“Some Compliments are Somebody Else’s Urgency Wearing a Smile”

I’ve had this throughout my life as a musician.

Someone comes up after a performance and says:

“Randolph, you’re amazing.”

And then almost immediately:

“Why aren’t you more famous?”

“Why aren’t you on television?”

“You should be much further than this by now.”

And it’s meant as a compliment.

That’s the strange thing.

They’re not trying to put you down. They’re actually trying to say something lovely. They’ve experienced something in you and they’re basically saying, I think more people should know about this.

But I remember sometimes walking away from those conversations and suddenly thinking:

Yeah... why am I not further?

Why don’t more people know me?

Why haven’t I had that success yet?

What am I doing wrong?

I was talking about this recently with my dear friend and she said something really simple:

“That’s somebody else’s urgency.”

And that stopped me.

Because, yeah, that’s exactly what it was.

Somebody else’s idea of where I should be.

Somebody else’s idea of what success should look like.

Somebody else’s timetable.

And I had taken it into myself as though it belonged to me.

I think we do this all the time.

“You should have bought a house by now.”

“You should be earning more.”

“You should have had children.”

“You should be leading that department.”

“You’re too talented to still be doing that.”

There can be love inside those statements.

There can be admiration.

But as I have sensed time and time again sometimes there is also a hidden instruction:

You should be somewhere other than where you are.

And I think that is where we have to become a little more awake.

Because the world is constantly giving us information.

People have opinions about us.

People see things in us and to me all of that is information.

However information is not automatically instruction.

That distinction has become really important to have I naviagate through my own choices

Someone else seeing possibility in you doesn’t mean you immediately have to reorganise your life around their version of that possibility.

And this isn’t about having no ambition.

I have ambition.

I want the work I’m creating now to travel much further.

I want to reach people so i can serve them to the best of my ability

I want to create things I haven’t created before

But there’s a difference between expansion that comes from something genuinely alive in you, and suddenly running because somebody else shouted:

“You should be over there by now.”

For a long time, success in music had a very particular shape.

You get the record deal.

You get the hit.

You get on television.

More people know your name.

And if those things haven’t happened, then somehow you’re still on your way to success rather than already participating in a life that has value.

But when I look back, so much of what has mattered in my own journey didn’t happen because I wrote a number-one record.

It happened because I loved music.

I started playing percussion.

Then I started singing while I was playing.

Somebody heard me and said, “You’ve got a voice.”

Then I started singing more.

Writing.

Improvising.

Performing.

Teaching.

Composing.

Working with people all over the world.

my life seem to be percolating towards new horizons .

My life didn’t follow the clean line that somebody else might have drawn for it.

But that doesn’t make it wrong.

And this is where I think comparison can quietly get us.

Research around social comparison has shown for decades that what we see around us can influence how we evaluate our own position and ability. We don’t need to become obsessed with the science of it to recognise the ordinary experience: you can feel completely fine with your life, look at somebody else’s trajectory, and five minutes later somehow decide you’re behind.

Nothing changed.

Only the measurement did.

So maybe when somebody says:

“You should be further by now,”

the first question isn’t:

Why aren’t I there?

Maybe it is:

Did I actually choose there?

That question has become important for me.

Because what if you’ve already chosen something else?

Sometimes all we need is a little space.

A moment before we turn somebody else’s observation into a new problem to solve.

A moment to ask:

Is this actually my urgency?

Is this where I want to go?

Or have I just borrowed somebody else’s timetable?

The world will keep having opinions.

Some of them will be useful.

Some of them might even wake something up in us.

But we still get to decide what becomes instruction.

And maybe part of living inside your voice is simply learning to hear yourself before the world answers for you.