What led me to TED

I've been moderate all my life. I literally can't remember a time when I couldn't, at least for a minute, step outside an argument and try to see it from the other person's viewpoint. Overall, it has been a blessing, but naturally it can also be a curse, and that egalitarian ideology has sometimes left me open to ridicule for lack of conviction.

Have I been known to take too much on and fail to execute everything well? Of course. I think I used to be famous for it. At least as I get older I'm comfortable admitting it. Although the words may have taken years to meander out of my mouth, that admission has probably lead to the most tangible and productive improvements in my self-worth and subsequent value to others.

A few years ago, I began to try the concept of just saying 'no' to things. Things that would normally seem like a no-brainer. Things that would be good for the finances, or good for my self-esteem, or the greater good of the community, or maybe all of the above.

The first few times I let the word slip out of my mouth it felt like I was letting someone down. Maybe the person on the other end of the phone, maybe myself, maybe both of us, and more.

But it freed me. It was liberating beyond belief. After a lifetime of being the guy who 'gets things done', and can always be 'relied upon', I was beginning to put myself and my existing (and rather extensive) suite of tasks first, instead of continuing to be the Samaritan.

I've been known to summarise my life in point-form, and when I do, it sounds a little scary. Once I finish, it's little wonder people might be thinking; "this guy doesn't have time to help me", and you mightn't blame them.

As at June 2015 I am (in no particular order of importance, except for item 1); raising three beautiful children aged 7, 10 and 23, running a public relations and marketing firm with my gorgeous and talented wife, performing around 150 gigs a year in various parts of Australia and internationally, trying to release my debut EP, teaching 20 students in one-on-one music lessons, completing my degree in production Horticulture, renovating our home and office, building a cubby house, trying to keep fit and workout five times a week and attending the odd male cooking class.

Enough for now? Yes thanks.

Old habits die hard though, and saying no to something I feel is for the greater good doesn't come easy to me, no matter how many balls I have in the air at the time.

So when one such opportunity arose recently I had to put my penchant for 'no' on hold.

Over the past four months I have been quietly chipping away with a group of like-minded individuals in the beautiful city of Orange, with a view to staging a TEDx event in our city. Last week our hard work and hours of think-tanking paid off with TEDx granting me the licence for an event in Orange on November 20, 2015.

How will I fit this in? Easy. It's worth it. We're going to try and improve our city through this forum, and some lives along the way. What could be more worthwhile than that?

If you haven't already watched the Randy Pausch lectures on time management, then please invest an hour or so of your life doing so. They are simple, but life-changing. They will show you how, by compartmentalising and partitioning the fragments of your life, you can achieve everything you want, including wonderful, meaningful relationships.

I can't wait for the voyage towards TEDx Orange on November 20.

What would we like to achieve? Social good. Social justice. Positive change.

I can fit that in......

Apprenticeship on George St

Apprenticeship on George St

I stepped onto the stage at The Commercial Hotel Bathurst for the first time in mid 1990 with a brand new Yamaha synth, a handful of blues licks and an untrained but reasonably in tune voice.

I was young, green and unaware of where this move might take me. I remember the feeling to this day. Part scared, part excited.

The Commercial Hotel was the mecca of live gigs in Bathurst. A thriving covers venue with bands three nights a week and swarms of university students, locals and visitors at which to blast your blisteringly loud cover songs.

I had been given a start in one of the town's more popular outfits; The Mad Arabs. In this day and age one would perhaps opt for different nomenclature, but amazingly that band is still going, sans death threats...

We were loud (really loud), rough, honest and energetic. Muddy Waters, JJ Cale, Clapton, Santana, The Stones. You know, all the stuff the kids are into today...

We sometimes played there twice a week, and we became so popular at the venue the owner let us set up in the back shed and rehearse, as well as leave our gear there permanently. They were unbelievable times I'll never forget, and those guys are my very dear friends to this day. This was my apprenticeship, not just in music, but in life, relationships, humour, politics and my favourite sport to this day - people watching.

Such was the old guard. The musicians who worked hard for their living and had the benefit of playing to enthusiastic crowds that loved live music. You made true friends in the industry back then. Before poker machines. Before Napster. Before iTunes and Spotify. Before your audience had their heads buried in a phone, texting someone they'd rather be with than the person sitting next to them, too distracted to applaud.

Many of us had a really good crack at original music as well. Some of the guys from the Bathurst scene did really well. I remember a trio of brothers, The Richardson's, who went on to have solid careers in America, playing with household names. They had insane harmonies, and I remember when they left for the USA, all of Bathurst were behind them. No (or very little) jealousy.

A couple of times I stood on the precipice and it seemed it would all fall into line for me in the game. Melbourne, 1996 was one - but that's another story for another time.

I dug out some of the old original 'tapes' the other day. They weren't that good. They were probably better than half the songs that made it big at the time, but they weren't anything special. Granted in this industry it's never really been about how good you are. It has for some time been about who you hang with, whos arse you kiss and just simply standing in the right place at the right time.

Flash forward 20 years and I'm standing back stage with the support act for Country Music icons Brooks and Dunn at Brisbane Entertainment Centre waiting to go on in front of 12,000 people. Part scared, part excited.

I've come to the conclusion whatever you begin with in your career as a working set of practices, or 'default state', if you like, will probably continue with you all the way.

What had changed 20 years on? Same guy, same doubts in himself, but same weird confidence underpinning it all. New audience. Bigger audience. Different instrument - I picked up the bass about 10 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, probably a similar rate of pay, but I didn't have to lug my own gear, and there was a rider, a hotel room, a tour bus and stars all around. Kix Brooks made me a steak sandwich that night. It's one of his traditions on tour - the big fry up, cooked by the man himself. That one will stick with me...

I don't want to be one of those jaded musicians that bangs on and moans about the industry and how it's changed so much and screwed us over. I think I've dipped my toe into those dangerous waters a few times already. It's hard not to sometimes. It's all around you. I've worked with so many people who have unrealised ambition and have become so negative and narcissistic it has turned me the other way.

To qualify, yes I tend to loathe the drivel pumped out by today's music industry. However, these are artistic musings and opinions, not so much an attack on the inevitable - change. Yes the industry has changed, and I believe for the most part, music is being dumbed down and sold to the masses in a shiny plastic form of it's former self. But what hasn't changed in the last 25 years? Well, Keith Richards, but apart from that....

Anyway, it's not all bad. We do have Sara Barielles, Beck, The Arctic Monkeys, and Toto and Fleetwood Mac are still touring! There are still glimpses of hope and plenty of people making beautiful music. You just have to seek it out these days...

To be honest, just make your own. Then you'll listen to something you'll really enjoy. That's what I did last year, fulfilling a lifelong dream to record in Nashville. With enough industry connections I was able to record at Quad Studios (no-one cool has recorded here except for Elvis, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, Lady Antebellum...) with some of Nashville's finest. The result is a beautiful EP of which I am incredibly proud.

What am I going to do with it? Haven't worked that out yet...

With 25 years of live playing, and gigs ranging from playing piano in a deserted, and I do mean 100% deserted, poker machine lounge to the biggest festivals and rooms in Australia I'm transitioning out of the music industry. It has been really kind to me, but like everything it has a life span. Goals change. Everything changes.

I have a great many mates in this industry who will look for every reason under the sun as to why they didn't become famous or hit the dizzy heights of stardom. It eats them up, plagues them and makes them question their own very talents and gifts. I refuse to be the guy who keeps on having this discussion, because it's probably going to take place in the aforementioned poker machine lounge.

I had my chances. Maybe I wasn't good enough. I'm comfortable with that. I know I made choices that put me out of contention for things that would have led me to different places, but I chose family over the industry a long time ago. No regrets. In fact a wise old muso from Bathurst once told me "you can be rich or famous". There's absolutely something in that, and I've had that mantra buzzing around in my head for years. 

I've been in non-stop work for 25 years and have raised three children (still raising two) on a musician's income. I'm far better off financially than some of my peers who chased fame, including the ones who achieved it. The music industry is a strange beast. The more you earn, the more you spend, and there is no shortage of people waiting to take their cut, advise you how to spend 'your' (and the company's) money and you see a lot more lunchtimes than lunches. 

I'm proud of everything, especially the mistakes. They're just the little building blocks of success. What a great time I've had. I've met and played with some of the best. The music in me will never die, but the job must eventually go. 

The Elevator Pitch

I could have been part of the white 'stolen generation' in Australia.

Be assured I don't mean to undermine or trivialise the atrocity that was the true stolen generation of Aboriginal people with that opening statement, but a Catholic kid to a young single mother in 1971 in regional NSW might have easily been snapped up by the church to be given a better life with someone more stable, sensible and deserving.

Thankfully mum had the foresight to get out of Dodge (Dodge being the legendary petrol-powered town of Bathurst) for the latter part of her pregnancy and stay with her aunt and family in the Central Coast city of Gosford, which is where I landed in a blaze of noise. We returned to Bathurst when I was some months old, I'm assuming once the gossiping mouths had calmed down a little. I spent the next 25 years there.

I was noisy in primary school and I was noisy in high school. I always felt the burning desire to be the centre of attention. Class clown or leader? Not quite sure. A mix of both I think. In primary school I was labelled naughty and quite often found myself standing outside the classroom or getting a dose of the cane in the principal's office. Yet when it came time for teachers to choose a public speaker or ambassador for the school it was often me. With no brothers or sisters, or even cousins (until later on) for that matter, I became gregarious, resourceful and forthright. I started sticking up for people pretty early on, perhaps because I craved a sibling. We'll let the psychologists wrestle with that one...

All my school reports said the same thing; "Kyle is incredibly bright, but needs to work harder to realise his potential". Aside from a brief moment in the academic sun as dux of Year 7 at St Stanislaus College it was all downhill from there. I spent most of my high school years chasing girls and skipping class to play the piano. Assignments were handed in at the last minute and usually calculated to receive just enough marks to keep my studies in second (and occasionally third) gear.

What was the rush? I thought it was far more important to master a Billy Joel piece than learn algebra. So music turned into a career, and I continue my love-hate relationship with the pianoforte to this day.

As an aside to that, it emerged I was excelling at English by putting even less effort into that subject than the others. An absolutely awesome system was being installed in my complicated brain by osmosis (yes, I did biology); stick to the things you're really good at and it's entirely possible you might get through school without doing an ounce of hard work. Translated in adult-speak, that would be "do the job you love and you'll never work a day in your life".

The girl-chasing and the piano playing continued, and I think I can credit myself with a bit of foresight here, as it proved to be a fabulous mix in adult life as well.

The apparent excellence in English led to my first job being a cadetship as a photojournalist on the local paper. The memories of four years of extremely low pay,  insanely long hours and being completely robbed of a social life have paled into insignificance, instead replaced with the warm glow of knowing I was given an incredible grounding in skills I use to this day.

I used to head off to a job in the little newsroom Toyota Corolla, notepad and Nikon camera in hand with a hunger in my eye to get the story, get to the truth and articulate it as best I could to the readership.

How the wheel has turned.....but not really.

Those skills I learned back in 1990, from photography and developing to typing, shorthand (my own version) and writing are still with me today as a social media content creator and marketer in my own business - Manning Public Relations.

These days its an ipad not a notepad, an imac not a word processor and the internet not 'the wire'. I still have the Nikon camera (but no longer have to inhale the developer - photoshop is my friend)

So here starts the blog - born out of frustration with the realm of Facebook, where opinions can live and die, along with a little bit of your soul, one day at a time.

Expect music, literature, science, politics, social justice, the arts in general and perhaps the interaction of all these...