John Legend on the creative process and "mumbling" his way to a hit (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] John Legend: You're really starting a small business when you are trying to launch a career as a successful artist.

[00:00:11] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us Tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is musician, John Legend. He's won 12 Grammy Awards, an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony, making him the first black man and second youngest person ever to attain coveted ego status. In his spare time, John is the senior coach on the hit Show of The Voice and he campaigns against Injustice, and he recently released his first Children's album.

My Favorite Dream.

[00:00:52] John Legend: I think kids want to feel that safety, and I think as parents, that's part of what we want to give them. We also wanna give them challenge and and enable them to take risks and allow them to take risks and all of that. But I think doing it from a place of safety and knowing that you've got people that have your back, I think is a good combination.

John didn't start his career as a musician.

[00:01:16] Adam Grant: He worked first as a management consultant. I was excited to hear his take on career pivots as well as to understand his creative process, which is

[00:01:24] John Legend: fascinating. I'll mumble nonsense Melo, so they have very little lyrical content, so ordinary people. I would just say,

[00:01:43] Adam Grant: John Legend, welcome to rethinking. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I wanted to start with something that I just learned from you last week, which is I had no idea that you struggled singing and playing music at the same time.

[00:01:58] John Legend: I just

[00:01:58] Adam Grant: assumed you were a natural. Tell me about that. I.

[00:02:00] John Legend: Well, I mean, it's all relative, but I'm much better at it now than I used to be, and I remember there being times when I was younger, particularly when I was like a teenager, if there was an opportunity to not play for myself.

When I sang, I knew that I would sing better if I didn't play piano for myself, but now I've gotten to the point where I feel just as comfortable singing while playing the piano or without. How long did it take you to get there? I had started playing the piano when I was four and started singing in public probably when I was about five or six.

So I wasn't really comfortable doing both together in a way that I was really confident until I was probably 15 or 16. So 12 years, around that time you wrote a McDonald's essay? Yeah. Tell me about that. So the essay competition was for Black History Month and title of the, uh, competition was Future Black History Makers of Tomorrow.

And the essay prompt was how do you plan to make Black History? And I'd said that I plan to make black history by becoming a successful recording artists and using that fame and success to, uh, help my community to. Stand up for justice and equality and improving the lives of people in my community. I wrote that when I was 15, and I've been living that aspiration ever since.

Are you kidding me? It's crazy. Who has that clarity of vision at 15 years old? Uh, I don't know. I did, I had forgotten that I wrote that though. My dad reminded me probably like 10 years in my, into my career. He's like, you remember that essay you wrote for McDonald's when you were 15? And I was like, eh, sorta.

And he showed it to me and I was pretty amazed at. Where my mind was at that point in my life and how much my life now tracks with what I wanted back then for myself.

[00:03:58] Adam Grant: I often tell our our students at Penn not to pursue fame, that it's just a bottomless pit of seeking validation. Why

[00:04:06] John Legend: did it work for you?

You have to look at fame as a byproduct of you doing what you really love to do really well. If you're in the business that I'm in, if you're doing it well, you will be famous. The focus should be on doing that really well, rather than on the fame that that comes with it.

[00:04:23] Adam Grant: I, I've heard people say over and over again that if you wanna pursue a creative career or be any kind of entrepreneur, you have to go all in.

Mm-Hmm. But you didn't, you worked as a, B, CG consultant and did music as a side gig, like a hobby.

[00:04:37] John Legend: Why? I needed a day job. I was neck deep in student loans, and, uh, I didn't have any family money to depend on, so I had to take care of myself, pay my own bills, and also really wanted to make music for a living.

But I guess I was just being practical about the need for a backup plan. So I, I got a good education. I went to Penn. I. Got a good kind of classic first job after Penn as a management consultant working at Boston Consulting Group for three years, and I didn't give up on music ever, so I worked in Boston for one year at BCG Boston, but then I asked them to transfer me to New York.

And once I got to New York. I really was closer to the music industry and was making a lot of moves to connect with people who were based there. I met my manager there, my lawyer there. I met Kanye West. There a lot of people that were really instrumental in the early part of my career. I met, once I moved to New York.

I didn't sleep a lot during this time. It really took a lot of my energy and my effort and my own. Personal money and whatever I needed to do to make it happen, but I had to do it that way. There's

[00:05:52] Adam Grant: a great study of entrepreneurs showing that the ones who keep their day jobs and then start their business as a side hustle are 33% less likely to see their startups fail.

[00:06:01] John Legend: Ah, so

[00:06:02] Adam Grant: this, this is actually a good strategy. You did a version of that. What, what do you make of that? What do

[00:06:07] John Legend: you think is the, the mechanism there? It might be kind of a self-selecting group in a, in a, in a sense that affects the sample. The people that are able to do both at the same time are probably just better at making things happen, and so they end up winning at entrepreneurship too.

[00:06:25] Adam Grant: I've often wondered if another piece of it is when you go all in, you're sort of locked in. Yeah. And you have to make the first idea work. Whereas when you're hedging your bets, you can run a bunch of experiments and you have the flexibility to pivot if the first approach doesn't work.

[00:06:39] John Legend: Yeah, that's true

[00:06:40] Adam Grant: too.

That makes sense. I. John, I, I have to ask, did you learn anything as a management consultant that's been relevant to your

[00:06:46] John Legend: music and creative life? I did learn my way around, you know, a financial statement or these, this or that terminology, but I don't think that was as important as kind of understanding.

How to get things done and be effective as someone who's just trying to get things done correctly and successfully and, and working with really smart people. It was a good place for me to be coming out of college. It was almost like an extra little finishing school for how to work my way around the world, you know?

[00:07:18] Adam Grant: I love it. Management consulting is finishing school for musicians who knew for, for people who wanna get things

[00:07:25] John Legend: done. How did you know when it was? Time to leave and go all in on music. In consulting, they typically only want you to be an associate for the first two or three years out of your bachelor's degree, and then they expect you to go E to business school or some other professional school and then possibly come back.

And so I was coming to the end of three years there and also at the same time. I was really starting to make some headway in my career. I had started working with Kanye West. I had started to just get more traction in the industry, and I had gotten as far as I could go, working a day job, and then trying to do music on the side.

I. And I felt like this was finally the time to really make music full time. But I still had a part-time job. One of my old clients, it was a pro bono client, uh, that we worked with called Management Leadership for Tomorrow, diversifying the ranks of leadership and business and nonprofit through helping more black and brown people go to business school and, and have access to mentors and, and just really.

Get on the track to leadership and being powerful executives. They were one of my, uh, clients, uh, near the end of my tenure at BCG and asked me to come and help them implement some of the stuff we worked on with them. And so I worked there part-time. I. And was a full-time musician as my kind of transitional occupation, uh, as I was getting close to getting a record deal and starting to go on the road with Kanye and, and then eventually I put out my own album.

[00:09:00] Adam Grant: So you have never been content to just be doing one thing?

[00:09:03] John Legend: Uh, no. I just want to be stimulated, motivated, and, and, and surround myself with interesting people that are fun and interesting to work with.

[00:09:14] Adam Grant: Mission accomplished. So let, let's talk a little bit about your creative process. Um, so you're what, five years outta college and you release your first album Wins multiple Grammys.

Your best new artist? I think the song we all remember best from that album is Ordinary People. Yeah. Which is that 20 years now?

[00:09:31] John Legend: Yeah. The album came out in December of 2004 and the single ordinary people came out right around that same time. And, you know, when I wrote it, I was in. Trying to write a song for me.

I was actually trying to write a song for the Black Eyed Peas. I was assigned to the same management company they were, and we worked together a bit, will I Am and I, we worked together quite a lot and one day he was like, can you come through to the studio and, and work on writing a few songs with me for the Black Eyed Peas?

So he just played a bunch of beats and I would sing whatever came to my head. And I started kind of mumbling the melodies that became ordinary people, and I wrote the chorus for ordinary people that night, and it started to kind of. Stay with me. And I was like, you know what? I want to keep this one for myself and you can keep all the other ideas we wrote together.

Uh, but I wanna keep ordinary people for myself. So I ended up keeping it and writing, uh, a ballad, um, to the chorus that I had started with the Black Eyed Peas. And it was supposed to be more of like a hip hop beat and a hip hop chorus, but I kind of stripped it down and made it a ballad and, and made the song that everyone's heard.

[00:10:45] Adam Grant: For somebody like you, it's often the case that creativity is easier to do than it is to describe, but to, to the extent possible. Can you unpack how you dreamed up either, you know, melody or lyrics?

[00:10:57] John Legend: How did that song come to be? Yeah, so I do an entire masterclass where I really get in depth about my songwriting process, but.

The basics of it are that I usually come up with more melody and music first, so I'll mumble nonsense melodies so they have very little lyrical content. So ordinary people, I would just say we,

and I'll try to write, I'll try to write melodies that sound good and feel good, and rhythmically feel right. Then I'll try to kind of shoehorn lyrics into that melodic structure that I've built. And so that's how I write most songs. So I mumble a bunch of things in a melody, maybe to a beat or to a piano riff or a guitar riff, and then eventually I kind of lead myself into writing a lyric from the mumbled nonsense that I've sung already.

[00:11:56] Adam Grant: How quickly does it go from the mumble to the, the actual

[00:12:00] John Legend: song? Sometimes it's pretty quick. I usually write most of the song in three to four hours. Wow.

[00:12:07] Adam Grant: So it, it sounds like then the, the mumbled melody creation is, is kind of pure improv.

[00:12:13] John Legend: Yeah, improv. And, and the key with lyrics for me is that they combine the specific and the universal.

So if you think about great songs, I think so many of them have. Kind of specificity within the artist's life and their story, and they feel like they're coming from a unique place, but they're also universal in the sense that everyone else can relate to them. And so I really feel like great lyrics are able to do that.

And I also think great lyrics should sing well. So that's why I really start with the melody first, because if the nonsense sings well, then if I'm able to fit a lyric to that nonsense and make it sing well. Still then usually it, it works in the song and then you know, you care about rhyme, you care about just.

Quality. You don't want it to be cheesy or dumb or, or feel cheap and unearned as a lyric. I think part of having the right standards for yourself is, is having a good sense of the history of music and listening to great artists and being influenced by great artists, and then setting a bar for yourself where you're trying to be in that same league of great artistry.

[00:13:28] Adam Grant: So let, let's talk about your new album. Yes. You, you got to, to do this a little differently this time. Uh, tell me the origin story.

[00:13:36] John Legend: So the new album is called My Favorite Dream, and it's an album that's meant for children and their families. And it started with me just for fun, covering one of the songs on a Fisher-Price Kick and Play Piano, Matt, that my daughter Estee was playing with.

And Chrissy was like, you should learn this song. So you can sing this to Estee and. She loved the song Estee did and she loved the toy. She still does, and she was playing with it. And I started listening to the song and learning the chords on my piano at home and looked up the lyrics and everything, and, and I like learned to cover it and sat at the piano and, and did a version of it.

And we recorded it on video and. Chrissy posted it to her Instagram and then I posted it to mine. And Chrissy's caption was just, if you know, you know, for all the parents out there that, uh, are quite familiar with this Fisher-Price toy and the music that goes with it. And so we posted that. And all the parents were like, oh my God, this is so cool.

You did this song, why don't you cover more songs like this? And, and then Fisher-Price reached out to me and we're like, Hey, let's do something together. And so. One version of that could have been, I just covered a few of those, uh, Fisher-Price songs and, uh, we found a, a cool way with them to release them.

But, um, the songwriter in me was like, um, you know what? I just wanna write a bunch of. Songs and create a whole brand new album. And so I ended up sitting at our piano at home and writing nine original songs for this album. So they comprised the bulk of the body of the album. And then I did, uh, three bonus, uh, Fisher-Price tracks and, and then also covered two classic songs, three Little Birds by Bob Marley and The Whalers.

And You Are My Sunshine. It was really fun to write the songs. I'd never written an entire album by myself. So this was the first time doing that aside from the covers. And then I also never had worked with Suson Stevens before, and I've been a fan of him as an artist and as a musician and arranger and producer for a long time.

And I just was inspired to reach out to him. I didn't even know him personally, but I was like. If I could imagine anyone producing this album and the songs that I've written, it would be Sufi Stevens, and he would make it dreamy and whimsical and beautiful and, and he has just this wonderful imagination and he's able to tap into that and make music sound so interesting and stimulating.

I was like. Can we find Super Stevens? And I didn't know him at all. He's not easy to find, right? Yeah. He lives in the Catskills and he's not super public in his life at all and doesn't do a lot of interviews. And it turned out my, uh, manager is friends with his manager. And she was able to reach out and just a range, a phone call to see if, you know, it's like dating speed dating to see if this could work out.

I was just like, I'm gonna send you all of these original songs I've written. I've just recorded really rough versions on my piano at home, but you'll get the gist for the songs. He said yes, which I was so happy 'cause I didn't have like a plan B. He was my plan. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Just this

[00:17:05] Adam Grant: image of you covering Fisher-Price cracks me up,

[00:17:09] John Legend: Uhhuh.

It's hilarious.

[00:17:09] Adam Grant: Yeah. And it's interesting to me that we all have soundtracks in our heads. Mm-Hmm. And. Some of the most frequent songs in my head are like the lullabies we played for our kids when they were little. Yeah. Uh, I think it's, it's a really formative time, not just for kids, but for parents too.

And I'm curious about how you thought about the message with that dual audience.

[00:17:33] John Legend: I was intentional about making sure the lyrics worked for young kids, and I also wanted it musically. To be something that parents would love and enjoy to listen to. And it's interesting because some lyrics that are meant for kids still really work for parents too.

Um, ion one of the things he said recently in an interview with the uh, LA Times about the album was that, you know, he had gone through some tragedy in his personal life. Recently, and some of the songs deal with, you know, how you respond to challenge and how you respond to sadness and, and, and things that aren't going your way.

And, and talk about safety and comfort and, and he found emotional solace. And emotional wisdom in the songs, even though they were written for kids going through his own recovery from the challenges and the trauma and the grief that he had experienced over the past year or so, that made me feel good knowing that him working on this album was in some ways therapeutic and it made me believe that it's possible for me to write songs that really work for kids, but also really work for adults at the same time.

[00:18:45] Adam Grant: What? What would you say is the major piece of wisdom that you wanted to convey as you put all these songs together along the themes of peace and safety?

[00:18:54] John Legend: Yeah, it was a lot about safety, about comfort, about imagination and exploration, and really about love and, and what it means to have like a strong bond of love with your family, with your friends, with the people in your tribe.

Just having that sense of connection with each other that will take care of each other. We'll be there for each other during hard times.

[00:19:18] Adam Grant: One of, one of my favorite songs on the album is when I Feel Sad.

[00:19:22] John Legend: Yeah.

[00:19:22] Adam Grant: I really liked the way you both conveyed tools for managing that emotion, but also didn't invalidate it.

[00:19:30] John Legend: Yeah. I talk about trying to focus your mind on the things that you love and the people you love, and. Trying to recall the times when you've been happiest and what made you happy and I don't know, I'm not a psychologist, but I felt like those are kinds of things that helped me when I feel sad, and hopefully it'll help kids too.

[00:19:52] Adam Grant: I am a psychologist so I can, I can tell you it resonated. For me, it reminded me actually a lot of conversations we have with our kids around saying, Hey, like, you're feeling sad, what does that feel like?

[00:20:04] John Legend: Yeah.

[00:20:04] Adam Grant: And is that a feeling you wanna sit with or is that a feeling you wanna change?

[00:20:09] John Legend: Yeah.

[00:20:09] Adam Grant: And then, you know, it's sort of up to them to figure out then how they wanna proceed.

[00:20:13] John Legend: Yeah. And I think it focuses also what we're grateful for and, and having a sense of gratitude for the things we do love about our lives. And hopefully that is a way of, uh. Enhancing our moods.

[00:20:27] Adam Grant: So where are your kids with the album now? Are they sick of it? Are they loving it?

[00:20:31] John Legend: They've heard it just enough, but I don't think they're sick of it yet, but they definitely got to test it out before the general public did, but we haven't run it into the ground yet.

Did it tee up any parenting conversations? I think a lot of it is really consistent with the kinds of things we talk about all the time, and so I. In that sense, it feels more like reflective of our parenting than like prescriptive for future parenting. What is your favorite parenting lesson you've learned?

Oh, wow. Well, we're learning a lot now. Well, recently we, uh, found out my son has type one diabetes, and so a lot of our parenting energy. And learning has gone around trying to be the most effective parents with this new diagnosis and all the different protocols it requires. So that's definitely been a challenge for us and uh, challenge for Miles.

But we are learning together and it's so interesting thinking about health challenges and also like what it means for six year olds to want to control their own body and, you know. Being different from other kids at school for one reason or another. All those things I think are real challenges, but we're learning and you know, we've been talking with the psychologist at the hospital and just learning together how to be as helpful and effective as parents while we're going through this new challenge.

[00:21:57] Adam Grant: One of the things that I've found really powerful from one of my favorite parenting experts, Julie Lithco Hams mm-hmm, is she often says that as parents we have to normalize struggle, and I got to watch you and Chrissy do that. When Miles came home and you said, what was hard for you today, I.

[00:22:13] John Legend: Yeah,

[00:22:14] Adam Grant: I think so many parents in your position just would want to, they'd wanna sort of find the silver lining immediately, right?

Or sort of almost paper over. Yeah. The difficulty. Um, how, how did you get to that place where you were able to just talk about it?

[00:22:28] John Legend: Yeah. I think we have to allow ourself to talk about it, and especially let him talk about it because he wants to feel seen and heard. And he wants to feel like he has some agency in whatever he is doing.

And so talking with him about it, allowing him to vent about it and, and not paper over it, I think is important. And it's interesting for me because I'm naturally optimistic and my default is to always kind of focus on the solution. And here's how we're gonna fix this, here's how we're gonna get through this.

But I think. We have to allow ourselves to like, commiserate a little bit about how tough it is and, and how challenging it is and hear him when he's, you know, feeling that challenge and feeling upset about it and hear him and no, just. You know, motor ahead straight to the solution, but allow him to voice his concerns.

[00:23:25] Adam Grant: That, that definitely strikes a chord. Personally, as a fellow irrepressible, optimist, sometimes I have to remind myself there, there are certain problems that aren't made to be fixed. They're just meant to be carried.

[00:23:39] John Legend: I think as, uh, good partners, we have to be that way too, because sometimes Chrissy wants me to like.

Empathize with her and not just try to solve it, you know?

[00:23:50] Adam Grant: Oh, you're, you're reminding me so much of a, a mentor Remind Rick Price, who said, uh, in all his years as a psychologist, first clinical, and then organizational, the most important thing he learned was his wife saying, sympathy not solutions. Mm-Hmm, exactly.

You don't have to

[00:24:06] John Legend: solve this. I just want to feel seen. Yes. And I, I definitely feel like I need to practice that with Chrissy and I'm better at it than I used to be, but, um, my brain like. I always want to like, well, how do we fix it?

[00:24:18] Adam Grant: On the broader parenting front, you've been a very passionate, outspoken advocate for paid family leave, and I'd love to hear both your general perspective on that, but also has that evolved at all in light of the latest challenge.

[00:24:32] John Legend: We talk a lot about reproductive rights. We talk a lot about who's pro-life and who's pro-choice. But um, I think. All of us should be of the mind that. For people who want to have kids and want to have families, we should make the regulatory regime as friendly to that as possible. And for me, that includes making sure there's family leave, maternal leave, paternal leave, all of that.

I really think the child tax credit was really helpful when it was implemented, a recovery bill, and I feel like that should be made permanent. There should be much more. Of a safety net and assistance for people who are trying to raise kids. It's really expensive to raise kids and if we want to encourage people to start families and and do so in a way that isn't breaking them financially, we have to make sure we provide the kind of assistance that people need to make it happen.

I think. Childcare is really expensive and early education is really difficult for a lot of people, and these are all policies. I feel like the government should have a role in making more accessible and and affordable for families.

[00:25:54] Adam Grant: Seems like a no brainer to me.

All right, John, you ready for a lightning round? Yeah, let's do it. What is the worst career advice you've ever gotten?

[00:26:06] John Legend: Well, I think it's always bad advice when you are only trying to get a bigger piece of the pie without growing the pie. You know, sometimes if you're fighting over, like percents here and percents there, but not thinking about the size of the overall pie, I think.

That can be really kind of a nearsighted strategy whenever you're getting advice to be kind of in the weeds about these tiny percentages here and there, rather than on growing the overall thing. That's bad advice.

[00:26:44] Adam Grant: It's almost like you took our negotiation class when you're, what about a, a favorite piece of advice that you've received?

[00:26:52] John Legend: One piece of advice I was given earlier in my career was. Don't give them choices that you don't really want. Don't give them like your first, second, and third choice. Just give them only the choices that you really love, because if they go with your third choice, you're not gonna really be happy.

[00:27:08] Adam Grant: There's some research on this by Jeff Leonard Deli and colleagues where they show that in a negotiation, if you put out multiple offers that are equally desirable to you, mm-hmm.

But. May not necessarily be equally attractive to the other person. They feel like you're getting choice, but all the choices are are, yeah. Like you're, you've already cleared your bar of, of happiness. Exactly. What is an unpopular opinion? You hold,

[00:27:30] John Legend: I'm scared to say my unpopular opinions. I don't know.

Here's, here's one. Here's one. Oh, go ahead. This is my little pet peeve that I talk about with Chrissy. It annoys me that the bear gets to win comedy Emmys, because I don't think of it as a comedy. I think it's a great show, but also I feel like it should compete in the drama field with other dramas.

[00:27:55] Adam Grant: I thought so too.

What's a prediction you have for the future of creativity?

[00:28:01] John Legend: Oh, I mean, obviously it is gonna involve ai. I really believe that AI can be. Collaborator with us on things like songwriting, script writing, all kinds of writing. It can kind of get you going, but you still have to be really good at setting the standards for yourself about what kind of creative output you want and use it as a tool, but don't allow it to kind of take over your creativity 'cause it won't actually succeed in that way.

[00:28:36] Adam Grant: I dunno if you remember this, but when you gave the pen commencement speech in 2014, in the middle of it, my phone started blowing up and I'm like, what's going on? And I got a bunch of messages saying, John Legend just gave you a shout out in his talk. It was, uh, what was the quote I used? I forget. You were making a plug for generosity.

Yeah.

[00:28:57] John Legend: What? It's true. You were right as, as usual, you were right.

[00:29:01] Adam Grant: I think in the long run it's better to be a giver than a taker, and I think that both from a success and a happiness and meaning perspective. But what, why did that message resonate with you?

[00:29:11] John Legend: I feel like, especially when you're speaking at an elite university where all these people are going to go off and do big things in the world, they're gonna be leaders and they're probably gonna make a decent amount of money.

Um, you want them to always be thinking about how they can contribute to the world and make the world better and stronger and safer and more connected and more loving and. The fact that there's proof that giving is is better for everybody, including the giver. I think that's a great message to share with young people who are gonna go out and, and be leaders.

[00:29:46] Adam Grant: I'm just gonna have you write all of my lead lines from now on. You started high school at a ridiculously young age and and college when most people are learning to drive, how did those early starts in being such a precocious kid affect you?

[00:30:01] John Legend: It was tough. Sometimes people look at it now like, you know what a big accomplishment.

You graduated two years early, which is fine, but I, I really think it was hard for me socially to integrate when I got to college. When I got to high school, like all of it was harder because of that. I think it made me. Socially less connected, and it took me a while to warm up wherever I was, and especially when I got to Penn because I was, you know, not only younger, but also from a small town when most kids were from the East coast, there were all these reasons.

I had to feel like an outsider. I think music was always the key for me to feel comfortable in any circumstance because that was one thing I knew that I could do. What's the question you have for me? What are your thoughts on, um, what we're going through with, uh, Miles's type one diagnosis and how to be good parents through this process?

[00:30:58] Adam Grant: I think, look, I'm muddling through parenting just like the rest of us. Mm-Hmm. I think it's really easy in a situation like that for you and Chrissy to be totally focused on your son.

[00:31:09] John Legend: Mm-Hmm.

[00:31:09] Adam Grant: And I guess I would want to make sure that you also take the time to ask what's been hard about that for you and how can you support each other?

Mm-Hmm.

[00:31:17] John Legend: Yeah. Yeah, that's good advice. We can always be like mindful about making sure we take care of each other as we're taking care of him.

[00:31:26] Adam Grant: Yeah. I think, I think, I mean, this is a general challenge in parenting, right? Mm-Hmm. It's so easy to get totally focused on the kids and put your own relationship on the back burner, but I think in times of, of adversity, that becomes even more critical to focus on.

[00:31:39] John Legend: Yeah. And I, I genuinely believe, especially through any hard times that we've had that like. It's really important for us to be a great team, a great tandem. If we have us right, then it can help all the other things be right too.

[00:31:56] Adam Grant: All right, la last, uh, question for you, the voice. Uh, it's so fun to watch you both evaluate talent and then elevate talent.

Uh, as a judge and a coach,

[00:32:06] John Legend: I do find that the act of teaching helps me get smarter about how. To be a better artist myself, but also how to explain to other people what will work for them. I had this experience the other day when I said something to an artist, and I had never said it that way before, but when I said it, I was like, oh, I need to remember that what I said was this song sounds like anyone could have written it.

It doesn't feel like it's specific enough to who you are. It doesn't tell me anything about you and. For that reason, I don't love it. And when I said that to him, I was like, I need to apply that same standard to my own writing and it needs to feel like there's a reason I had to write it, you know,

[00:32:58] Adam Grant: brilliant advice.

And I, I think it applies to any creative pursuit. Yeah. You wanna, you wanna write this song that only you can write that's a reflection of, of something unique about you.

[00:33:08] John Legend: Yeah.

[00:33:09] Adam Grant: Well, John, this has, this has been so much fun. Thanks for taking the time. Thank you.

Three quick reflections on John first. Is it just me or is it even amazing when he mumbles his song? That's gonna be stuck in my head for a long time. Secondly, I wanna underscore the point that in any creative project, the highest bar is to write the song that only you can write. And third, I thought John made an important point about giving.

I watched so many people plan their careers by saying, I'm gonna achieve success and then I'm gonna give back. I think that's backward. You can give first. You don't have to wait until you've achieved success to start helping other people. It's never too early to share your knowledge, teach your skills, and open up your network to connect people who don't know each other.

And even if those acts of generosity don't drive your success, they can become a fountain of wellbeing.

Rethinking is hosted by me. Adam Grant, the show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced in mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue, and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Highl, Baban Chang, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

A few months ago, I saw you perform with Chris Martin. Yeah. He did a cover of you. Do you have any notes for him?

[00:34:57] John Legend: Well, we have fun. I've known him for a long time, and I just think he's a wonderful human being and a wonderful musician. And he was making fun of me a little bit with his version of ordinary people.

He was like doing like the impression version of me with all the extra vibrato and all that stuff, and I thought it was all right. It wasn't great.

Jamie Foxx does a pretty good impression of me.