I was very intrigued by Bob Dylan and how for every point you can make about why Bob Dylan is brilliant, you could make another counterpoint as to why you would never want to include Bob Dylan in your dreams of being a musician. Because of one reason or another. It's just a great thing to do to look at somebody that you really admire almost to the point of, you know, obsession, and humanize them and break it down and look at it. Instead of looking at something thirty years after its heyday where everything gets crystallized into brilliant, awesome, he went electric and everybody went, "boo" and he went, "yeah take it!" and the world went, "yeah we love it."
Well you have to break that down and get into it and look at it linear, look at it like you're in that moment looking forward. So I went to Wikipedia, [Laughter] and I took every single record he ever put out, the year it came out, and the top chart position that it got to, and I graphed it. It went from like one to seventy-something so that was how wide it was. And I went across this way and this thing goes like, it looks like an EKG going across. Now if you're only honing in on one moment from where it goes from three to twenty on the chart, it's moving about a half an inch. But if you have just put a record out that has underperformed, quote-unquote, so that now you've slipped. Imagine going from three to twenty this year. The press will eat you alive, he's done, your label will drop, they'll say he's a has been, never mind, good night, on to the next guy. Oh, these three clones, one's a DJ, other one does backflips," oh that's really impressive, fine.
[Laughter]
But your attention will shift. But if you look at it like this, that becomes the most impressive shape your career can possibly take. One, four, twenty, four, seventy, seventy-four, thirty, one. That's to me I think the way that you can be around forever is not to do whatever it takes to hook yourself to the number one position, because if you do that then the constant is number one at the expense of the variable being whatever it takes to be number one. And that's also a ticket out. It's a ticket out.