Blissful ignorance

When I was 17, I applied to be the stadium organist for the Cleveland Indians.

I was a junior in high school at the time, trying to teach myself piano. I never took a lesson. I went about it the way I learn most things: throw myself into the deep end and see if I can figure it out on the way down. So when the Cleveland baseball team (the Indians back then, the Guardians now) posted an opening for a stadium organist, I was convinced there was no better way to get serious about piano than to play it for a ballpark full of people.

A kid with no musical training beyond Googling scales and fumbling through them on a guitar is, let’s say, an unlikely hire for a Major League club. But at the time, I truly believed I was a candidate worth looking at. And maybe I was, I don’t know. I had the ambition and drive to do anything, which might have been more than some of the other applicants could say. Probably still unwise to hand the organ to a kid whose entire music education came from search results.

It was just an online application. I wish I could see what I actually wrote in it, because my previous job experience amounted to washing dishes at the Town Tavern, the local spot Sunday churchgoers would hit up for brunch. I’d come home smelling like dirty dishwater. That was the resume.

What I got back was complete silence. Never heard a word. I like to imagine someone in the front office opening my application, chuckling gleefully, and hooking it into the garbage bin.

I’m 38 now, and looking back at that kid, there’s something in the story I don’t want to let go of. Call it blissful ignorance: believing fully that I can do the thing, even when I’m nowhere near capable of it yet. Believing I’m the candidate you want. Believing I can do anything.

I may be a fool for some of that. Obviously I can’t do everything. But my friend Nick reminds me of something whenever I forget it: everything here on Earth was made by people no smarter than we are. No smarter than I am.

That mindset has walked me into a bunch of experiences I had no business having. Winning video contests. Getting the job at Mux. Placing 13th out of roughly 700 players in an international pinball tournament, a game I knew almost nothing about, and walking away with $700 for it. Buying a 1973 Honda CB350 that didn’t run and wrenching on it until it did, having never worked on a motorcycle in my life. And right now my band Homedays is recording an album. We’re finally making it happen. In every case, the belief showed up long before the ability did.

It can get you in trouble, too. The same force convinced me I could build a crypto bot that traded smarter than everybody else’s, and it lost $800 to a misplaced decimal point. (To be fair, it would have been a profitable trade if I hadn’t messed up the decimal.)

Blissful ignorance is still worth protecting. Even if you’re not the right person for the thing at the time, believing you are does more for who you become. It guards your motivation and your drive, and eventually it leads you to outcomes you never would have thought possible.

I was back at that ballpark recently with my kids. My daughter spent the game convinced she was going to end up on the Jumbotron, so she danced her head off between innings, a stadium full of people around her. I didn’t think she had much of a chance. The joke was on me. They showed her on that screen twice, in two different innings. Somebody in this family finally made it up there.

Still to this day, I remain blissfully ignorant.