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Nicholas says there are two ways you might feel.

The first thing you may feel is a sense of grief — you are losing something that was part of your identity. You have been the go-to person for these types of projects and now you’ll need to give that up. That is hard. It’s normal to feel a loss at this point, and that feeling can make it hard to hand off that task. It feels like giving away a part of yourself to someone else, and you won’t be the one to have the fun implementing it or get the credit when it succeeds.

I get that. I have to mentally put on different shoes to feel it anymore though, as at this point in my career I simply cannot wait to give up tasks. Please, for the love of god, take my tasks. You can have the fun and the credit, I promise.

And then:

A second common resistance is related to the performance of the person you’ve delegated to: will they complete the task in time? Will they complete it with the same commitment to quality that you have? What if they get stuck and need to ask for help?

This one will be hard forever because it’s likely after delegation the buck still stops with you. If they don’t do things in time, you’ll have to step in. If they don’t do things well, you’ll have to step in. If they need help, you’ll be doing the helping. All of that is fine and the hope is things improve over time. But they don’t always improve over time, so a delegation attempt might end up a total waste of time and resources. Happens.

Do you know what the big hesitancy for me considering my first attempts at delegation? It was entirely money. Every dollar you spend delegating is a dollar you no longer have. If you give a kid forty bucks to mow your lawn, that’s easy. But even part-time employees aren’t forty bucks, they likely represent some major cash outlay that doesn’t just feel like a hell of a risk — it is a hell of a risk.

No pain, no gain.

Jane Fonda VHS tapes

Susan unpacks the seven dimensions of music and how they show up along a varying spectrum in every song. She explains how everyone has an individualized taste for the configuration of these dimensions, and that how closely a particular song aligns with this pattern of sweet spots accounts for whether you like it or not.

Part of me is like awwww bummer my super hip brain what with all its complex and esoteric tastes and be distilled into a seven-spectrum graph?? But there is all sorts of nuance to this. This is just an interesting way to think about it all and perhaps deliver a bit of insight into who we are.

I do have a fear of my musical tastes atrophying to the point that I only like the old stuff and this new stuff is just insolent noise. It’s already happened to some degree, but fortunately, I’m hanging on by a thread discovering a handful of new-to-me artists each year still that do it for me and I get quite into.

My favorite of all this was Susan’s first spectrum that she talked about on the show, and one that is the least possible to apply science to: authenticity. That is, how authentic the sound of the music sounds to you. Unlike some of the other spectrums, this isn’t a two-sided thing where some people like authentic music and others like inauthentic music. Everybody likes authentic music. The weird thing is that what sounds authentic to me might not sound that way to you and vice versa. That’s what has stuck in my brain. Like I can imagine some real modern country lover’s brain going man that guy just rhymed trucks with fucks, that’s good down home authentic stuff where my brain goes that’s just silly trite manipulative inauthentic garbage. And that same fella thinking did that cityfella just sing “I’ve come to test the timbre of my heart”? because he’s just singing fake inauthentic jibberish that I bet he doesn’t even understand and me going now that’s beauty in music — that’s authentically tapping into your emotions and turning it into melody.