Find Your Music Team

Sep 8, 2026

I have a confession to make. I like a good formula. Frameworks make me feel safe.

Tell me there are five steps to doing something better, and I’ll probably want to know what they are. Give me a checklist, a tried-and-tested approach or, even better, the one thing that will change everything, and you have my attention. You would think we’d know better by now. We’ve all heard that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Yet there’s something very appealing about the idea that someone has found the answer and, if we just follow the instructions, we can get the same result.

Sometimes we can. A good framework can be enormously useful, and someone else’s experience can save us years of trial and error. We can follow the exercise program and feel stronger, change the way we eat and have more energy, or adopt a new approach to work and wonder how we ever managed without it.

But what happens when we follow the formula and it doesn’t work? Now that is where things get interesting.

When something is supposed to work, we can become very focused on doing it correctly. We follow the steps more carefully, try harder and become more disciplined. We look at the people for whom it seems to be working and wonder what they’re doing that we aren’t. Before long, we’re no longer asking whether the framework is helping us. We’re asking what’s wrong with us because we can’t seem to make it work.

Perhaps nothing is wrong. The formula may be a perfectly good one. It may work brilliantly for somebody else. It may even work for most people. It just may not work, in that form, for you.

That doesn’t mean that anything uncomfortable or difficult is a bad fit. Some of the most worthwhile things we do challenge us enormously. Growth asks something of us, and abandoning anything the moment it becomes hard probably isn’t much of a formula either. But there is a difference between being challenged by something that is helping us grow and repeatedly forcing ourselves into a way of doing things that simply doesn’t fit.

Perhaps we sometimes become so attached to the form that we forget what it was supposed to help us do in the first place. The morning routine was meant to help us start the day well. The exercise program was meant to help us become healthier. The productivity system was meant to help us get meaningful things done. The framework was supposed to serve the objective, not become the objective itself.

So maybe we can loosen our grip on the rules a little. We can take what works, adapt what nearly works and leave what doesn’t. We can learn from people who have figured something out without assuming we have to reproduce exactly what they did. A framework can give us somewhere to begin; it doesn’t have to dictate where we end up.

Perhaps that’s the freedom in remembering there is no template for you. You don’t have to reject every formula, and you certainly don’t have to invent everything from scratch. You just have to leave enough room to make it fit.

Because sometimes the formula isn’t failing, and neither are you.

It’s simply not the right fit