Be the one who goes first
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On July 6, 1957, a 15-year-old kid named Paul McCartney rode his bike to a church fair in Woolton, Liverpool.
He wasn’t supposed to be there. He had no reason to go. A school friend named Ivan Vaughan had mentioned that a local skiffle band called the Quarrymen was playing on the back of a flatbed truck behind St. Peter’s Church, and Paul figured he’d check it out. That’s it. No grand plan.
The band wasn’t great. The lead singer, a 16-year-old named John Lennon, kept making up lyrics because he couldn’t remember the real ones. But something about him was magnetic. He had swagger. He had presence. Paul noticed.
After the set, Ivan brought Paul backstage. If you can call a church auditorium with folding chairs “backstage.” John and his bandmates were slouched around, barely paying attention to this younger kid. Paul could have stood there awkwardly, made small talk, gone home. Nobody would have remembered.
Instead, he picked up a guitar, flipped it upside down because he was left-handed, and started playing Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock.” Then Gene Vincent. Then a Little Richard medley. The whole thing lasted maybe twenty minutes.
John Lennon later said: “That was the day, the day I met Paul, that it started moving.”
Two weeks later, Paul was in the band. Within seven years, they were the biggest act in the history of recorded music.
Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. Paul McCartney didn’t get discovered that day. He wasn’t plucked from obscurity by some talent scout. He showed up uninvited to a church fair and made the first move. He chose John Lennon before John Lennon chose him.
If Paul goes home after watching the set, there are no Beatles. That’s not an exaggeration. John and Paul lived in different neighborhoods, went to different schools, were nearly two years apart in age. There was no natural reason for them to cross paths again. The entire thing happened because a 15-year-old kid decided to walk up and play.
Initiative is a hell of a drug.
