How to Find Passion in Your Problems and Turn Limitations into Opportunities
2024-02-15 Invite Champions Weekly
Photo by Reno Laithienne on Unsplash
We all like to talk about our strengths. But what about our weaknesses and our limitations?
It’s been said that our greatest strengths can be our greatest weaknesses. And this is true.
But what if our limitations can also become our strengths?
‘A man’s got to know his limitations.” - Dirty Harry
The other night I took my bride on a Valentine’s Date to the Meyerson Symphony Hall in Dallas to hear my favorite musician, David Sanborn.
For about six years, I wanted nothing more in life than to be David Sanborn. He is assuredly the most iconic and imitated saxophonist alive, with a six decade career and a powerful sound, simultaneously silky and tough.
(For the uninitiated, click this video of him playing with Eric Clapton and Cheryl Crow and let it play in the background while you read. He blows his face off while Eric and Sheryl just shake their heads in amazement.)
The unknown backstory is that Sanborn has limitations, or “weaknesses,” that would prevent most from even attempting to do what he does.
At the age of three, David Sanborn contracted polio.
He spent a year in an iron lung. (Never heard of an iron lung? Click here to see Polio Paul, the last living human being in an iron lung.)
Sanborn emerged from his metal dungeon with lifelong impairments. He was paralyzed for a year. His left arm became permanently weaker and smaller than his right. His left hand doesn’t fully function, and his right leg, which was paralyzed as a child, is shorter and weaker than his left.
Worst of all, his lungs are smaller than normal.
A saxophonist, with small lungs!
Now, he’s 78 years old. When he came on to the stage at the Meyerson, his wife had to help him get in place at his stool, where he stayed the entire performance. But from this frail, aging musician came the biggest sounds you’d ever imagine.
… I had to stop halfway through writing this and watch that solo with Clapton again. Just… wow.
A bit of backstory: In 1955, the Salk vaccine conquered polio. It saved millions of lives, but left many with a new problem: PPS, or Post-Polio Syndrome. PPS is chronic. It “mimics polio, making it an insidious -- and constant -- reminder of the vanquished disease. PPS has a laundry list of symptoms. Extreme fatigue, muscle impairment and memory problems are common.”1
Though the polio was supposedly long gone, young Sanborn had PPS. He remained weak and required ongoing care. During one visit at age 11, the doc recommended he take up a wind instrument to help strengthen his lungs.
David chose alto because it was the only saxophone he could hold up.
With little else to do, he began to play—all the time. He matriculated through the St. Louis public school system, started gigging with local blues legends, and by his mid 20s was playing session solos for famous pop and rock stars. You can hear him behind such singers as James Taylor, Sting, Billy Joel, Ray Charles - the list goes on and on. He became the sax player on Saturday Night Live. In the 80s, he released four #1 albums and was featured in films such as Lethal Weapon.
As a young sax player in the 1980s, I tried to emulate his style. Me and every other young player of the day. We all bought the same Bobby Dukoff mouthpiece he used. We learned his solos and mimicked his moves.
But nobody could ever repeat his gritty, powerful punch.
Now here’s the unbelievable why:
Sanborn’s inimitable style is because of what’s known to players as the embouchure, or the way a player holds the instrument to the mouth.
David’s embouchure breaks all of the proper rules.
That’s because as a middle schooler, sometimes he was so weak he couldn’t get out of bed. So he would lay down and play with the horn held beside him.
As a result, his embouchure is far down and to the right, almost like a clarinet player’s.
You can still visualize the bed bound, young David as you watch him play in the Clapton video.
What I could have never known as a young sax player was that Sanborn’s amazing sound and success is a direct result of the physical limitations he’s struggled with his whole life. He learned to play in a way no one would ever teach, and thus developed a unique style precisely because of his limitations.
The disease made David.
His thorn in the flesh became the source of his strength.
He says, “the sax saved my life.”2
Takeaway: In an age in which we seek and celebrate our individual strengths, are we looking in the wrong places?
Instead, ask yourself, what is your thorn in the flesh? Your limitation?
What if your limitation is the exact thing God might use in you and through you to bless the world?
Want to learn more about this? Contact me for a look at how this happens in Scripture and what we can do about it.
Championing Invite
So how does the power of your limitations translate to strategy?
Take book marketing for example.
Having an unlimited budget doesn’t sell a book. It’s been tried. You can’t force people to care.
On the contrary, a book with little marketing can take off. At times, there seems to be no rhyme nor reason.
With small margins on unit sales, and a constantly changing media environment, publishers are usually unwilling to front significant marketing dollars. Self-pub is no better. It’s oversold and a racket. The average self-published book moves 250 units, lifetime.
But what do we as publishers know for sure? In 2024, a book’s chances for success are substantially higher when both publisher and author have skin in the game.
Authors who self-publish inevitably lack expertise.
Traditional publishing struggles without author involvement.
What works in 2024 is a partnered approach, where author and publisher invent new strategies to partner together to platform the message of a book and the author’s associated ministry.
With this limitation in mind, I’ve been working on a new marketing strategy at Invite Press that seeks to leverage the limitations of marketing budgets, using our partnership method, to create a mutual approach whereby author and publisher both benefit from the success of the book in the marketplace. We are hoping to turn the biggest limitation most books face into the biggest strength you can find in publishing today.
More soon on this innovative approach.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1987/07/24/david-sanborns-horn-of-passion/c0643b60-c548-457f-be1d-4cfe35efbf48/