I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing — who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them.

The life of a jazz musician is a difficult life, because you want to play, you want to be, you want to get to the inner spirit and sometimes you drink or you use drugs or you smoke a lot. You do all these things to try to get the spirit out. So it’s a difficult existence and a lot of the great people that I have known, and in history, they kind of over-indulge, and they never sort of are able to balance their musical life with their personal life. Maybe it’s not necessary to do that. That is another question, I don’t know, but I’d like to see young musicians coming up that don’t smoke and that don’t drink to excess and don’t use drugs, and don’t sort of debilitate themselves. I think that’s where we should go. I think that is what guys should be doing. I don’t think you have to drink and use drugs to play good jazz, but that’s been the model for so long that a lot of guys get caught up in that, you know.

The worst advice was to start a record label when I wanted to be a musician. It was smart advice. It could have made me more money, but it did not inspire me.

pick one job and delegate all the other tasks.

Perhaps one character trait which does help is the ability to focus, and perhaps to be a little stubborn. If I learned something in class that I only partly understood, I wasn't satisfied until I was able to work the whole thing out; it would bother me that the explanation wasn't clicking together like it should. So I'd often spend a lot of time on very simple things until I could understand them backwards and forwards, which really helps when one then moves on to more advanced parts of the subject.