Today we’d like to introduce you to Matthew Hinsley.
Hi Matthew, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
“Is there anything I can say to convince you not to do that?” is what one undergraduate advisor told me when I shared I was planning to study music in grad school. “Go to law school, Matt,” he suggested. “Then you can make money and buy all the guitars you want.”
It didn’t make sense to me. I was a senior at an elite music conservatory, I was surrounded by highly trained human beings bursting with talent who were ready to share their gifts with the world, and I was being told there was no space in the marketplace for us.
Since that day, I’ve raised millions of dollars to produce artistic shows of all kinds – serving hundreds of thousands – on stage, radio, and TV. My team developed infrastructure that has added guitar education to American public schools on a massive scale, built some of the nation’s first and only for-credit performing arts courses for incarcerated youth, created a first-ever braille-based learning system for blind and visually impaired learners now used globally, and built gentle and supportive music healing programs in shelters, prisons, and hospitals, all while paying musicians millions of dollars for their professional work.
Here are some things I’ve learned: Art matters. Kindness and beauty matter. As a society, we have a hard time placing value on invisible and hard-to-measure things like emotion, character, intention, meaning, mental health, and spirit. Yet, those things make us who we are and build the desire to apply effectively and succeed within us.
These experiences led me to write my newest book, Form & Essence: A Guide to Practicing Truth, about the vital and undeniable importance of invisible and hard-to-measure things in a world obsessed and distracted by data, delineation, and demonstration.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My biggest obstacles have always been inside me. For example, as a product of the music conservatory system I developed certain preconceptions about music. I believed advanced playing was better than beginning playing. I valued formal settings for music appreciation over less formal ones and sought dedicated students over those with a casual interest.
Advanced playing is, of course, a wonderful thing – human achievement is one of the great wonders of the world. But beginning playing is no less a miracle. As long as joy is present, any experience with music is as valuable and valid as any other. A beautiful concert in a formal hall with a silent audience is a sublime experience – I produce them frequently. But the bedside performance at the children’s hospital, hospice, prison, or limited memory unit is no less sublime, critical, and essential. As a teacher, having serious and dedicated students means sequential progress along a wondrous path of discovery, but so, too, can be any progress made by any student where there is belonging, encouragement, and celebration. As a young graduate, I was not aware of these things.
Only after years as a public servant did my armor of preconception begin to be peeled off one plate at a time, and I realized how much bigger music and art can be. This is just one of many internal obstacles I have faced – and continue to face – as I grow as a leader.
Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I’ve mentioned that I’m a community leader in the arts. I’m most proud of my work building a culture inside and around my organization rooted in kindness, beauty, and goodwill. These simple but profound concepts have allowed us to diversify our funding, grow every year for twenty-eight years, innovate, and find joy.
I wrote a book recently called Form & Essence: A Guide to Practicing Truth. It’s the most important thing I’ve produced, and I’d like to share a bit about it. In a box on my desk is a hundred-year-old pocket watch with MGH engraved on the back. It still works when I wind it, and it tells time. That is its Form. The watch belonged to my great-grandfather, who worked as a carpenter on the railroad his whole life. I never met him, yet he inspires me. I’m named after him, so those initials on the watch are my initials, too. I also have a notebook in which he made a one-line entry of every day of his working life with what he did, how many hours, and how much he was owed. It goes on like that, line by line, for more than thirty years. I think of his diligence when I hold his watch or leaf through his tattered notebook. I wonder who he was—how much he is in me. Thinking of him puts my days in perspective. It makes me feel strong. Those feelings? They are Essence. To think of the great-grandfather’s watch as a physical object without comprehending its significance is to see its Form but not its Essence. It is only half of the truth.
Nowadays, we’re obsessed with the things we can see, define, and measure. Form dominates Essence. We walk on a visible path of likes and shares, profit and loss, yours and mine, right and wrong. But this needs to be clarified, and it is costly. What we see on our screens eclipses what we know in our hearts. The labels we put on one another prevent us from building friendships across boundaries and beliefs. The metrics we use to claim progress in school or work leave little room for earnest commitment to joy and curiosity.
There is a better path that balances Form with Essence and leads to a more profound truth. It’s hard to find because it is made of invisible things like emotion, meaning, and spirit, but walking the invisible path is transformative and powerful. It works within the heart and radiates outward through our dreams and deeds.
In business, there is conventional wisdom that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Really? Think about it. Be honest. The truth is that measurement is extremely helpful in managing certain aspects of business. But it isn’t good at managing relationships. It could also help us comprehend the kinds of instincts the most outstanding business leaders of all time are so famous for. Spend any time reading about Herb Kelleher and Southwest Airlines, and you’ll realize that while the company was filled with metrics, it was also imbued with Kelleher’s spirit. All the other airlines Southwest outcompeted were filled with metrics, too. But they didn’t have his Essence.
Kelleher once said, “We will hire someone with less experience, less education, and less expertise, [over] someone who has more of those things and has a rotten attitude because we can train people. We can teach people how to lead. We can teach people how to provide customer service. But we can’t change their DNA.”
It’s not that Form and measurement is bad. But it’s only half of the truth. It’s the easy half to understand because it is visible and measurable. So, Form dwarfs Essence in most business conversations. To discuss feelings, trust instincts, or meet with no agenda seems weak, naïve, or bizarre—a distraction from mature professional conversations about deliverables, efficiency, and profit.
In secondary education, for another example, we are obsessed with measuring student progress along a narrow curricular pathway that will lead to a good college followed by a good job. Along the way, parents expect their children to get good grades. Administrators judge teachers on how well their students perform on standardized tests. Politicians tie school funding to those tests, and journalists love to write stories with colorful graphs displaying school passing and failing rates.
But if education is a competitive, closely monitored, linear pathway through important predetermined subjects, then what is it not? It is not exploration, or self-expression, or history, or art. It is not a community-centered haven of safety and support for children in areas rife with social and economic challenges.
In the wake of high-profile bullying, school violence, and studies about depression, the voices about educating the whole child that have spoken in the shadows for decades turn into buzz concepts like “social-emotional learning” or “turning STEM into STEAM” by adding “A” in for “Arts.” Not because of some grand revelation that teaching arts and humanities are intrinsically good, but because “studies have shown” that kids engaged in such things test better in the job-oriented areas we care about—while improving measured deliverables like attendance and graduation rates.
Jobs make money. Money is measurable and helps us obtain other things in Form. Therefore, the domination of Form in education applies constant pressure to remove frivolous stuff like arts and humanities in favor of subjects with a more obvious purpose, or at the very least demands justification of those frivolous things through data-driven proof of their benefits to core curriculum and behavior.
Preparation to enter the workforce isn’t bad. It’s good! But is that really what we’re talking about?
Success is not a product of only what subjects we study or our grades. Success is also a product of our sense of self, belonging, safety, determination, inspiration, confidence, motivation, resilience, cultural awareness, etc. But those are hard things to talk about, and they’re difficult to test. They are not easy answers because they belong to Essence. And so we delude ourselves, at great expense, into the half-truth of form obsession in education.
I believe Form and Essence are dangerously out of balance in our understanding of objects, business management, and education and across a broad spectrum of human endeavors impacting creativity and motivation, relationships with ourselves and others, and care for our communities and planet. And I think distraction—especially from smartphones, polarizing media, and social media—smothers our awareness of Essence nearly every minute of every day.
So that’s what the focus of my work – and my new book – is about.
Can you talk to us about happiness and what makes you happy?
Joy is a level of consciousness, and the doorway to joy is unconditional love. I might have a ‘good day’ where circumstances, objects, or wealth align with my intentions or a ‘bad day’ where they do not. But these things have no bearing on joy. Think of the lottery winners whose lives fall apart, the actors and sports stars at the height of fame and fortune who succumb to addiction and misery, or the leaders of nations who breed violence and dissent. Think, then, about the countless studies of individuals in relative technological, if not economic, poverty who register as some of the most joyful on the planet because of strong ties to family or faith or community or land. I have several practices that help me tremendously.
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- Eliminating Social Media: Social Media destroys our sense of self, self-worth, and equilibrium. It’s insidious because it purports to connect us to others and bring us happiness through sharing and validation. Still, study after study shows us that AI-moderated relationships in the artificial landscape of the attention economy erode our mental health. I recommend reading Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine.
- Journaling: My thinking brain needs a safe and quiet space to process my conscious and unconscious thoughts, dreams, hopes, and fears. My daily journaling has been my haven for consciousness for over twenty years.
- Meditation: The body stores and promotes emotion, excitement, and trauma, and it has its own language. Often, the body is unaware that we are no longer the children we once were when a specific traumatic event occurred. Breath and awareness is the gateway to communion with the body. My suggestion is Qi Gong – which I’ve practiced almost every day since I first learned it as a teenager.
- Yoga: A more kinetic but still thought and breath-based practice, yoga is like a doorway to the wisdom and challenge stored by my organs, muscles, and joints.
- Personality: Everyone is different, and those differences are built-up motivations buried deep in our personality. Learn about personality, and you will unlock secrets to your motivation, particular pathway for spiritual growth, and the motivations of others. I suggest immediately buying The Wisdom of the Enneagram by Riso/Hudson.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.matthewhinsley.com/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-hinsley-31387b87/
- Other: https://www.amazon.com/Form-Essence-Guide-Practicing-Truth/dp/1304986926/
Image Credits
Jack Kloecker, Arlen Nydam, Jaime Ibarra
