether you get the words right
(9:49) Never miss a word and you have practised too much
(12:07) His reasons for saying it, and your opinion of it
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
What does Elvis fumbling his words teach you about being good at something?
Recorded on inauguration day in January 2021, and it is really about the difference between caring and compassion.
The heart of it
If you never miss a word, you have practised too much, and it has probably stopped coming from the heart.
Caring is wanting to get it right. Compassion is why you are doing it at all.
The wobble is not a flaw in the performance. It is the evidence that somebody meant it.
I got this from a Malcolm Gladwell episode about the moments when people cannot get their words out, and Elvis is the example.
Take Are You Lonesome Tonight. Every recording you can find of it, the sung parts are flawless. Then there is a spoken bridge in the middle, and he stumbles all over it. Not because he has forgotten it. It was one of his biggest songs.
He stumbles because the words are about somebody leaving, and the ones he found easiest before Priscilla left became the hardest afterwards. In one performance a month before he died, he laughs, and then he cries, and he does not get through it cleanly.
That is the perfect version. Anybody could sing it correctly. Nobody else could sing it like a man who meant every word.
The same is true of speeches. Biden has a stutter and you can watch him hunting for a word. I have one too. Mine started at seventeen when friends took the mickey out of me for not getting words out fast enough and told me to hurry up.
And on the politics, briefly, because it is what set this off. People on all sides of it care deeply about their country, and there is nothing wrong with caring. Where it goes wrong is believing there is one perfect answer, because there is no perfect answer, no perfect country and no perfect person.
A lesser person would have performed it perfectly.
Malcolm Gladwell
One small thing to try
Show up flawed at one thing today.
The speech where you lose your place. The song where you miss the note because something is going on in your chest. The meal that is slightly overdone because your mind was elsewhere. The hug you hold a second too long.
Then look at somebody else's version of that and let it be, rather than tidying it in your head.
Questions people ask
Is this an excuse for being unprepared?
No. Elvis knew the words. Preparation is not the enemy, polishing until nothing of you is left in it is. The difference is whether you still mean it when you get there.
What is the difference between caring and compassion?
Caring is wanting to hit the notes. Compassion is the reason you got on the stage. You need both, and only one of them survives being over rehearsed.
Why an episode about politics on this podcast?
Because it was that morning, and because leadership was the clearest example available of what happens when caring arrives without compassion. It is not really about either man.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
politics · empathy · compassion
Read the transcript
A little over four years ago, I would talk to my friends about
the US election.
And one conclusion I could only come to was there was no way
Donald Trump was going to win the election.
But then, over the next four years, I woke up every morning, or
not every morning, but I woke up many mornings thinking, holy crap,
Donald Trump is president.
Over the four years, I got so obsessed with Donald Trump's Twitter
and the.
I was partly entertained, but every day I was like, wow, I cannot
believe a president would say that.
And here we are today on the day of the inauguration, and Biden
is about to be sworn in.
And I was watching the TV last night.
There seems to have been compassion returns to politics in
America.
And one thing I've learned over the last four years is nobody
is perfect.
Everybody makes mistakes.
Everybody slurs their words.
Everybody says the wrong word.
I'm no exception.
In council meetings, I often say the wrong word to what I really
mean.
And luckily, my colleagues recognize that I believe and they
often correct me, and I'm thankful for them in doing so.
There's two things that I want to bring up in this podcast, and
that's about the difference between caring and compassion.
And the other thing is nobody is perfect.
I'm Stephen Webb, and this is Stillness in the Storms.
And it's a podcast that'll help you to build resilience and
that emotional wisdom to deal with things when they go wrong.
I'm paralyzed.
I've been paralyzed since I was 18, and I think I qualify for
someone that ended up in a life that I wouldn't choose and has
been quite difficult.
I find my inner peace.
I find my happiness.
And I live a pretty damn good life and very blessed life.
And it's a blessed life because it's deeply flawed, which
means it's perfect.
I could never understand the.
When people say perfectly imperfect, I was like, yeah, that
doesn't make sense.
But as I get older, I realize that everything doesn't have to make
sense.
And I was listening to a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell, and
he was talking in the podcast is called Revision History.
He was talking about paraplexis.
And it's when you say the.
The wrong word, when you cannot get your words out and you
fumble on them or and you fall upon them.
He talks about Elvis and Elvis, especially in one particular
song, are you lonesome tonight?
And if you look it up on YouTube, look up every performance
you find of are you lonesome tonight?
In.
In the singing part, it's flawless.
It's perfect.
But in the bridge where it's the talking.
And it is not easy to remember the words in a talking part, but
this was one of his biggest songs.
What's really telling about during the bridge is how he falls
over the words.
And he doesn't fall over the words because he doesn't know the
words.
He falls over the words because emotions get in the way.
And you can tell that because when Malcolm Gladwell looked into
it and he spoke to a few colleagues and other musicians, he
realized that prior to Priscilla leaving him, he was able
to do it a lot easier.
And then when Priscilla left him, he was really difficult to do
it.
The way the song set out is, are you alone tonight makes him the
hero, and then the bridge makes him the flawed person.
And when we.
When we are talking about us being a flawed person, we get a lump
in our throat.
We find things difficult.
We don't want to show up.
We.
We want to run.
And if you're on stage or you're talking to a group of people
and suddenly you're talking about something that you're not quite
sure of, or an emotion is running strong, you.
You will fumble your words.
You'll get them wrong anyway.
Let me play a little bit of the song now for you, and then you'll
understand a little easier.
Is your heart filled with pain?
Shall I come back again?
Tell me, dear, are you lonesome too?
I wonder if you're launching the night.
You know, someone said the world's a stage and each of us play
a part they had me playing in plus tags.
You read your line so cleverly.
You never missed.
Thank you.
They came act too.
You forgot the word.
You seem to change, you fool.
You acted strange and why I've never why I ever did it.
Honey, who am I talking to?
You lied when you said you love me.
You.
I had no cause to doubt you.
But I really go on hearing your lies and you go on living without
you.
Now the stage is bare and I'm standing there without any hair.
I know.
And you won't come back to me Is your heart.
So there it is, the.
The amazing performer, Elvis Presley.
And I wonder how many people realize that, why it was so difficult
for him to get those words out.
But that's what makes those performances so perfect.
And when it comes down to performing that song, many people
would perform it perfectly, but no one could perform it, which,
ironically, isn't perfect because Elvis performed it perfectly,
which was wrong every single time.
He performed it perfectly because the words meant something
and they were deep and meaningful.
And that's the difference between caring.
You care whether you get the word right.
When you're singing a song.
You care whether you hit the notes right.
Compassion is not about hitting the notes right.
Compassion is about the feeling behind the notes, the reason
you're there, the why behind the words and the songs and the feelings.
And over the last four years in America and in this country, with
the rise of nationalism more and in America with the patriots
and all of these people deeply care.
They deeply care about their country, and they want their country
to be right, and they want their country to fit a certain image
in their minds.
And I cannot sit here and say they're wrong, because they're not
wrong.
There's nothing wrong with caring.
You know, we want everybody to care, but when we move on from that
caring, we realize caring isn't about one perfect solution.
Because there isn't one perfect solution.
There isn't a perfect life.
There isn't a perfect human.
There isn't a perfectly sung song.
The perfectly sung song is the flawed one, the speech that the person
fumbles over their words and has a tear in their eye and has compassion.
That's the perfect one.
That's what it means to be perfectly imperfect.
And this last four years have really shown the difference between
caring and compassion.
And last night, Biden, someone that suffers from a stutter, which
I do as well.
My stutter started when I was about 17 years old when a few friends
would take the mick out of me when I couldn't get my words out
properly and they would tell me to hurry up, and I developed a
stutter.
At that point, I don't have it so much anymore because I tend to.
It's only when I get really nervous.
But Biden has a stutter, and you can see sometimes in his mind,
he's trying to get the word out, and he doesn't always get the
word.
And he misses words, and so does Trump.
Trump doesn't so much miss words.
He pronounces the words wrong because he's one step ahead.
And I'm not knocking Trump for that.
I do the same thing, and I'm not knocking Biden for missing words
because I do the same thing, and everybody does.
I don't know anybody that doesn't.
And if you never miss a word, you've practiced too much.
And it's not necessarily coming from the heart.
You're trying to emulate something else.
I think we need to look at each other and we need to see things
as and recognize that each other is perfect, just the way we
are with our flaws.
The missing words, the incomplete sentences, the bum notes,
the hair out of place, the slightly twisted top, you know, the
belly, whatever.
You want to look at people and just accept them for the deeply,
beautifully flawed, perfect person they are.
And that goes for the patriots that care deeply about what they
see as a perfect country or can be perfect.
Opposite side.
See as a deeply caring, compassionate country that sees the
imperfections and says, we're okay with that, but we can ease each
other's pain.
And look at Biden last night.
It wasn't a different America, but it was that the face was different
of America.
400,000 people have died in Covid.
We've got nearly 100,000 in this country.
Way more people than had to die if we ended up doing things in
a different way.
I'm going to talk about that on this podcast, but all I'm going
to say is it's really seeing for the first time compassion in
a leader.
And when you see compassion leader, you see someone that will
make mistakes, that will falter, but they'll pause, and the
decisions they make will be based on wisdom and compassion.
Don't always look at a person's words, a person's mannering
mannerisms and the song they're singing.
Look at what's deeply behind them, the caring behind them.
I'm not talking about a conspiracy theory bollocks like that
behind them, like, oh, he said that as a slip.
And he had many reasons for saying that.
No, that's your opinion of it.
Look up the song by Elvis and you'll see perfectly what I'm talking
about.
And he, he fumbles it and he, he, he goes, blah, blah, blah.
And he laughs and he thinks and he cries.
And there was a performance in June 1977, just a month before his
passing, where he stood there on stage and the whole world's stage
and we all playing our part.
That's a terrible impression.
I'm sorry for any Elvis fans out there.
I'm a huge Elvis fan.
My daughter is as well.
But he just goes on and goes, ever the whole world's a stage and
we're all playing and he laughs and he cries.
That's the perfect performance.
If you want to do a perfect performance as a human, do it through
compassion.
Do it through fumbling your words.
Do it through.
You know, I don't know.
Just.
Yeah, I'm fumbling on my words right now.
Just be you and care.
Care deeply.
And that's the kind of leadership that we need right now.
And that's the kind of leadership that I seen in America
last night, and I'd so damn welcome that back.
If compassion isn't in our leaders, it's not going to be in
the people.
And if a person does a speech or a song perfectly, Michael Malcolm
Glabel ended that podcast with the most exquisite, beautiful line
that I could never emulate.
And he said, talking about.
And I'll put a link to the podcast below because you have to
listen to it.
And there's so much more to the podcast than what I'm even brushing
over.
It's probably the best podcast I've ever listened to, and it's had
the deep impact on my life, and I think it'll have a deeper impact
on my life and it'll resonate for a long time to come.
But he said right at the end about another singer, and she was
singing about her mum and she wrote the song and she found it really
difficult to get the words out.
And in the end she managed to get herself through it.
He said at the end, and I just love this line.
A lesser person would have performed it perfectly.
You are a better person for being who you are.
Showing up with a flawed, perfect heart, with that flawed speech
where you mumble your words, that flawed song where you don't
hit the high note because perhaps something's going on inside
of your heart.
You know, that flawed meal that's slightly overdone because
you had your mind on something else, that flawed hug that you just
need to hug that little bit more because you're frightened to
letting go be flawed, because that's the only genuine people I
know, the ones that know they're deeply flawed and show up.
Anyway, I just want to say I love you guys and thank you for being
part of this podcast.
And I'm trying to get a new episode out every week.
If you could leave a review and you could share it and subscribe,
that would be absolutely awesome.
And take care.
And I'm looking forward to the inauguration this afternoon.
Bringing the compassion back where the cake where the.
That's.
I'm going to leave that in because that's so beautiful.
Bringing the compassion back when the caring was not enough.
