SECTION ONE

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY

CATEGORY

 

Determination

PRIMARY EMOTION

Determination

 

ALSO FITS

Perseverance, Resilience, Courage, Identity, Ambition, Self-Belief, Overcoming Criticism, Personal Growth

WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT

Some songs are written after the victory.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY belongs to the part that comes before it.

It belongs to the person standing there with an idea nobody else can see yet.

I think most people who have tried to do something different understand that feeling.

You have an idea.

You can see where you want to go.

Maybe you cannot explain every part of it yet. Maybe you do not even know exactly how you are going to get there. You just know there is something inside you telling you to move.

Then somebody laughs.

Somebody tells you to be realistic.

Somebody tells you that you are aiming too high.

Somebody reminds you of everything that can go wrong.

Sometimes they use the word crazy.

Sometimes they do not have to.

The message is still the same.

Stop.

Stay where you are.

Be more like everybody else.

That is where this song begins.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is about refusing to let somebody else’s opinion become your identity or your limit.

It is not saying every dream will succeed.

It is not saying determination guarantees success.

It is not saying you should ignore good advice.

Sometimes people warn us because they see something we do not. Sometimes criticism is exactly what we need. If somebody knows more than I do, I want to listen. If I am wrong, I want to know. If an idea can be improved, I want to improve it.

There is a big difference between good advice and somebody telling you not to try because they cannot imagine you succeeding.

That difference matters to me.

I have always been curious about people who confidently predict somebody else’s future.

How can any of us know exactly what another person is capable of becoming?

We cannot.

We can look at somebody today.

We can look at their past.

We can look at their mistakes.

We can look at what they have accomplished so far.

But none of those things give us the complete picture of who that person may become tomorrow.

People change.

People learn.

People rebuild.

People surprise us.

Sometimes they surprise themselves.

This song is for those people.

It is for the person starting a business while everybody tells them to get a normal job.

It is for the artist creating something nobody understands yet.

It is for somebody returning to school later in life.

It is for the inventor surrounded by failed attempts.

It is for the person rebuilding after losing everything.

It is for somebody starting again when starting again feels harder than starting the first time.

It is also for the person whose biggest critic lives inside their own head.

That voice can be worse than anything another person says.

Maybe I am aiming too high.

Maybe I am wasting my time.

Maybe they are right.

Maybe I should quit before I embarrass myself.

Most people have heard some version of that voice.

This song answers it.

Maybe I fail.

Maybe I fall.

Maybe I discover that I was wrong.

But I am going to find out.

I would rather move forward and learn the answer than spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if I had tried.

 

THE STORY BEHIND DON’T CALL ME CRAZY

I have spent a large part of my life around people who build things.

Construction teaches you something very quickly.

Before anything exists, somebody has to see it.

You can stand on an empty piece of ground and see nothing but dirt.

Somebody else can stand in exactly the same place and imagine a building.

At that moment, the building does not exist.

There is no finished structure anybody can point to.

There are plans.

Measurements.

Materials.

Machines.

People.

Work.

And before all of that, there was an idea.

Then somebody had to begin.

I have always liked that part of building because it applies to much more than construction.

A business begins that way.

An invention begins that way.

A song begins that way.

A book begins that way.

A career begins that way.

A new life can begin that way.

Before other people can see the result, somebody has to believe enough in the possibility to start working toward it.

That invisible stage is where dreams are probably at their most vulnerable.

It is easy to admire something after it has succeeded.

The hard part is believing while there is still nothing to show anybody.

I have been self-employed for decades. I have spent years around graders, loaders, skid steers, excavators, dozers and construction jobs where eventually something has to happen.

You can talk about the job.

You can plan the job.

You can argue about the job.

You can explain why the job will be difficult.

Eventually somebody has to move.

The machine has to start.

The ground has to change.

Something has to get built.

I think that attitude became part of me.

Talking has value.

Planning has value.

Thinking has value.

But eventually there comes a point when another conversation does not move anything forward.

You have to do something.

That idea is all through DON’T CALL ME CRAZY.

While you kept talking, I was walking.

You point at the mountain, but you never climb.

You were afraid to fail, so you never began.

Those lines came naturally because I understand the difference between talking about doing something and actually beginning.

Beginning is where reality gets involved.

That is when you find out whether your idea works.

That is when you discover what you forgot.

That is when mistakes happen.

That is when you have to adjust.

That is when you learn.

I have also spent much of my life taking things apart mentally and sometimes literally because I wanted to know how they worked.

As a young person, I took radios apart.

Later I experimented with automotive ideas.

I created illuminated address signs using metal, Plexiglas, lighting and sensors because I thought something that already existed could be made differently.

I designed tools in construction.

I designed things while working around the railroad.

I was always looking at something and asking whether there might be another way to do it.

Sometimes there was.

Sometimes there was not.

That never bothered me.

Trying something and discovering that it does not work is still an answer.

Now you know.

That same curiosity eventually became songwriting.

Then songwriting became something larger.

It became MOITA.

When I look at MOITA, I do not see only a collection of songs.

I see something I am building.

Every song becomes another chapter.

Every webpage becomes another opportunity to tell the story behind it.

A song about history can lead somebody into history.

A song about grief can open a conversation about grief.

A song about homelessness can make somebody think differently about the person they passed on the street.

A song about determination can make somebody ask whether they gave up too soon.

That is what interests me.

The music opens the door.

Then we can go somewhere.

But before MOITA could become something another person could understand, I had to see it myself.

That is exactly the kind of situation DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is talking about.

People are comfortable with finished things.

Finished things provide evidence.

Ideas do not.

Before the evidence arrives, all anybody can see is somebody talking about something that has not happened yet.

That is when the labels come.

Crazy.

Dreamer.

Unrealistic.

Obsessed.

Impossible.

Sometimes those labels stop people.

Sometimes they become fuel.

I wanted this song to live inside that choice.

What do you do when somebody laughs at the thing you believe in?

Do you spend all your energy trying to convince them?

Or do you get back to work?

I would rather get back to work.

The work eventually answers questions that arguments cannot.

There is another reason this subject matters to me.

I know what rebuilding means.

There have been chapters of my life where what existed before was gone and the next part was not waiting there ready for me.

You discover something during those times.

Starting again is different from starting the first time.

The first time you may not understand what failure costs.

Starting again means you remember.

You remember losing.

You remember being disappointed.

You remember people judging you.

You remember what it felt like when something you believed in did not work.

Then you have to decide whether you are willing to risk all of that again.

That is where determination becomes real.

It is easy to say you will never quit when nothing has tested you.

It means something different after life has knocked you down.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY carries that part of me.

Not somebody pretending he never failed.

Somebody who knows failure exists and moves anyway.

WHY I WROTE THIS SONG

I wrote DON’T CALL ME CRAZY because I do not believe another person should automatically get to decide what somebody else is capable of becoming.

People can advise us.

People can disagree with us.

People can challenge us.

People can point out weaknesses in our ideas.

Sometimes they should.

I do not want people around me who tell me everything I do is brilliant.

That does not help anybody.

If something is wrong, tell me.

If there is a better way, show me.

If I missed something, I want to know.

Learning is part of building.

What I reject is the idea that somebody else’s fear should become my future.

That happens more than people realize.

Sometimes a person tells you not to try because they care about you and do not want to see you hurt.

Sometimes they are projecting their own experience onto you.

Sometimes they tried something once, failed, and decided nobody else should try either.

Sometimes they simply cannot see what you see.

And sometimes criticism comes from a much more uncomfortable place.

Your willingness to try reminds somebody else that they stopped trying.

I think that can bother people.

If somebody has spent years telling themselves something is impossible, watching another person attempt it forces an uncomfortable question.

What if it was not impossible?

What if I was afraid?

That does not mean every critic is jealous.

That would be far too simple.

Sometimes the critic is right.

Sometimes the dreamer is wrong.

Life is not a movie where determination magically fixes everything.

I wanted the song to remain grounded in that reality.

The point is not that I know I will win.

The point is that I am willing to find out.

That is why one of the most important thoughts in the song is not about winning at all.

It is about not dying wondering what I left inside.

That matters more to me than pretending failure does not exist.

Failure exists.

I have failed.

Everybody who has spent enough time trying things has failed at something.

The question is what happens next.

Do I learn?

Do I adjust?

Do I get better?

Do I try again?

Or do I allow one failure to become a permanent description of who I am?

That is why I wrote the song.

I wanted determination without pretending.

Confidence without pretending certainty.

Anger without losing control.

Defiance without becoming stupid.

The music itself fits that attitude.

Heavy.

Powerful.

Angry.

But controlled.

That last word matters.

Controlled.

The person in this song is not smashing everything because somebody doubted him.

He is moving forward.

There is a difference.

WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME

Determination has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.

Not because everything worked.

A lot of things did not.

Being self-employed teaches you quickly that there are problems nobody else is going to solve for you.

Equipment breaks.

Schedules change.

Jobs go sideways.

Weather does not care about your plans.

Money gets tight.

People disappoint you.

You make mistakes.

Then morning comes.

You deal with it.

Over enough years, problem solving becomes part of how you think.

That followed me into creativity.

I have written hundreds of songs.

They did not all arrive perfectly.

They did not all become something worth keeping.

Some ideas went nowhere.

Some lines were replaced.

Some songs surprised me.

Some became much better than I imagined when they started.

You do not discover any of that if you never begin.

Creation requires movement.

Write something.

Try something.

Change it.

Listen.

Learn.

Start again.

The same thing happened with MOITA.

I did not want a website that simply displayed a song title, a picture and a play button.

I wanted the songs to become doorways into larger conversations.

I wanted people to understand why I wrote them.

I wanted the life behind them preserved.

I wanted history songs to teach history.

I wanted painful songs to help people understand pain.

I wanted songs built from questions to encourage people to ask their own questions.

I wanted the whole thing connected.

That idea became the MOITA Library.

Somebody else does not have to understand the complete picture while I am building it.

I have to understand why I am building it.

That is why the chorus feels personal to me.

“Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me”

You cannot always show another person what is driving you.

They may see the hours.

They may see the work.

They may see you starting over.

They may even see you fail.

What they cannot fully see is the reason you keep returning.

That belongs to you.

I know there have been easier roads in my life.

There were certainly quieter ones.

I could have stopped creating.

I could have decided that after everything that happened, it was too late to build something new.

I did not.

That does not make me better than somebody who chose differently.

Everybody has a life I cannot fully understand.

It simply means this is the decision I made with mine.

Keep building.

 

WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY fits MOITA because it carries an idea that appears throughout the library in many different forms.

What happened to you matters.

What you do next matters too.

Those two truths can exist together.

I never want MOITA to become a place where difficult experiences are wrapped in easy motivational slogans.

Life is not that simple.

Some losses cannot be replaced.

Some wounds remain.

Some mistakes carry consequences.

Some doors close permanently.

Determination does not erase any of that.

What determination can do is stop one chapter from automatically writing every chapter that follows.

That is important to me.

Different MOITA songs approach that idea from different directions.

Some deal with identity.

Some deal with betrayal.

Some deal with pain.

Some deal with rebuilding.

Some deal with courage.

Some deal with people who have been knocked down so many times they are not sure whether they have another round left in them.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY deals with the moment when somebody else tries to define the size of your future before you have finished building it.

That belongs here.

MOITA itself is built on curiosity.

Why?

Why not?

What happened?

What can we learn from it?

Could this be done differently?

What happens if I try?

Those questions have followed me throughout my life.

I do not want to lose them now.

There is another reason the song fits MOITA.

It does not make excuses.

The person speaking in this song does not say the critics are responsible for whether he succeeds.

He keeps moving.

That distinction matters.

Other people can make the road harder.

They can discourage you.

They can hurt you.

They can put obstacles in front of you.

But there comes a point where your next decision belongs to you.

That can be uncomfortable because responsibility is heavy.

It is also powerful.

If every problem in my future belongs to somebody else, then I have given everybody else control.

I would rather take responsibility for what I can control.

My effort.

My choices.

My willingness to learn.

My willingness to change direction when necessary.

My willingness to stand back up.

That is MOITA.

Not pretending I cannot fall.

Knowing I can fall and continuing anyway.

READ THIS FIRST

Before you read these lyrics, I want you to think about something you once wanted badly enough that you could already see it before it existed.

Maybe you built it.

Maybe you are still building it.

Maybe you failed.

Maybe you changed your mind.

Maybe life took you somewhere completely different.

Maybe somebody laughed and you stopped.

Maybe nobody had to laugh because you talked yourself out of it first.

Do not judge yourself too quickly.

There are good reasons to walk away from some dreams.

We grow.

Priorities change.

Responsibilities matter.

Sometimes what we wanted at twenty is not what we want at forty.

Sometimes quitting one thing is exactly what allows us to begin something better.

But sometimes we walk away for one reason.

Fear.

Fear of failing.

Fear of embarrassment.

Fear of losing money.

Fear of disappointing somebody.

Fear of finding out we are not as good as we hoped.

Fear of hearing somebody say, “I told you so.”

That is the fear sitting across from this song.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY does not promise you victory.

It asks whether you are willing to find out what you are capable of before somebody else decides the answer for you.

As you read the lyrics, follow that person from the beginning.

At first he is being labelled.

Then he starts answering back.

Then the criticism becomes fuel.

Then the song reaches the question underneath everything.

Would I rather fail while trying, or reach the end wondering what I never gave myself the chance to become?

That is where the song is going.

 

FULL LYRICS

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY

You said I was crazy
You said I lost my mind
You laughed at the vision
That you were too scared to find

You called me a lunatic
Said it could never be done
But while you kept talking
I was walking through the fire and sun

You don’t build nothing
You don’t even try
You shoot down the dreamers
Then ask yourself why

Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me

Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high
At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why

You said I was broken
You said I’d never last
But I took every failure
And turned it into gas

You hide in your silence
You live in your doubt
You point at the mountain
But you never climb out

You don’t know the hunger
You don’t know the cost
You only count winners
After calling them lost

Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me

Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high
At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why

Call me crazy
Call me insane
Call me the storm
That you couldn’t contain

Call me reckless
Call me blind
But I saw the future
Before you opened your mind

Heavy breakdown
Drums hit harder
Guitar riff drops low

You were afraid to fail
So you never began
You buried your courage
In the palm of your hand

You laughed at the vision
You mocked every word
But the loudest mouths
Are the weakest heard

I may fall down
I may bleed pride
But I won’t die wondering
What I left inside

Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me

Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high
At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why

Don’t call me crazy
Now that I proved you wrong
You were the doubt
I turned into song

Don’t call me crazy
Don’t act surprised
You only saw madness
I saw the rise

Call me crazy
Call me insane
Call me the thunder
That broke through the chain

Call me crazy
Say what you want
I was never the problem
I was the one you could not become

 

SECTION ONE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 1

“You said I was crazy
You said I lost my mind
You laughed at the vision
That you were too scared to find”

This is where the song starts, with somebody else deciding what I am before they understand what I am trying to do.

I have never had a problem with somebody disagreeing with me. If you think I have a bad idea, tell me. If you know something I do not know, I want to hear it. If I am heading in the wrong direction, maybe you can save me a lot of time.

That is not what these opening lines are about.

There is a difference between questioning an idea and dismissing the person who has it.

The moment somebody says you are crazy or you have lost your mind, they do not have to deal with the idea anymore. They have already decided the problem is you.

I think we do that to people more often than we realize.

Somebody wants to start something and we laugh.

Somebody has an idea we cannot picture and we tell them it will never work.

Somebody wants to rebuild their life and we remind them of everything they did wrong before.

Somebody decides they want more from themselves and we ask who they think they are.

That last question has always interested me.

Who do you think you are?

Maybe I do not know yet.

Maybe that is the whole point.

None of us is finished.

The person standing in front of you today is not necessarily the person who will be standing there five years from now. People learn. They change. They fail. They get back up. They discover abilities they did not know they had. Sometimes life knocks something out of them. Sometimes it puts something into them.

That is why I have always been careful about somebody telling another person exactly what they will never become.

How do you know?

You know who they are today. You know some of what they have done. You may know their mistakes. You may even know them very well.

You still do not know their future.

“You laughed at the vision
That you were too scared to find”

That takes the opening somewhere else.

Now I am asking why somebody laughs at another person’s vision.

Sometimes the answer is simple. Maybe the idea really is terrible.

I have had ideas that did not work. Anybody who spends enough time creating things is going to have them. I do not believe every idea deserves to succeed simply because somebody believes in it.

Reality gets involved eventually.

That is a good thing.

But sometimes laughter has very little to do with whether the idea is good.

Sometimes another person attempting something makes us uncomfortable because it reminds us of something we did not attempt ourselves.

Maybe we wanted to start a business and never did.

Maybe we wanted to write something.

Build something.

Change careers.

Go back to school.

Leave a bad situation.

Begin again.

Maybe we kept waiting until we felt completely ready and that day never arrived.

Then somebody beside us starts doing the very thing we were afraid to do.

That can create an uncomfortable feeling.

It is easier to laugh at them than to ask ourselves why their courage bothers us.

I am not saying every critic is secretly jealous. I do not believe that. Sometimes criticism is completely justified.

But sometimes another person becomes a mirror without intending to.

Their movement reminds us that we are standing still.

That is what I was thinking about when I wrote that line.

“You called me a lunatic
Said it could never be done”

Now the judgment becomes certainty.

It could never be done.

I have always found statements like that interesting.

Never is a very big word.

There are certainly things that cannot be done. Reality has limits. Physics has limits. Money has limits. Time has limits. Our bodies have limits. Sometimes an idea really is impossible.

But before I accept somebody telling me something cannot be done, I want to know why.

Show me the problem.

Maybe you are right.

Maybe there is something I missed.

Maybe the idea needs to change.

Maybe I need more knowledge.

Maybe I need better equipment.

Maybe I need more money.

Maybe I need somebody with experience I do not have.

Maybe the entire idea needs to be thrown away.

Fine.

At least now we are having a useful conversation.

What I do not accept very easily is somebody saying it cannot be done simply because they cannot imagine how to do it.

Those are two completely different things.

I have spent a lot of my life around construction and equipment. That world teaches you to respect reality pretty quickly. Dirt does not care about your confidence. Grades do not change because you believe hard enough. Equipment breaks whether you are having a good day or not.

You have to solve the actual problem in front of you.

That taught me something I carried into the rest of my life.

Do not argue with reality.

Learn from it.

But do not confuse somebody else’s opinion with reality either.

Those are not the same thing.

“But while you kept talking
I was walking through the fire and sun”

This is where the song starts moving.

Until now, almost everything has been words.

You said this.

You called me that.

You laughed.

You told me it could never happen.

Then comes the answer.

I was walking.

That word matters to me because eventually talking has to become movement.

I have spent enough years on jobsites to know how easy it is for people to talk about what needs to happen.

Everybody can have an opinion.

The grade is wrong.

The schedule is wrong.

The machine should be over there.

Somebody should have done this yesterday.

This is going to be difficult.

That will never work.

Eventually somebody still has to climb into the machine and move some dirt.

That is when you find out what is real.

The same thing happens with almost anything we build.

You can talk about writing a book for twenty years.

At some point you have to write the first page.

You can talk about starting a business.

At some point you have to make the first real move.

You can talk about getting into better shape.

At some point you have to begin.

You can talk about rebuilding your life.

Eventually rebuilding becomes something you do, not something you describe.

That is why the line says I was walking.

I was not standing there trying to win the argument anymore.

I had somewhere to go.

And I was walking through the fire and sun.

I wanted difficulty in that image.

I did not want the song pretending that once you believe in yourself everything becomes easy.

That has never been my experience.

Sometimes moving toward something you believe in is miserable.

You get tired.

You make mistakes.

You lose money.

You waste time.

You discover that something you were certain about was wrong.

You have to start parts of it again.

People laugh.

Sometimes they were right about something and you have to swallow your pride and admit it.

That is part of the fire.

Determination does not remove difficulty.

It gives you a reason to keep dealing with it.

“You don’t build nothing
You don’t even try”

This is where my frustration comes out.

I have a lot more patience for criticism from somebody who has actually tried something.

They understand things differently.

A person who has built a business knows plans can go wrong.

A person who has created something knows the first version is not always the final version.

A person who has failed understands that effort does not guarantee success.

A person who has rebuilt understands how different starting again feels from starting the first time.

Those people can tell me I am wrong and I will listen.

They have earned my attention because experience taught them something.

What bothers me is the person who never enters the arena but somehow knows exactly what everybody inside it is doing wrong.

They do not build.

They do not try.

They do not risk anything.

But they are experts on why everybody else should stop.

That is the person I am talking to here.

And building does not have to mean construction.

Everybody can build something.

You can build a family.

A relationship.

A career.

A skill.

A reputation.

A business.

A better life.

You can rebuild trust.

You can rebuild confidence.

You can rebuild yourself after a terrible chapter.

Some of the most important things people build cannot be seen at all.

The point is not what you build.

The point is whether you are participating.

Are you trying to move something forward?

“You shoot down the dreamers
Then ask yourself why”

This is where the song gets bigger than one argument.

We say we admire dreamers.

We celebrate inventors after the invention works.

We celebrate entrepreneurs after the company succeeds.

We celebrate artists after people know their names.

We celebrate people who rebuild after we can see that they rebuilt.

But there is an earlier version of every one of those stories.

That is the difficult version.

Before the proof.

Before the applause.

Before anybody knows whether it is going to work.

That is when the person looks the most foolish.

They are spending time on something that does not exist yet.

They are talking about something nobody else can see.

They may be failing over and over.

They may look like they are getting nowhere.

That is when one laugh can matter.

One sentence can matter.

Sometimes encouragement matters too.

I am not saying another person’s words control our lives. We are responsible for our own decisions.

But words have weight.

Most people can remember something somebody said to them years ago.

A teacher.

A parent.

A friend.

A boss.

A stranger.

Maybe it was something wonderful.

Maybe it was something cruel.

The person who said it might not even remember.

You do.

That tells me we should be careful about what we say when somebody is standing at the beginning of something.

“You shoot down the dreamers.”

Then we wonder why people stop dreaming.

That does not mean we should tell everybody every idea is brilliant.

That is not support either.

Sometimes the most supportive thing you can say is that there is a problem.

But there is a difference between helping somebody think and teaching somebody to doubt themselves.

Then the chorus arrives.

“Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me”

This is the first time the song stops answering individual accusations and tells you what is actually happening inside the person.

The fire.

For me, that fire is not some magical force.

It is hunger.

It is curiosity.

It is determination.

It is that thing inside you that keeps bringing you back to an idea even after the excitement should have worn off.

Other people cannot completely see that.

They can see what you are doing.

They can see the hours.

They can see whether you have succeeded.

They can see the mistakes.

They can see you starting over.

What they cannot see is why you keep coming back.

That belongs inside you.

“Just because you can’t see.”

Those words are probably as important as “Don’t call me crazy.”

We make judgments based on what we can see.

That is natural.

The problem is believing that what we can see is everything there is.

It is not.

We know very little about what another person is carrying inside them.

We do not know every reason they get out of bed.

We do not know every promise they made to themselves.

We do not know what they survived.

We do not know what they are trying to prove, or whether they are trying to prove anything at all.

Sometimes they simply need to know what they are capable of.

“Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high”

Aiming high does not guarantee anything.

I want to keep saying that because it matters.

You can aim high and miss.

You can work hard and fail.

You can believe completely in something that turns out to be wrong.

That is life.

But I would rather aim honestly at something that matters to me than make every decision according to what somebody else thinks is reasonable for me.

Who decides how high another person is allowed to aim?

You can tell me the risks.

You can tell me what I am missing.

You can tell me what experience taught you.

I will listen.

But the decision about whether something is worth attempting eventually belongs to the person who has to live with the result.

“At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why”

That is where the first chorus ends, and I think it says more about the song than any promise of success could.

At least I went forward.

Not:

At least I won.

Not:

At least I proved everybody wrong.

I went forward.

There is something honest in that.

Movement gives you information.

Once you begin, you learn things thinking alone could never teach you.

You discover what you are good at.

You discover what you are terrible at.

You find out whether the idea survives reality.

Maybe it does.

Maybe it changes.

Maybe it fails completely.

But now you know something you did not know before.

You moved.

That is where the first part of this journey needed to take us.

The person started with somebody else defining him.

Crazy.

Lost his mind.

Lunatic.

Impossible.

By the end of the first chorus, he has not proven anything yet.

He has simply stopped standing there listening.

He is moving.

And now the song is ready to ask a harder question.

What happens when the criticism is no longer only about the dream?

What happens when somebody tells you that you are the thing that is broken?

 

SECTION ONE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 2

“You said I was broken
You said I’d never last”

This is where the song becomes more personal.

At the beginning, the criticism was aimed mostly at the vision.

You are crazy.

You lost your mind.

You are a lunatic.

It can never be done.

Those words attack what I believe I can do.

Broken attacks who I am.

That is different.

If somebody tells me my idea is wrong, I can examine the idea. Maybe they are right. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I need to change the plan.

But when somebody tells me I am broken and I will never last, they are no longer judging one idea or one decision. They are making a prediction about the rest of my life.

I have a problem with that.

People sometimes take one chapter of somebody’s life and turn it into the title of the whole book.

You failed, so you are a failure.

You lost everything, so you will never rebuild.

You made a mistake, so that mistake is who you are.

You went through something terrible, so you will always be damaged by it.

You fell once, so you will fall every time.

I do not believe people are that simple.

A person can be hurt without being finished.

A person can make mistakes without becoming the mistake.

A person can lose confidence and find it again.

A person can fall apart and rebuild differently.

And differently matters.

Rebuilding does not always mean returning to exactly who you were before.

Sometimes you cannot.

Sometimes you should not.

Life changes us.

Loss changes us.

Failure changes us.

Success changes us too.

The real question is what we do with those changes.

I understand something about starting again because I have had to do it.

Starting again is not the same as starting the first time.

The first time you begin something, excitement can carry you a long way. You see possibility. You imagine what could happen. You may not completely understand what failure costs because you have not paid for it yet.

Starting again is different.

Now you remember.

You know what disappointment feels like.

You know what it feels like when something you believed in does not work.

You know what it feels like when people judge the result without knowing everything that happened behind it.

You know how quickly life can change.

Then you have to decide whether you are willing to risk believing again.

That is where determination becomes real to me.

Determination is easy to talk about when nothing has tested it.

It means something different after the fall.

“But I took every failure
And turned it into gas”

I chose gas because gas creates movement.

Failure happened.

I cannot go backward and make it unhappen.

So what can I do with it?

I do not believe the saying that every failure automatically makes you stronger.

It does not.

Failure can hurt people badly.

It can destroy confidence.

It can create fear.

It can make somebody bitter.

It can make somebody afraid to trust themselves again.

It can convince a person that the safest thing to do is never risk anything anymore.

Failure does not automatically become strength.

You have to do something with it.

What did I learn?

What did I miss?

What part of this was my responsibility?

What was outside my control?

Did I rush?

Did I ignore good advice?

Did I trust somebody I should not have trusted?

Did I misunderstand the situation?

Was the idea wrong?

Was the idea good but the execution wrong?

Did circumstances change?

What would I do differently now?

Those are useful questions.

They do not erase what happened.

They give what happened somewhere to go.

That is what turning failure into gas means to me.

If life already made me pay for the lesson, I want the lesson.

I do not want to pay the price and walk away with nothing.

“You hide in your silence
You live in your doubt”

The song turns back toward the other person here.

But I do not hear these lines with the same anger as the earlier ones.

There is something sad about them.

Doubt can steal a lot of time without making much noise.

It does not always say quit.

Sometimes it says tomorrow.

Next year.

When I have more money.

When I know more.

When things calm down.

When I am completely ready.

When I feel more confident.

Some of those are good reasons to wait.

Timing matters.

Money matters.

Family responsibilities matter.

Preparation matters.

There are times when waiting is exactly the right decision.

But there is another kind of waiting.

Fear can disguise itself as preparation.

You tell yourself you are waiting for the right time when what you are really waiting for is the disappearance of uncertainty.

That day may never come.

At some point you have to ask yourself an uncomfortable question.

Am I waiting because waiting makes sense?

Or am I waiting because beginning scares me?

Only the person living that life can answer honestly.

“You point at the mountain
But you never climb out”

Everybody has a mountain.

It may not look like a mountain to anybody else.

That does not matter.

For one person it may be money.

For somebody else it is education.

Fear.

Grief.

Health.

Addiction.

Confidence.

A damaged relationship.

Starting over.

Admitting they were wrong.

Learning to trust again.

The mountain is whatever stands between where you are and where you are trying to go.

Sometimes the mountain is unfair.

Sometimes you did not put it there.

Sometimes somebody else helped put it there.

Sometimes life simply dropped it in front of you.

You can be completely right about why the mountain exists and still be the person standing in front of it.

That is the difficult part.

What can I do now?

Can I climb it?

Can I go around it?

Do I need help?

Do I need more knowledge?

Do I need different equipment?

Do I need another route?

Do I need more time?

Do I need to change the destination?

Those are all possibilities.

But pointing at the mountain forever does not move you.

Eventually something has to happen.

“You don’t know the hunger
You don’t know the cost”

This is where I start thinking about how little we really know about another person’s journey.

We see results.

We do not always see what created them.

Somebody may look successful today and we see the finished result.

We do not see every night they doubted themselves.

Every mistake.

Every setback.

Every time they almost stopped.

Every sacrifice.

Every person who told them it would not work.

The same is true in the opposite direction.

Somebody may look unsuccessful from the outside and we have no idea how far they have already travelled.

Maybe getting out of bed that morning was a victory nobody saw.

Maybe staying sober was the victory.

Maybe going back to school was the victory.

Maybe asking for help was the victory.

Maybe starting over was the victory.

That is why I try to be careful judging journeys I did not walk.

“You don’t know the hunger.”

Hunger is private.

I am not talking only about money or recognition.

Sometimes hunger is simply needing to know.

Can I do this?

Can I finish it?

Can I rebuild?

Can I become better at this?

Can I make something that did not exist before?

Can I become something different from what people decided I was?

Sometimes another person will never understand why something matters so much to you.

They do not have to.

But that hunger usually has a cost.

“You don’t know the cost.”

Time costs something.

Energy costs something.

Money costs something.

Comfort costs something.

Pride definitely costs something.

Sometimes you work for years before anybody sees a result.

Sometimes you work for years and the result still does not come.

That happens too.

Sometimes the cost is admitting that you were wrong and changing direction.

That can be one of the hardest costs of all because now you have to face yourself.

“You only count winners
After calling them lost”

I like this line because success has a funny way of changing people’s vocabulary.

Before somebody succeeds, they are unrealistic.

After they succeed, they are visionary.

Before success, they are obsessed.

After success, they are dedicated.

Before success, they are wasting their time.

After success, everybody talks about their perseverance.

Before success, they are lost.

After success, people sometimes act as though they knew all along.

The person may not have changed much at all.

The result changed.

Now there is evidence.

That should make us careful about judging somebody while their story is still being written.

Sometimes the person we called lost really was lost.

Sometimes being lost is how they discovered another road.

Sometimes the destination changes completely.

That does not automatically make the journey worthless.

Then the chorus returns.

“Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me”

I do not need to explain the chorus all over again because the words have not changed.

The journey has.

The first time we heard these words, the fire was mostly ambition.

There was a vision.

There was hunger.

There was movement.

Now failure has entered the song.

Broken has entered the song.

Doubt has entered.

Cost has entered.

The fire survived them.

That changes the emotional weight of the chorus.

At first the fire said:

I want this.

Now it says:

I have been hit and I am still here.

That is perseverance.

“Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high
At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why”

Again, the chorus ends with movement rather than victory.

That matters even more now.

Earlier, going forward was a decision.

Now it has become evidence.

The person has already encountered difficulty and continued.

That creates a different kind of confidence.

Not:

I know everything will work.

But:

I know everything does not have to work for me to keep learning and moving.

That confidence is much harder to take away.

“Call me crazy
Call me insane
Call me the storm
That you couldn’t contain”

This is one of the biggest turning points in the entire song.

At the beginning:

“Don’t call me crazy.”

Now:

“Call me crazy.”

That change is not accidental.

The word is losing its power.

At the beginning, I still want the other person to understand me.

I am defending myself.

I am explaining why the label is wrong.

Now something has changed.

Call me whatever you want.

I have somewhere to go.

There comes a point when you have to decide how much of your life you are willing to spend correcting somebody else’s opinion of you.

Sometimes you should defend yourself.

Sometimes something false needs to be corrected.

Sometimes a misunderstanding deserves an explanation.

But there are also people who have already decided who you are.

You can explain yourself for ten years and they will still see whatever they decided to see.

At some point, continuing the argument becomes another way of allowing them to control your time.

Maybe the better answer is to leave the argument and keep living.

Keep building.

Keep learning.

Keep moving.

“Call me the storm
That you couldn’t contain”

The storm is not about destroying everything around me.

It is momentum.

Something tried to stop the movement and failed.

That is why contain matters.

The label was supposed to become a boundary.

Stay here.

Do not go farther.

Do not try that.

Do not become something I cannot imagine you becoming.

The person keeps moving anyway.

“Call me reckless
Call me blind
But I saw the future
Before you opened your mind”

I am not saying I literally saw the future.

Nobody gets that guarantee.

I am talking about seeing possibility.

That is where almost everything we create begins.

Somebody stands on an empty piece of ground and sees what could be built there.

Somebody hears a rough musical idea and can already imagine where the song might go.

Somebody looks at an ordinary object and asks whether there is another way to make it work.

Somebody looks at their own damaged life and somehow sees the possibility that it does not have to remain that way forever.

That is imagination.

Imagination does not promise that something will happen.

It allows us to see that something might happen.

Then the work begins.

“Before you opened your mind.”

I like that part because the other person is not trapped forever in the role of critic.

They can change.

People should be allowed to change their minds.

If new evidence arrives and somebody says, “I was wrong,” I respect that more than somebody who keeps defending an old position because their pride will not let them move.

Changing your mind is not always weakness.

Sometimes refusing to change your mind is.

Then the music takes over.

“Heavy breakdown
Drums hit harder
Guitar riff drops low”

This belongs to the journey too.

The song needs the weight here.

The pressure has been building through the lyrics, and now the music physically changes underneath them.

The drums hit harder.

The guitar drops.

Everything gets heavier because the next accusation is heavier.

Until now, most of the song has been about what happened to the dreamer.

What people called him.

What they said about him.

How they judged his vision.

Now the song turns around.

It asks what happened to the person doing the judging.

“You were afraid to fail
So you never began”

That may be one of the hardest lines in the song.

Not because failure is shameful.

Because there was no failure.

There was no attempt.

Fear stopped the journey before reality could answer the question.

If you never begin, there are certain things you protect yourself from.

You cannot fail at something you never attempt.

You cannot be embarrassed by a result that never happens.

Nobody gets to say, “I told you so.”

Nobody watches you lose.

That can feel safe.

But there is another cost.

You never know.

What if I had tried?

What if I had started?

What if I had given myself one honest chance?

What if the first attempt failed but taught me enough for the second one?

What if I discovered I was good at something I never expected?

What if the original dream took me somewhere completely different?

Those questions can last much longer than embarrassment.

That is why I think fear of failure sometimes costs more than failure itself.

Failure gives you an answer.

Fear can leave you with a question for the rest of your life.

“You buried your courage
In the palm of your hand”

The courage is still there.

That is important.

I did not say it disappeared.

I did not say the person never had any courage.

It is buried in their own hand.

They still possess it.

Maybe they did not use it when the first opportunity came.

That does not mean the story is finished.

The person who was afraid yesterday can make a different decision tomorrow.

The person who quit can begin again.

The person who spent years saying it was too late can stop saying it.

The person who stayed silent can speak.

The person who mocked somebody else for trying can finally try something themselves.

That is one of the reasons I do not want the critic in this song turned into a permanent villain.

People change.

That is one of the central ideas of the entire song.

If I believe the dreamer can change, rebuild and become more, then I have to leave the same possibility open for the person who doubted them.

Courage is not something a few special people are born with and everybody else goes without.

A lot of the time courage is simply a decision made while fear is still sitting beside you.

You can be afraid and move.

You can doubt yourself and move.

You can remember the last failure and move.

You can have no guarantee at all and still decide that something deserves an honest attempt.

That is where this part of the journey leaves us.

The person who began the song being called crazy has moved through judgment, failure, doubt and fear.

The criticism has not disappeared.

What has changed is its authority.

It no longer gets to make the decision.

And now the song is ready for one of its biggest landmarks.

“I may fall down
I may bleed pride
But I won’t die wondering
What I left inside”

 

SECTION ONE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 3

“I may fall down
I may bleed pride
But I won’t die wondering
What I left inside”

This is one of the biggest landmarks in DON’T CALL ME CRAZY.

Everything before this has been bringing us here.

The criticism.

The labels.

The laughter.

The failure.

The doubt.

The person who was too afraid to begin.

Now the argument becomes much simpler.

I may fail.

I know that.

I may fall down.

I know that too.

My pride may take a beating.

I have lived long enough to know what that feels like.

But there is something I am more afraid of than failure.

Reaching the end of my life and wondering what I never gave myself the chance to discover.

That is what this lyric is really about.

I think we spend a lot of time talking about the cost of trying.

That makes sense.

Before making a serious decision, we should think about what can go wrong.

What could I lose?

How much will this cost?

What happens if it fails?

Who else could be affected?

Those are responsible questions.

But there is another question that deserves to sit beside them.

What could it cost me if I never try?

That cost is much harder to measure.

There is no bill for regret.

Nobody sends you an invoice for the years you spent wondering.

There is no receipt showing what you might have become.

You simply carry the question.

What if?

I think those two words can become very heavy.

What if I had started?

What if I had gone back to school?

What if I had written the book?

What if I had tried the business?

What if I had learned the instrument?

What if I had apologized?

What if I had taken the opportunity?

What if I had given myself one more chance after the first one failed?

Nobody can chase every possibility.

We have responsibilities.

We have limits.

We have families.

We have bills.

We have health.

We have circumstances that sometimes make a decision impossible no matter how badly we want something.

I understand that.

This song is not telling anybody to throw responsibility away and chase every dream that enters their head.

It is asking for honesty.

If I walk away from something, why am I walking away?

Because it is the right decision?

Or because I am afraid?

Those are not the same thing.

“I may fall down.”

There is no guarantee hidden in that line.

I might lose.

I might discover I was wrong.

I might work hard and still not get where I wanted to go.

That possibility has to be accepted before determination means anything.

If I only continue when success is guaranteed, that is not courage.

That is certainty.

Most important things in life do not give us certainty.

“I may bleed pride.”

Pride deserves its own line because pride can stop us from doing a lot of things.

Sometimes the financial loss is not what scares us most.

It is looking foolish.

It is having somebody say, “I told you so.”

It is remembering how confidently we talked about something and then watching it fall apart.

That hurts.

Pride remembers who was watching.

It remembers who laughed.

It remembers who warned you.

Sometimes pride would rather never attempt something than risk having to admit it did not work.

That is a terrible reason to leave something important inside you.

If I fail, my pride may hurt.

I can survive hurt pride.

“But I won’t die wondering
What I left inside”

That is the line I would want somebody to remember from this song.

Not because everybody should take every risk.

Because everybody should at least ask themselves whether there is something inside them they have never given an honest chance.

Maybe the answer is no.

That is fine.

Maybe you are exactly where you want to be.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But maybe something immediately came into your mind when you read those words.

Something you keep putting off.

Something you used to talk about.

Something you quietly stopped mentioning because people laughed.

Something you tried once and failed at.

Something you decided you were too old to begin.

Something you still think about when nobody else is around.

I cannot tell you whether you should do it.

Nobody reading a webpage can make that decision for you.

But I think the question deserves an honest answer.

What did I leave inside?

Then the chorus returns.

“Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me”

The chorus does not need another complete explanation.

We already know what the fire means.

But its emotional weight has changed again.

At first the fire was ambition.

Then it became persistence after failure.

Now it has become something even deeper.

It is the refusal to leave part of yourself undiscovered because somebody else could not understand why it mattered.

The person has accepted that falling is possible.

That changes everything.

He is not moving because he believes he cannot lose.

He is moving because he has decided that the possibility of losing is still better than never knowing.

“Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high
At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why”

Once again, the song returns to movement.

At least I went forward.

The more times those words return, the more I like them.

They keep the song grounded.

It would have been easy to write a chorus about becoming the greatest.

Winning everything.

Standing above everybody who doubted me.

That is not what this song is really about.

It is about participation in your own life.

I went forward.

Maybe I made it.

Maybe I did not.

Maybe the destination changed while I was moving.

Maybe I discovered that what I originally wanted was not what I needed.

But I found out because I moved.

Standing still would never have given me that answer.

Then something important happens.

“Don’t call me crazy
Now that I proved you wrong
You were the doubt
I turned into song”

For the first time, success enters the lyric directly.

“Now that I proved you wrong.”

Something worked.

The person who was laughed at has evidence now.

The easy direction would be revenge.

You laughed at me.

Look at me now.

You were wrong.

I won.

That feeling is human.

Anybody who has been doubted knows there can be satisfaction in proving somebody wrong.

I am not going to pretend there is not.

But I do not think revenge is the most interesting part of these lines.

The important line is:

“You were the doubt
I turned into song”

That is transformation.

Something that could have stayed negative became useful.

I think that is one of the things creativity does best.

You can take anger and turn it into music.

You can take grief and write about it.

You can take a question that has bothered you for years and build a song around it.

You can take something funny that happened and make somebody else laugh.

You can take history and turn it into a reason for somebody to become curious.

You can take doubt and turn it into a song.

The original experience does not disappear.

It becomes material.

That is exactly what happened here.

If somebody doubts me and I spend the next twenty years arguing with them, then their doubt still owns a lot of my time.

If I take that doubt and create something with it, now I own what I do with it.

That is a much better trade.

This is also where the song connects strongly to what MOITA has become for me.

A lot of songs begin with something that will not leave me alone.

An experience.

A question.

A memory.

Something I read.

Something somebody said.

Something that happened in my life.

Something I watched happen to somebody else.

Something from history.

Sometimes something that made me angry.

Sometimes something that made me laugh.

Writing gives all of those things somewhere to go.

Then something interesting happens.

Once the song leaves me and reaches another person, it can become something different for them.

The doubt that inspired my song may remind somebody else of a completely different moment in their life.

Now the song belongs to two stories.

Mine and theirs.

That is one of the reasons I write.

“Don’t call me crazy
Don’t act surprised
You only saw madness
I saw the rise”

Now we are looking backward at the beginning from a different place.

At the beginning there was no proof.

That matters.

It is easy to say somebody had vision after the result appears.

Before the result, vision and foolishness can sometimes look very similar.

Both involve believing in something that does not exist yet.

The difference is often discovered only through work.

That is why I do not want this lyric to pretend the dreamer knew the future with certainty.

He did not.

He saw possibility.

“You only saw madness
I saw the rise”

Two people looked at the same beginning and imagined two different endings.

One saw failure.

One saw possibility.

Neither had proof yet.

The person who believed still had to do the work.

That is important because belief without work would have left the whole thing exactly where it started.

An idea.

What changed the story was movement.

The person worked long enough for possibility to become evidence.

That is when everybody’s language changes.

Now the crazy idea looks different.

Now the person who was supposedly lost looks determined.

Now the risk looks like courage.

Results have a strange way of cleaning up the story afterward.

Real life is usually much messier while it is happening.

There are wrong turns.

Doubts.

Mistakes.

Days when you think maybe the critics were right.

Days when you think you were right.

Days when you have no idea.

Then you keep working.

That middle part is where most of life happens.

“Call me crazy
Call me insane
Call me the thunder
That broke through the chain”

Earlier I became the storm.

Now I become the thunder.

The song is getting close to the end, and the images have grown with it.

Thunder announces itself.

You do not have to ask whether it happened.

You hear it.

That is what the result has become.

At the beginning, the person had to explain the vision because nobody could see it.

Now something happened.

There is evidence.

But the line that matters most to me here is the chain.

“That broke through the chain.”

What is the chain?

It can be the label.

It can be fear.

It can be somebody else’s expectations.

It can be the identity you were given years ago and kept carrying long after it stopped fitting.

It can even be your own memory of failure.

Chains are not always put on us by other people.

Sometimes we build our own.

I failed once, so I cannot do it.

I am too old.

I am not educated enough.

I am not talented enough.

People like me do not do things like that.

I have already wasted too much time.

Those thoughts can become chains because eventually we stop questioning them.

We treat them like facts.

Sometimes they are not facts.

Sometimes they are conclusions we made years ago and never examined again.

Breaking through the chain means questioning the conclusion.

Is this still true?

Was it ever true?

What happens if I test it?

Maybe the answer confirms the limit.

That can happen.

But maybe the chain was never as strong as you thought.

“Call me crazy
Say what you want”

We have now travelled almost the entire distance of the title.

At the beginning:

“Don’t call me crazy.”

Now:

“Call me crazy
Say what you want.”

That is not the same person speaking.

At the beginning, the label still matters enough to fight against.

By the end, the speaker has stopped asking for permission to define himself.

That is the emotional destination of the song.

You can have your opinion.

I do not have to live inside it.

There is freedom in that.

It does not mean words suddenly stop hurting.

They do not.

It does not mean I stop caring what everybody thinks.

I care what certain people think.

Most of us do.

We are human.

But caring about somebody’s opinion and giving them control over your direction are different things.

That is what the speaker finally understands.

“I was never the problem
I was the one you could not become”

This is the final lyric, and it deserves time because it can easily be misunderstood.

Read too quickly, it can sound arrogant.

I am better than you.

You wish you were me.

Everybody who criticized me was jealous.

That is not what I mean.

I would not believe something that simple.

People criticize for all kinds of reasons.

Sometimes they are right.

Sometimes they are worried about us.

Sometimes they know something we do not.

Sometimes they misunderstand us.

Sometimes they are frustrated with their own lives.

Sometimes they simply do not like the idea.

The final line is about something more specific.

Projection.

Sometimes another person’s courage makes us uncomfortable because it reminds us of something we did not do.

They took the chance.

We did not.

They started again.

We did not.

They spoke.

We stayed silent.

They tried after failing.

We decided one failure was enough.

They allowed themselves to look foolish for a while because they wanted an answer.

We protected ourselves from embarrassment.

Then watching them can become uncomfortable.

Not because they are better than us.

Because they remind us of a decision we made.

That is what I mean by:

“I was the one you could not become.”

At that moment, I made a choice you could not make.

That does not mean you can never make it.

That part matters to me.

I do not want the song ending by permanently condemning the other person.

If the entire message of DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is that people should not be trapped inside somebody else’s definition of them, then I cannot turn around at the end and trap the critic inside mine.

They can change too.

The person who laughed can begin.

The person who doubted can learn.

The person who was afraid can become courageous.

The person who told somebody else their dream was impossible can finally go after something of their own.

Everybody is unfinished.

That includes both people in this song.

So when I say:

“I was never the problem”

I am not claiming I have never been a problem in my life.

That would be ridiculous.

I have made mistakes.

I have been wrong.

I have failed.

I have had to learn things the hard way.

The line belongs specifically to this argument.

The willingness to dream was not the problem.

Trying was not the problem.

Aiming high was not automatically the problem.

Refusing to let somebody else’s fear make my decision was not the problem.

Maybe the real problem was that one person had decided the future before either of us had lived it.

And now we have reached the end of the song.

Look at how far the title travelled.

The song began with resistance.

Do not call me crazy.

Then it moved through action.

I kept walking.

Then failure entered.

I turned it into fuel.

Then doubt entered.

I kept moving.

Then the word lost its power.

Call me crazy.

Then fear was exposed.

You never began.

Then the deepest question arrived.

I will not die wondering what I left inside.

Then doubt became creativity.

I turned it into song.

Finally, approval stopped mattering.

Say what you want.

That is the journey.

Not from failure to guaranteed success.

Not from weakness to invincibility.

Not from being laughed at to becoming better than everybody else.

The real journey is from allowing somebody else’s judgment to define the conversation to taking responsibility for your own direction.

That is a much harder thing.

Because responsibility means I cannot blame the critic forever either.

At some point I have to move.

I have to learn.

I have to make decisions.

I have to accept consequences.

I have to admit when I am wrong.

I have to adjust.

I have to decide what deserves another attempt and what deserves to be left behind.

Nobody can do all of that for me.

That is what I hear when DON’T CALL ME CRAZY reaches its final line.

Listen to good advice.

Respect reality.

Ask questions.

Learn from people who know more than you.

Change direction when the evidence tells you to.

Do not confuse stubbornness with courage.

But after all of that, remember something.

It is your life.

Nobody else knows everything still inside you.

Nobody else can guarantee what you will become.

And nobody else should get the final word simply because they spoke first or spoke louder.

Maybe you will succeed.

Maybe you will fail.

Maybe you will discover something completely different from what you originally went looking for.

There is only one way to receive some answers.

Begin.

 

SECTION TWO

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY

THE STORY

The story behind DON’T CALL ME CRAZY does not come from one single day.

It comes from a pattern I have seen throughout my life.

Somebody has an idea.

Somebody else immediately explains why it will not work.

Sometimes the idea deserves criticism.

Sometimes it needs to change.

Sometimes it is completely wrong.

But sometimes the only thing wrong with the idea is that nobody can see the result yet.

That difference has always interested me.

I have spent most of my working life in industries where talk eventually has to become action.

Construction is very good at exposing the difference.

You can sit around a table and discuss a job for hours.

You can talk about grades, elevations, drainage, equipment, materials, timing, cost and everything that might go wrong.

At some point, somebody still has to go outside and do the work.

The machine has to move.

The ground has to change.

The job has to begin.

That way of thinking became part of me long before I started writing songs seriously.

I have been self-employed since 1988.

When you work for yourself, especially around construction and equipment, there is nobody standing behind you waiting to solve every problem.

Things break.

Weather changes.

Jobs change.

People change their minds.

Money gets tight.

Schedules fall apart.

You make decisions.

Sometimes you make the right one.

Sometimes you make the wrong one and have to fix it.

You learn very quickly that complaining does not move dirt.

That sounds simple, but it has shaped a lot of how I think.

If something is wrong, deal with it.

If something can be improved, improve it.

If you made a mistake, admit it and correct it.

If something is not working, find another way.

I think that same attitude is sitting underneath this entire song.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is not really about proving I am smarter than somebody else.

It is about refusing to stop moving just because somebody else is standing still.

I have always been interested in ideas.

Even when I was younger, I wanted to know how things worked.

I took radios apart.

I looked at automotive ideas.

I built illuminated address signs because I thought there was another way to make something useful and visible.

I designed tools while working in construction.

I came up with ideas while working around the railroad.

Some worked.

Some did not.

That is part of creating.

You do not need every idea to work.

You need enough curiosity to keep asking questions.

Could this be better?

Could this be different?

What happens if I try this?

Why does everybody do it this way?

Is there another way?

Those questions can make people uncomfortable.

A lot of people feel safer around things that are already proven.

I understand that.

Proven things are easier to trust.

There is evidence.

There is a history.

There is something you can point at and say, “That works.”

An idea does not give you that comfort.

At the beginning, an idea is only possibility.

That is why people often laugh early and admire later.

They are reacting to the evidence available at the time.

Before success, there is very little evidence.

That is where belief has to do some of the work.

I have lived enough life to understand that belief by itself is not enough.

You need work.

You need discipline.

You need knowledge.

You need people who will tell you when you are wrong.

You need enough humility to change direction.

You need enough patience to accept that something might take much longer than you expected.

You also need enough stubbornness not to quit every time somebody else does not understand what you are trying to build.

That balance is hard.

Too much confidence and you stop listening.

Too much doubt and you never begin.

Somewhere in between is where most meaningful work happens.

That is the place this song lives.

THE PEOPLE WHO SAY IT CANNOT BE DONE

I have never understood why some people become so invested in telling somebody else what they cannot do.

Advice is one thing.

I respect advice.

If somebody has experience I do not have, I want to hear what they know.

If somebody can see a flaw in my plan, that can save me time, money and frustration.

Good criticism is valuable.

But there is another kind.

The person who says no before they even understand the idea.

The person who laughs first.

The person who tells you that you are wasting your time because they would never take the risk themselves.

The person who keeps reminding you of every old mistake while you are trying to build something new.

That kind of criticism can become dangerous if you start carrying it around as truth.

People often speak with more certainty than they actually possess.

They say, “You’ll never make it.”

How do they know?

They say, “That will never work.”

How do they know?

They say, “You’re not that kind of person.”

What kind of person?

The person I was yesterday?

The person I was ten years ago?

The person you decided I was?

Human beings change.

That should be obvious, but we forget it all the time.

We learn.

We fail.

We mature.

We become better at some things.

Worse at others.

Life knocks certain habits out of us and gives us new ones.

We can become more patient.

More disciplined.

More cautious.

More determined.

Sometimes one experience changes the entire direction of a life.

So when somebody confidently tells another person what they can never become, I have trouble taking that seriously.

None of us knows the complete answer.

That is part of what makes the future worth walking into.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A DREAM AND THE WORK

There is something else I wanted inside this song because determination gets talked about in a way that can become unrealistic.

A dream is not enough.

I can sit in a chair and dream about ten different things.

That does not build any of them.

A dream becomes serious when work begins.

That is when the fantasy meets reality.

Reality asks questions.

Do you have the skill?

Do you have the patience?

Do you have the resources?

Can you learn what you do not know?

Can you keep going when the excitement wears off?

Can you handle criticism?

Can you adjust without losing the purpose?

Can you fail without deciding the whole thing was meaningless?

That is where the dream becomes real.

I have seen people who love the idea of success but hate the work that comes before it.

They want the result.

They do not want the process.

The process is usually the part that makes the result possible.

You cannot skip it.

I think construction taught me that in a very physical way.

Nobody drives past a finished site and thinks about every pass of the grader.

Every bucket of dirt.

Every breakdown.

Every correction.

Every day where the weather made everything miserable.

They see the finished result.

That is natural.

But the person who built it remembers the process.

Creative work is the same.

People hear a finished song.

They do not hear every idea that did not work.

They do not hear every line that got replaced.

They do not see all the thinking behind it.

They hear the final three or four minutes.

That is what they are supposed to hear.

But the creator knows what happened before that.

That hidden work matters.

It is also why I think people who build things tend to respect other people who are building something.

They know the price.

Maybe they do not like what you are creating.

Maybe they disagree with your choices.

But they understand effort.

There is a difference between criticizing from experience and criticizing from the sidelines.

That difference appears in the song when I say:

“You don’t build nothing
You don’t even try”

Those words are direct.

They are meant to be.

I am not saying everybody has to build a company or invent something.

We all build in different ways.

You can build a family.

You can build trust.

You can build a career.

You can build a community.

You can build your health.

You can rebuild yourself.

The point is participation.

The point is trying.

THE TIMES I HAD TO REBUILD

I could not write this song honestly without understanding what it means to start over.

There have been times in my life when the version of the future I expected disappeared.

That changes the way you think.

The first time you begin something, there is often excitement.

You see possibility.

You may not fully understand how much can go wrong.

Starting again is different.

Now you have experience.

You know what losing feels like.

You know what disappointment feels like.

You know how quickly life can change.

That knowledge can make you stronger.

It can also make you afraid.

There is a temptation after a hard fall to stop taking chances.

Keep everything smaller.

Expect less.

Risk less.

Hope less.

That way, maybe it will hurt less next time.

I understand why people do that.

Sometimes survival requires caution.

But if caution becomes permanent, it can slowly turn into surrender.

That is where I have always had trouble.

I can accept losing something.

I have a harder time accepting that the loss gets to decide everything I do afterward.

That is why the line about taking every failure and turning it into gas means something to me.

I do not believe failure automatically makes anybody stronger.

That sounds nice, but it is not always true.

Failure can make people bitter.

It can make people afraid.

It can make people stop trusting themselves.

What matters is what you eventually do with it.

Can you take something from the experience?

Can you learn what went wrong?

Can you recognize what was within your control and what was not?

Can you improve the next decision?

Can you become better prepared?

If you can do that, then at least the failure gave you something besides pain.

I have had enough difficult chapters to know I would rather learn than carry them around as proof that I should never try again.

If life made me pay for the lesson, I want the lesson.

That thinking is inside this song.

WHY THE WORD CRAZY

The word crazy has a particular weight.

People use it casually all the time.

That is how I use it in this song.

I am not talking about mental illness.

I am talking about the way people sometimes use one word to dismiss a person whose thinking does not fit comfortably inside what everyone else expects.

That happens everywhere.

Somebody thinks differently.

Crazy.

Somebody takes an unusual risk.

Crazy.

Somebody refuses to give up.

Crazy.

Somebody starts something at an age other people think is too late.

Crazy.

Sometimes the word is playful.

Sometimes it is cruel.

Sometimes it is just lazy.

It can replace a real conversation.

Instead of asking why somebody believes in an idea, we label them.

Once you label a person, you do not have to understand them.

That is one reason the title works for me.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is not really asking somebody to stop using a word.

It is saying, do not mistake your inability to see what I see for proof that there is something wrong with me.

Maybe I am wrong.

Maybe you are.

Time will tell.

Until then, I am working.

THE FEAR OF FAILURE

One of the lines that became more important to me as the song developed was:

“You were afraid to fail
So you never began”

I think fear of failure has stopped more people than failure itself.

Failure at least means something happened.

You tried.

You learned.

You discovered something.

Fear can stop everything before the first step.

That does not mean people should take stupid risks.

There is nothing wrong with protecting your family, your finances or your future.

Sometimes saying no to an idea is the smartest thing you can do.

The question is why.

Am I walking away because the evidence tells me this is a bad decision?

Or am I walking away because I cannot stand the possibility of looking foolish?

Those are different reasons.

Embarrassment has more power over people than we admit.

Nobody wants to fail publicly.

Nobody wants people saying, “I knew it.”

Nobody wants to feel stupid.

That fear can make a safe life look much more attractive.

There is nothing wrong with a safe life if that is what you truly want.

The problem begins when safety becomes something you resent later.

When you look back and realize you did not choose peace.

You chose fear.

That is why the song asks what happens if you never begin.

You protect yourself from failure.

You also protect yourself from the answer.

You will never know.

That is the part I find difficult.

I can live with being wrong.

I have been wrong before.

I can live with something failing.

I have had things fail.

What I do not want is to reach the end of my life wondering what I left inside because I was too afraid to test it.

That is probably the most personal idea in the song.

THE HUNGER OTHER PEOPLE CANNOT SEE

People see results.

They do not always see hunger.

That word can mean many things.

I am not talking only about wanting money or recognition.

Sometimes hunger is simply the need to finish something that matters to you.

It may not matter to anybody else.

That does not make it meaningless.

Somebody can spend years restoring an old car because they love it.

Somebody can spend years writing a book that never becomes a bestseller.

Somebody can learn an instrument at seventy.

Somebody can rebuild a relationship.

Somebody can train for a race they have no chance of winning.

Why?

Because the meaning is not always in beating somebody else.

Sometimes the meaning is in discovering what you can become by doing the work.

That is the kind of hunger I am talking about.

Other people cannot always see it.

They see your behaviour.

They see the hours.

They see what you gave up.

They may decide you are obsessed.

Maybe you are.

But only you know what the thing means to you.

That does not give you permission to neglect every responsibility in your life.

Balance matters.

People matter.

Family matters.

But there are times when something inside you demands effort.

If you ignore it long enough, it does not always disappear.

Sometimes it turns into regret.

That is why I wanted the song to acknowledge the cost.

“You don’t know the hunger
You don’t know the cost”

People often look at a successful result and make the whole journey smaller than it was.

Lucky.

Right place, right time.

Good connections.

Sometimes those things are true.

Luck is real.

Connections matter.

Opportunity is not distributed equally.

Some people start with advantages other people never get.

I do not deny any of that.

But even when luck plays a role, we rarely know the complete cost somebody paid to reach where they are.

That is why I try not to judge somebody’s journey from the outside.

I do not know enough.

THE MOMENT THE SONG TURNS

The early part of DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is defensive.

Somebody is being called things.

Crazy.

Lunatic.

Broken.

The voice answers back.

Then something changes.

“Call me crazy
Call me insane”

Now the word has lost its power.

That is a very important moment in the song.

The person stops begging to be understood.

I think there comes a point in life when you realize you can waste enormous amounts of energy trying to correct somebody else’s opinion of you.

Sometimes they do not want to change it.

Sometimes no amount of explanation will help.

You can spend years presenting evidence to somebody who already made up their mind.

At some point, you have to ask whether that is really where your energy belongs.

Maybe not.

Maybe the better answer is to continue living.

Continue building.

Let the work speak.

That is why the song becomes stronger there.

Call me whatever you want.

I have somewhere to go.

That is not the same as pretending words do not hurt.

They can.

Anybody who says they never care what anybody thinks is probably not telling the complete truth.

We are social creatures.

We care about belonging.

We care what people close to us think.

Being rejected hurts.

Being mocked hurts.

But caring about an opinion and obeying it are two different things.

That is the freedom inside that part of the song.

You are allowed to think what you want about me.

I am still allowed to keep moving.

WHY I DID NOT WANT REVENGE TO BE THE ENDING

There was another choice I wanted to avoid with this song.

It would have been easy to turn the whole thing into revenge.

You doubted me.

I succeeded.

Now I am better than you.

That is a very simple story.

I do not think it is the strongest one.

Success does not automatically make somebody a better human being.

Failure does not make somebody less worthy.

I did not want the song to become a celebration of humiliating people who were wrong.

There is some satisfaction in proving doubt wrong.

I am human.

Of course there is.

But I wanted something more important underneath it.

The real victory is not making the critic feel small.

The real victory is refusing to become small because of the critic.

That is different.

If my entire life becomes an attempt to prove somebody else wrong, then they are still controlling me.

They are still choosing the destination.

I would rather build something because I believe it matters.

If success also proves somebody wrong along the way, fine.

But that cannot be the only reason.

That is why “You were the doubt I turned into song” matters.

The doubt becomes material.

It becomes fuel.

It becomes something creative.

It does not remain an argument forever.

That is a much better use of it.

THE FINAL LINE

The ending is probably the hardest line in the song.

“I was never the problem
I was the one you could not become”

That can sound arrogant if it is read the wrong way.

I do not mean that I am better than another person.

I do not mean everybody who disagrees with me secretly wishes they were me.

That would be ridiculous.

The line is about projection.

Sometimes another person’s courage can make us uncomfortable because it reminds us of our own fear.

Somebody starts something we wanted to start.

Somebody leaves a situation we were afraid to leave.

Somebody speaks up when we stayed silent.

Somebody takes a chance we refused to take.

In those moments, criticizing them can be easier than examining ourselves.

That is the idea behind the line.

Maybe the problem was never the dreamer.

Maybe the dreamer was simply holding up a mirror.

That is a very different thing.

And it does not mean the critic is permanently condemned.

People can change.

People can begin again.

The person who was afraid yesterday can become courageous tomorrow.

I believe that too.

Maybe that is the quiet hope inside the song.

The person being criticized keeps moving.

But the person doing the criticizing still has a choice.

They can stay where they are.

Or they can finally take their own first step.

HOW THE SONG CAME TOGETHER

The song needed to sound heavy because the message is not gentle.

There is anger in it.

But I did not want uncontrolled anger.

The song had to feel disciplined.

The heavy riff gives it weight.

The double-kick drums push it forward.

The breakdown gives the middle of the song a physical shift.

The guitar dropping low at that point is not just there because heavy music sounds good.

It prepares the listener for the accusation that follows.

“You were afraid to fail
So you never began”

That line needs weight underneath it.

The song has already spent time defending the dreamer.

Now it turns directly toward the person who never started.

That is why the music gets heavier there.

I wanted the arrangement to feel like determination itself.

Pressure builds.

The song keeps moving.

The chorus returns.

The words become more confident.

By the end, the person is no longer asking for permission or understanding.

They have made peace with being misunderstood.

That is where the song needed to finish.

WHY THIS SONG HAD TO EXIST

I think DON’T CALL ME CRAZY had to exist because this subject is bigger than ambition.

It is really about permission.

Who gets to decide what you attempt with your life?

Obviously, reality gets a vote.

Responsibilities get a vote.

The people we love deserve consideration.

Facts matter.

Consequences matter.

But somewhere in all of that, your own voice has to matter too.

You get one life.

At some point, you have to decide what risks are worth taking.

What work is worth doing.

What dream deserves another chance.

What failure taught you enough to try differently.

What criticism deserves attention.

And what criticism deserves to be left behind.

Nobody else can make every one of those decisions for you.

That responsibility belongs to you.

I think that is why the song feels so closely connected to MOITA.

MOITA is built around asking questions.

It is built around stories.

It is built around learning from failure instead of hiding it.

It is built around curiosity.

It is built around the belief that a life does not have to fit neatly into one description.

Builder.

Songwriter.

Inventor.

Businessman.

Prisoner.

Failure.

Success.

Any one word can describe one chapter and still fail to describe the whole person.

That matters to me.

I do not want to be reduced to the worst thing that happened to me.

I do not want to be reduced to the best thing either.

A life is larger than one moment.

That is true for everybody.

Maybe that is the deepest reason I wrote DON’T CALL ME CRAZY.

Do not decide you know the ending while somebody is still writing the story.

I would not want somebody doing that to me.

I do not want to do it to anybody else.

And if somebody has already decided who I am, I still have one choice left.

Keep writing.

 

SECTION THREE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 1

“You said I was crazy
You said I lost my mind
You laughed at the vision
That you were too scared to find”

This song begins with judgment.

Not disagreement.

Judgment.

There is a difference.

Somebody can disagree with an idea and still respect the person carrying it.

Somebody can ask questions.

They can challenge the plan.

They can point out weaknesses.

They can say, “I don’t think this will work.”

That can be useful.

But once somebody decides you are crazy, the conversation changes.

Now they are not questioning the idea.

They are questioning you.

That is why I wanted the song to begin there.

Before anything is proven, before anything succeeds, before the person has a result they can point to, all they really have is belief.

That can be a lonely place.

I have always found it interesting how comfortable people can become predicting somebody else’s future.

They look at where you are today and assume that is where you will always be.

They look at what you have failed at and assume failure is your identity.

They look at what does not exist yet and decide it never will.

That is a dangerous way to look at people.

We are unfinished.

All of us.

A person can learn something tomorrow that changes the next ten years of their life.

They can meet somebody.

Read something.

Lose something.

Build something.

Fail at something.

Start again.

One decision can change direction.

That does not mean everybody becomes anything they want.

Life has limits.

Reality matters.

But nobody standing beside you can completely know what you may become.

That is what I hear in the first two lines.

“You said I was crazy.
You said I lost my mind.”

The labels arrive before the evidence.

Then comes:

“You laughed at the vision
That you were too scared to find”

That line turns the question around.

Why do some people laugh at another person’s ambition?

Sometimes because the idea really is ridiculous.

That happens.

Sometimes because they genuinely think the person is making a mistake.

That happens too.

But sometimes another person’s courage makes us uncomfortable.

Maybe they are attempting something we once wanted to attempt.

Maybe they are taking a risk we were afraid to take.

Maybe they are beginning again when we decided beginning again was impossible.

That can create an uncomfortable mirror.

It is easier to laugh at the person than to ask what their courage is bringing up inside us.

I do not think every critic secretly wants to be the person they criticize.

That would be too simple.

But human beings do compare themselves to one another.

Sometimes another person’s movement makes our own stillness more visible.

That is worth thinking about.

“You called me a lunatic
Said it could never be done”

Now the criticism becomes absolute.

Not difficult.

Not unlikely.

Impossible.

“It could never be done.”

Those words have stopped a lot of people.

They have also challenged a lot of people.

I think it depends on what happens after you hear them.

Do you accept them?

Do you rebel against them?

Do you examine them?

The smartest answer is probably to examine them.

Why does this person think it cannot be done?

Is there something they know that I do not?

Do I have a problem in the plan?

Do I need more skill?

More money?

More time?

A different approach?

That is where confidence needs humility.

I do not believe in ignoring reality because somebody called you a dreamer.

That can become stupidity very quickly.

But I also do not believe “impossible” should be accepted simply because it was spoken confidently.

Ask why.

Then test the answer.

“But while you kept talking
I was walking through the fire and sun”

This is where the song moves.

The first lines are words.

Now there is action.

That contrast is the backbone of the whole song.

Talking can be useful.

Planning can be useful.

Debating can be useful.

But eventually something has to move.

I learned that very early from construction.

You can discuss the grade.

Discuss the plan.

Discuss the weather.

Discuss the equipment.

Discuss what might go wrong.

At some point, somebody still has to start the machine.

That is what “I was walking” means to me.

I stopped trying to win the argument and started doing the work.

That is a much stronger answer.

And I did not write:

“I was walking through a beautiful field.”

I wrote:

“I was walking through the fire and sun.”

There is difficulty there.

Heat.

Pressure.

Discomfort.

That matters because I never wanted this song to sound like positive thinking magically makes life easy.

It does not.

Sometimes moving forward hurts.

Sometimes the people criticizing you are right about part of the difficulty.

Sometimes the road is harder than you expected.

Sometimes you lose money.

Time.

Pride.

Sleep.

Relationships change.

Plans collapse.

The fact that the road is difficult does not automatically mean the direction is wrong.

It means you need to decide whether the destination is worth the cost.

“You don’t build nothing
You don’t even try”

The song gets sharper here.

There is frustration in these lines.

I wanted that.

Because there is a particular kind of criticism that bothers me.

It is not criticism from somebody who has tried.

People who have built things usually understand failure.

They know plans change.

They know mistakes happen.

They know that something can look easy from the outside and be completely different once you are responsible for it.

Those people may disagree with you strongly.

But often there is something useful inside what they say.

The criticism I am talking about here comes from somebody who never enters the arena.

They do not build.

They do not try.

But they have endless confidence explaining why everybody else should stop.

That is where:

“You don’t build nothing
You don’t even try”

comes from.

I do not mean building only in a physical sense.

Most people spend their lives building something.

A family.

A career.

A reputation.

A skill.

A relationship.

A business.

A life.

Somebody recovering from a terrible chapter is rebuilding.

Somebody learning to trust again is rebuilding.

Somebody returning to school later in life is building.

Somebody raising a child with patience is building.

Somebody trying to become better than the person they were yesterday is building.

The question is not whether everybody should create the same thing.

The question is whether you participate in your own life.

“You shoot down the dreamers
Then ask yourself why”

This is where the song widens.

Now I am not only talking about one critic and one dreamer.

I am thinking about the way we treat people who are trying something.

We say we admire courage.

We say we need entrepreneurs.

Inventors.

Artists.

Leaders.

People willing to think differently.

Then when one of them appears before the success arrives, we sometimes treat them like fools.

That is strange.

We celebrate dreamers after the dream becomes evidence.

The harder moment is before.

Before the company exists.

Before the invention works.

Before the song is heard.

Before the person rebuilds.

Before the result proves anything.

That is when encouragement matters most.

“You shoot down the dreamers.”

Sometimes with cruelty.

Sometimes with one careless sentence.

Sometimes with a laugh.

Sometimes by constantly reminding somebody who they used to be.

Then later people wonder why the person stopped trying.

Words are not responsible for every choice another human being makes.

I do not believe that.

But words carry weight.

Most of us remember something somebody said years ago.

Maybe it was kind.

Maybe it was cruel.

Maybe they forgot it ten minutes later.

You did not.

That tells us something about how careful we should be when somebody is standing at the beginning of something.

That is where confidence can be fragile.

Then the first chorus arrives.

“Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me”

This is the first real statement of identity in the song.

Up to this point, the speaker has been reacting to what somebody else says.

Now he explains what they cannot see.

The fire.

I did not mean fire as some mystical thing.

I meant hunger.

Drive.

Purpose.

The reason somebody gets up and keeps working when nobody else understands why.

You cannot always see that from the outside.

You see the person.

You see what they have today.

You see whether they succeeded yet.

You see whether they failed.

But you cannot see how badly they want something.

You cannot see the promise they made to themselves.

You cannot see what they are willing to learn.

You cannot see how many times they have already started over.

You cannot see every private conversation they have with themselves.

That is why quick judgment is dangerous.

We see very little of one another.

“Just because you can’t see.”

That line matters as much as the title.

The problem is not necessarily that the fire is not there.

The problem may be that it is invisible to you.

And invisible things are easy to dismiss.

“Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high”

Now the song deals with ambition.

There is something funny about ambition.

People often admire it only after it works.

Before that, aiming high can look arrogant.

Who do you think you are?

Why do you think you can do that?

What makes you special?

I have always had trouble with those questions because they assume ambition requires permission.

You can aim high without believing you are better than anybody.

You can want more from your own life without looking down on somebody who wants something different.

The size of another person’s dream does not reduce yours.

That is important.

“At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why”

This is where the first chorus lands.

Not on winning.

On movement.

That is exactly where I wanted it.

The song is not saying:

“I succeeded, therefore I was right.”

Not yet.

It is saying:

“I moved.”

That is a much more honest standard.

Did I try?

Did I learn?

Did I move forward?

Did I give the idea a fair chance?

Did I discover something about myself?

Those questions still matter even if the final answer becomes no.

Sometimes the attempt itself changes you.

You become more skilled.

More disciplined.

More realistic.

More confident.

Sometimes you learn that the original dream was wrong, but the effort takes you somewhere better.

That can happen too.

Movement creates information.

Standing still does not.

“You said I was broken
You said I’d never last”

Now the song changes.

Crazy questioned the idea.

Broken questions the person.

That is deeper.

People sometimes take what happened to somebody and turn it into who they are.

You failed.

Therefore you are a failure.

You lost something.

Therefore you are finished.

You made mistakes.

Therefore you will always make the same mistakes.

You fell apart.

Therefore you are broken forever.

I do not believe people work that way.

I think everybody carries damage of some kind.

If you live long enough, something will hurt you.

Some people carry more than others.

But being hurt and being finished are not the same thing.

That distinction matters to me because I have had to rebuild parts of my own life.

Starting again teaches you something.

The first time you begin, you may still believe everything will work.

Starting again means you know it might not.

You remember the fall.

That makes the second beginning different.

“But I took every failure
And turned it into gas”

This is one of the most practical lines in the song.

Gas makes something move.

That is all.

I did not write that failure becomes wisdom automatically.

It does not.

Failure can destroy confidence.

It can make people bitter.

It can make them afraid to try again.

The useful part comes from what you do afterward.

What did I learn?

What was my responsibility?

What was outside my control?

What can I do differently?

What should I never repeat?

What did this cost me?

Was the lesson worth carrying forward?

That is how failure becomes fuel.

If life charged me for the lesson, I might as well learn it.

Otherwise I paid for nothing.

“You hide in your silence
You live in your doubt”

The song turns back toward the critic again, but the feeling changes.

This sounds less angry to me.

It sounds almost sad.

Because doubt can quietly take years from a person.

It rarely arrives as some dramatic announcement.

It says:

Tomorrow.

Later.

When I have more money.

When I know more.

When I feel ready.

When life calms down.

Sometimes those are legitimate reasons.

Timing matters.

Responsibility matters.

Not every delay is fear.

But there are also times when “later” becomes the hiding place.

You keep waiting for the moment when uncertainty disappears.

It never does.

“You point at the mountain
But you never climb out”

Everybody has a mountain.

It may not look impressive to another person.

That does not matter.

One person’s mountain is money.

Another person’s is fear.

Another is education.

Another is grief.

Addiction.

Confidence.

Health.

Starting over.

Learning to trust.

Admitting a mistake.

Leaving something harmful.

The mountain is whatever stands between where you are and where you are trying to go.

You can study it forever.

Describe it.

Complain about it.

Tell everybody how high it is.

At some point, if you want to know what is on the other side, you have to climb.

“You don’t know the hunger
You don’t know the cost
You only count winners
After calling them lost”

This is where the song begins looking at success differently.

People usually meet success after the difficult part has become invisible.

They see the finished building.

Not every pass of the grader.

They hear the finished song.

Not every line that was thrown away.

They see the business.

Not the nights the owner wondered whether it would survive.

They see the person standing again.

Not necessarily everything that happened while they were down.

That is why:

“You don’t know the hunger.”

Hunger is private.

You can watch somebody work and still not know why they are doing it.

Maybe they want money.

Maybe they want freedom.

Maybe they want to prove something to themselves.

Maybe they simply cannot leave the idea alone.

Maybe they need to know whether they are capable of finishing it.

Then:

“You don’t know the cost.”

Everything worth building costs something.

Time.

Energy.

Attention.

Money.

Comfort.

Sometimes pride.

Sometimes people misunderstand you.

Sometimes the cost is having to start again after discovering you were wrong.

That is another cost nobody celebrates.

Admitting your own mistake.

That can hurt more than somebody else criticizing you.

“You only count winners
After calling them lost”

This line makes me smile because success changes the vocabulary.

Before success:

Crazy.

Obsessed.

Unrealistic.

Lost.

After success:

Determined.

Focused.

Visionary.

Brilliant.

Sometimes it is the same person doing the same work.

The result changed.

Now everybody understands.

That should make us cautious about how confidently we judge somebody while their story is still unfinished.

Then the chorus comes back.

“Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me”

The words are the same.

The person is not.

That matters.

The first time, the fire was mostly ambition.

Now failure has entered the story.

Being called broken has entered the story.

Doubt has entered.

Cost has entered.

The second chorus carries more weight because now the fire has survived something.

It is no longer only excitement about the future.

It is persistence.

That is different.

“Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high
At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why”

Again, the chorus ends on movement.

But now “I went forward” means more.

The first time, it was a decision.

Now it is evidence.

I have already taken hits and continued.

That creates a different kind of confidence.

Not the confidence that says:

“I know everything will work.”

The confidence that says:

“I know I can keep moving even when everything does not work.”

That confidence is harder to shake.

“Call me crazy
Call me insane
Call me the storm
That you couldn’t contain”

This is the first major turning point in the song.

At the beginning, the speaker says:

“Don’t call me crazy.”

Now he says:

“Call me crazy.”

Something has changed.

The word lost its power.

That is freedom.

There comes a point when defending yourself becomes a waste of energy.

You explain.

You clarify.

You show people what you mean.

Sometimes they still decide they know who you are.

Fine.

Let them.

You have work to do.

That is the storm.

Not rage.

Momentum.

A storm moves.

The person has reached the point where somebody else’s opinion can no longer contain the movement.

“Call me reckless
Call me blind
But I saw the future
Before you opened your mind”

I want to be careful with these lines because nobody literally sees the future.

What I mean is seeing possibility before somebody else is willing to see it.

That happens all the time.

Somebody looks at an empty property and sees what could be built there.

Somebody hears a rough musical idea and hears the finished song.

Somebody looks at a person everyone else has given up on and sees what they could still become.

That is not predicting the future with certainty.

It is imagination.

And imagination is where every creation begins.

“Before you opened your mind.”

That line leaves room for the other person to change.

I like that.

The critic does not have to remain the critic forever.

People can change their minds.

They can learn.

They can admit they were wrong.

I would rather somebody change their mind than spend the rest of their life defending something they no longer believe.

Then the music takes over.

“Heavy breakdown
Drums hit harder
Guitar riff drops low”

This is not just a musical instruction sitting between lyrics.

It is part of the journey.

The song has been building pressure.

Now the music physically drops its weight.

The listener should feel the shift.

The next thing being said is more direct.

The argument has reached the point where the song needs to hit harder before the words arrive.

“You were afraid to fail
So you never began”

This may be one of the hardest accusations in the song.

Not because failure is shameful.

Because fear prevented the attempt.

There is an uncomfortable truth here.

If you never begin, you protect yourself from failure.

Nobody sees you lose.

Nobody laughs.

Nobody says, “I told you so.”

You stay safe.

But you also never find out.

That is the cost.

And sometimes that question follows a person much longer than failure would have.

What if?

What if I had started?

What if I had taken the chance?

What if I had given myself one honest attempt?

Those questions can become heavy later in life.

“You buried your courage
In the palm of your hand”

I like this image because the courage is still there.

Buried does not mean gone.

The person still has it.

That means something can change.

People are not permanently cowardly because they were afraid once.

The person who did not begin yesterday can begin tomorrow.

The person who stayed silent can speak.

The person who quit can return.

The person who lost confidence can rebuild it.

Courage is not some permanent personality trait that only certain people receive.

Often courage is one decision made while fear is still present.

That matters because the song is getting closer to its deepest question.

Are you afraid of falling?

Or are you more afraid of reaching the end and discovering you never really tried?

 

SECTION THREE

LYRIC JOURNEY

PART 2

“You laughed at the vision
You mocked every word
But the loudest mouths
Are the weakest heard”

Now the song comes back to laughter.

That matters because it connects us to the beginning.

The vision was laughed at there.

It is being mocked again here.

But the person hearing it is different now.

Earlier, the laughter had power.

Now it has become evidence of something else.

Sometimes volume is not strength.

Sometimes it is insecurity.

I have met people who do not need to fill every room with their opinion.

They listen.

They watch.

They think before they speak.

When they finally say something, it usually carries more weight because they are not trying to dominate every conversation.

Then there are people who criticize almost everything.

Every idea is stupid.

Every plan will fail.

Every person trying something is wasting their time.

That gets tiring.

And eventually you have to ask whether the criticism is coming from experience or from frustration.

“The loudest mouths
Are the weakest heard”

I am not saying every loud person is weak.

That would be ridiculous.

I am saying noise is not the same thing as wisdom.

Confidence does not need to shout all the time.

The people who are actually doing the work usually have less time for endless commentary.

That is one of the reasons I have always respected people who build.

They may complain.

They may argue.

They may swear at the machine when it breaks.

But eventually something gets done.

That is different from standing beside the job telling everybody why it cannot be done.

“I may fall down
I may bleed pride
But I won’t die wondering
What I left inside”

For me, this is one of the main landmarks of the entire song.

The song has talked about criticism.

Failure.

Doubt.

Ambition.

Fear.

But this is where all of it gets reduced to one personal question.

What would hurt more?

Trying and failing?

Or never finding out?

That is a question every person answers differently.

And there is no simple answer.

Some risks are not worth taking.

Some responsibilities are more important than a dream.

Sometimes the right decision is to walk away.

I want to be clear about that.

But there are also times when fear disguises itself as wisdom.

That is harder to admit.

You tell yourself the timing is wrong.

The money is wrong.

You are too old.

Too young.

Too busy.

Too late.

Not ready.

Maybe some of that is true.

But maybe part of it is fear of being wrong in public.

Fear of failing.

Fear of looking foolish.

Fear of losing.

That is where this lyric lives.

“I may fall down.”

That accepts reality.

There is no guarantee.

“I may bleed pride.”

That is important too.

Pride gets hurt when we fail.

Sometimes that hurts worse than the practical loss.

You can make the money back.

You can rebuild the plan.

But embarrassment sits there.

You remember who saw it.

You remember what they said.

You remember how sure you were.

That can make a second attempt harder than the first.

Then comes the line that matters most.

“But I won’t die wondering
What I left inside”

I do not want to reach the end of my life with a list of things I never gave myself permission to attempt because I was afraid of somebody else’s opinion.

That does not mean I have to chase every idea.

It means the ideas that matter deserve an honest decision.

Not a fearful one.

If I say no, I want it to be because I examined it and decided no.

Not because somebody laughed.

Not because somebody told me who I was allowed to be.

Not because one failure convinced me I had no right to try again.

That is the difference.

Then the chorus returns again.

“Don’t call me crazy
Just because you can’t see
The fire that’s burning
Inside of me”

By now, the chorus has changed again.

The fire is no longer only ambition.

It is now tied directly to regret.

The person understands the cost of trying.

They also understand the cost of never trying.

That makes the fire more serious.

It is not excitement anymore.

It is conviction.

“Don’t call me crazy
Because I aim too high
At least I went forward
While you stood there asking why”

This time the chorus sounds almost settled.

The speaker is not trying very hard to convince anybody anymore.

That is another change.

Early in the song, there is more frustration.

Now there is almost peace inside the defiance.

I moved.

That is enough.

You can think what you want.

That is a very powerful place to reach.

Not because criticism disappears.

Because your dependence on approval gets smaller.

That is different.

“Don’t call me crazy
Now that I proved you wrong
You were the doubt
I turned into song”

Now success finally enters the picture directly.

“Now that I proved you wrong.”

That line could have gone in a very different direction.

It could have become revenge.

It could have said:

Now look at me.

Now I am better than you.

Now you are the fool.

I did not want that.

The stronger line is the next one.

“You were the doubt
I turned into song”

That is transformation.

Take something negative.

Use it.

Turn it into something.

That is much more interesting than revenge.

If somebody doubts me and I spend the next ten years arguing with them, then the doubt still owns part of my life.

If I take the energy and build something, now it has become useful.

That is exactly how creativity can work.

Pain becomes a song.

Anger becomes a song.

Confusion becomes a song.

A question becomes a song.

A memory becomes a song.

Something difficult gets turned into something another person can hear and maybe use in their own life.

That is one of the things I love most about writing.

It takes something private and gives it somewhere to go.

And once it becomes a song, it can belong to somebody else too.

They may hear something completely different in it.

They may connect it to a business.

A relationship.

A recovery.

A dream.

A failure.

Now the original doubt has travelled farther than the critic ever expected.

That makes me smile.

“Don’t call me crazy
Don’t act surprised
You only saw madness
I saw the rise”

This part looks back at the whole journey.

At the beginning, there was no proof.

That is why one person saw madness.

The other saw possibility.

Now there is a result.

That changes how people remember the beginning.

Success does that.

People rewrite history.

They say they always knew.

They say they were only testing you.

They say they were trying to protect you.

Sometimes that is true.

Sometimes it is not.

But I think the more interesting part is not whether they admit they were wrong.

It is what the dreamer learned while they were being doubted.

“You only saw madness
I saw the rise”

That line is about perspective.

Two people can look at the same beginning and see opposite futures.

Neither person has certainty.

That is important.

The dreamer can be wrong too.

I do not want to pretend otherwise.

But somebody has to imagine the possibility before anything new can exist.

That is what “I saw the rise” means to me.

I saw what could happen if I kept working.

Not what was guaranteed.

What was possible.

Then the song makes one last climb.

“Call me crazy
Call me insane
Call me the thunder
That broke through the chain”

Earlier, the speaker became the storm.

Now the image changes to thunder.

Thunder announces that something has happened.

It cannot be ignored.

And the chain matters.

A chain holds something.

It limits movement.

So when I say:

“That broke through the chain”

I am thinking about the moment when the label loses its power completely.

The doubt.

The old identity.

The fear.

The expectation.

The idea of what somebody thought you should remain.

The chain breaks.

That does not mean life suddenly becomes easy.

It means one particular thing no longer owns you.

Sometimes that is enough to change everything.

“Call me crazy
Say what you want”

At this point, the title has completed its journey.

The song began with:

“Don’t call me crazy.”

Now the speaker says:

“Say what you want.”

That is the emotional destination.

The word is no longer the issue.

Approval is no longer the issue.

The person has moved beyond needing permission.

That is a very different kind of strength from anger.

Anger still reacts to the other person.

Freedom does not need to.

“I was never the problem
I was the one you could not become”

This is the final line, and I think it needs to be handled carefully because it can sound arrogant if you read it too quickly.

I do not mean:

I am better than you.

I do not mean:

Everybody who criticizes me secretly wishes they were me.

That would be stupid.

What I mean is that sometimes another person’s courage exposes something we do not want to examine in ourselves.

Maybe they did the thing we were afraid to do.

Maybe they started again when we had convinced ourselves it was too late.

Maybe they kept working after failure.

Maybe they spoke up when we stayed silent.

Maybe they believed in something after we stopped believing in ourselves.

That can be uncomfortable.

So sometimes the easiest answer is to attack the person.

Call them crazy.

Reckless.

Arrogant.

Blind.

Anything that avoids the question.

What if the thing that bothers me about them is that they are doing something I was too afraid to attempt?

That is the meaning I hear in the final line.

“I was never the problem.”

The dream was not automatically the problem.

The ambition was not automatically the problem.

The willingness to try was not the problem.

“I was the one you could not become.”

Not because they were incapable forever.

Because at that moment, they did not make the same choice.

That still leaves hope.

A person who was afraid yesterday can begin tomorrow.

A person who mocked somebody else’s dream can decide to build their own.

A person who spent years standing still can still move.

That matters to me.

I do not want this song to end by condemning the critic forever.

The song is about movement.

That should apply to everybody.

The dreamer moved.

The critic still can.

And that is where DON’T CALL ME CRAZY ends.

Not with certainty.

Not with perfection.

Not with some promise that every risk pays off.

It ends with ownership.

You can call me what you want.

I still get to decide whether I move.

That is the lesson I carry from the song.

Listen to good advice.

Learn from failure.

Respect reality.

Change direction when you need to.

But do not hand somebody else the final say over what you are allowed to attempt with your life.

Sometimes the difference between a dream that disappears and a life that changes is simply this.

You began.

 

SECTION FOUR

REFLECTION

There is something I keep coming back to when I think about DON’T CALL ME CRAZY.

How many people have abandoned something important because somebody else made them feel foolish for believing in it?

We will never know.

Those stories are invisible because nothing was ever built.

The business never opened.

The book never got written.

The invention stayed in somebody’s head.

The person never went back to school.

The application was never submitted.

The conversation never happened.

The first song was never written.

The second attempt never came.

We can see failure because failure leaves evidence.

What we cannot see are all the possibilities that disappeared before anybody gave them a chance.

That is one reason I wanted to write this song.

I am not trying to tell anybody that every dream is brilliant.

They are not.

I have had ideas that worked and ideas that did not.

I have changed direction.

I have been wrong.

That is part of creating anything.

There is a big difference between believing in yourself and believing you can never be wrong.

I believe in the first one.

The second one can get you into trouble.

If somebody gives you good advice, listen.

If somebody sees a problem you missed, pay attention.

If the numbers do not work, look at the numbers.

If you need to learn more, learn more.

If your first approach fails, figure out why.

Determination should never make us stupid.

It should make us harder to stop and willing to learn.

That is the balance inside this song.

I can listen to you without surrendering to you.

I can consider your criticism without allowing it to become my identity.

I can admit I was wrong without deciding I am finished.

I can fail without becoming a failure.

I can change the plan without abandoning the destination.

That is a lesson I think becomes more important as we get older.

When we are young, we sometimes imagine successful people travelling in a straight line.

Then life teaches us differently.

There are detours.

Bad decisions.

Wrong turns.

Unexpected opportunities.

Losses.

Second chances.

Things we thought would last forever disappear.

Things we never expected become important.

Sometimes we have to rebuild from places we never imagined we would reach.

That does not necessarily mean the story is over.

Sometimes that is where the most interesting part begins.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is really about protecting that possibility.

The possibility that where you are today is not where you have to remain.

The possibility that another person does not know your entire future.

The possibility that failure taught you something you could not have learned from success.

The possibility that you still have something inside you that deserves to be tested.

I think about the line:

“I may fall down
I may bleed pride
But I won’t die wondering
What I left inside”

That is probably the part I would want somebody to remember years after hearing the song.

Not because I want people taking foolish chances.

Because I want people asking themselves honest questions.

Is there something I still want to do?

Why have I not done it?

Is the obstacle real?

Is it temporary?

Is it responsibility?

Is it money?

Is it timing?

Is it lack of knowledge?

Or am I afraid?

There is nothing shameful about answering that last question with yes.

Fear is human.

The important part is what comes next.

Maybe the answer is to prepare.

Maybe it is to save money.

Maybe it is to learn.

Maybe it is to ask for help.

Maybe it is to start smaller.

Maybe it is to wait until the timing is responsible.

Maybe it is simply to begin.

That answer belongs to the person living the life.

Nobody else can make it for them.

There is another side to this song that matters just as much.

What kind of person are we when somebody else tells us their dream?

That is worth asking too.

Do we immediately tell them why it will fail?

Do we laugh?

Do we compare their beginning with somebody else’s finished result?

Do we call them unrealistic because we would be afraid to attempt the same thing?

Or do we listen first?

There is nothing wrong with giving somebody an honest warning.

Sometimes that is friendship.

If I see somebody about to make a terrible mistake and I have information that could help them, I should say something.

But there is a difference between warning somebody and shrinking them.

There is a difference between:

“Have you thought about this?”

and:

“You could never do that.”

One invites thought.

The other passes judgment.

We should know the difference.

You never know what somebody is carrying when they finally tell you what they want to do.

They may have spent years building enough courage just to say it out loud.

One careless laugh can land harder than you intended.

One sincere question can do the opposite.

“What if you’re right?”

I used that question earlier in this story because I think it belongs here too.

We spend a lot of time asking what happens if we fail.

That is responsible.

We should ask it.

But occasionally we should ask the other question.

What happens if this works?

What happens if I learn enough?

What happens if I keep improving?

What happens if the first failure is not the final result?

What happens if I am standing at the beginning of something that will matter to me for the rest of my life?

That question does not guarantee anything.

It simply allows possibility into the room.

I think people need that.

Especially after life has knocked them down.

When somebody has lost something important, made serious mistakes, been rejected, been embarrassed, or watched a plan collapse, the easiest conclusion is often:

That was my chance.

Maybe it was not.

Maybe it was one chance.

Life does not always give us the same opportunity twice, but it often gives us another opportunity in a different form.

We have to be willing to recognize it.

That is why the word “broken” matters in this song.

“You said I was broken
You said I’d never last”

A person can feel broken.

A plan can break.

Trust can break.

Confidence can break.

A life can look completely different after one terrible chapter.

But broken is not always permanent.

Some things can be repaired.

Some things have to be replaced.

Some things teach us to build differently next time.

And some things leave scars that become part of who we are.

None of that makes a person worthless.

I think one of the cruelest things we can do is freeze somebody at the worst point in their life and insist that is who they will always be.

People need accountability.

I believe that.

But people also need room to change.

Otherwise, what are we asking them to do?

If somebody can never become more than their worst mistake, there would be very little reason for anybody to improve.

I do not believe that is how life works.

I have seen too much rebuilding.

I have done too much rebuilding myself.

That is part of why determination means more to me than simple confidence.

Confidence feels good when everything is going well.

Determination matters when it is not.

Determination gets tested after the embarrassment.

After the rejection.

After the loss.

After somebody says, “I told you so.”

After you have to look at your own mistakes honestly.

That is when you discover whether the dream was only exciting or whether it actually mattered.

There is a line in this song that says:

“You were the doubt
I turned into song”

That is MOITA in four lines of thought compressed into two lines of lyric.

Take what life gives you and do something with it.

Sometimes what life gives you is beautiful.

Sometimes it is painful.

Sometimes it is ridiculous enough to make you laugh.

Sometimes it makes you angry.

Sometimes it leaves you with questions for years.

I write from all of it.

That is why MOITA cannot be one subject or one emotion.

Life is not one subject.

I can write about family and then write about history.

I can write about grief and then write something funny.

I can write about faith, betrayal, courage, love, homelessness, politics, pain, creativity, or something I simply became curious about.

They still belong together because the connection is not the subject.

The connection is the life looking at the subject.

That is what this library is becoming.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY belongs here because it touches one of the ideas running underneath so much of what I have done.

Do not let the worst chapter make the decision for the rest of the book.

I know that sounds simple.

Living it is not simple.

There are mornings when determination does not feel powerful.

There is no heavy guitar riff following you around.

No double-kick drums.

No crowd cheering because you got out of bed and tried again.

Most rebuilding is quiet.

Nobody sees it.

You make one decision.

Then another.

Then another.

Months later, maybe you look behind you and realize you have travelled farther than you thought.

That is real perseverance.

Not pretending nothing hurts.

Not pretending failure does not matter.

Not pretending criticism never gets inside your head.

It does.

The question is whether it stays there long enough to become your voice.

That is where the title becomes important one last time.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY begins as a demand.

By the end of the song, it almost does not matter anymore.

Call me crazy.

Say what you want.

That is growth.

The person no longer needs the critic to take the label back.

They have stopped allowing the label to decide anything.

There is a freedom in that.

You do not need to win every argument about yourself.

Sometimes you need to stop arguing and live.

Build.

Learn.

Create.

Try.

Fail.

Adjust.

Try again.

And when something finally works, you do not need to return to every person who doubted you and demand an apology.

The result is enough.

More importantly, the person you became while getting there may be worth more than the result.

That is another thing success can hide.

We focus so much on destinations that we forget what the journey does to us.

Maybe you started wanting to build a business and discovered discipline.

Maybe you started wanting to write a song and discovered your voice.

Maybe you returned to school for a qualification and discovered confidence.

Maybe you tried something and failed, but the failure introduced you to the work you were actually meant to do.

Not every successful journey ends at the destination originally imagined.

Sometimes the destination changes because we change.

There is nothing wrong with that.

The important thing is being awake inside your own life.

Making decisions instead of simply inheriting them.

Learning who you are instead of accepting every label handed to you.

That is what I hope stays with somebody after this song ends.

Not anger at the doubters.

Not a desire to prove everybody wrong.

Something better.

A willingness to find out.

Find out what you can build.

Find out what you can learn.

Find out what failure can teach you.

Find out whether that idea still matters after the excitement wears off.

Find out whether you are willing to work for it.

Find out what is still inside you.

And maybe, while you are doing that, give somebody else the same room.

The next person who tells you an idea that sounds impossible may be wrong.

They may also surprise you.

You do not have to believe in every dream you hear.

Just be careful about becoming the person who teaches somebody else to stop believing in themselves.

There are enough obstacles waiting for all of us without becoming unnecessary obstacles for one another.

Thank you for walking through this song with me.

If you recognized yourself in the person being doubted, I hope you keep enough belief to give yourself an honest chance.

If you recognized yourself in the person doing the doubting, there is something worthwhile in that too.

Maybe the song gave you a question you did not have before.

Sometimes a question is enough.

Because the person standing in front of us today is unfinished.

So are we.

And none of us knows exactly what the next chapter can become.

MOITA

WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY

EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING

SECTION FIVE

MOITA DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY opens the door to a subject much bigger than ambition.

What happens when human beings decide something cannot be done?

Sometimes they are right.

Some ideas fail because they are poorly planned. Some fail because the technology does not exist yet. Some fail because the money runs out. Some fail because the person attempting them discovers a better direction.

But history also gives us plenty of examples of ideas that looked unreasonable before they became ordinary.

That is worth exploring because there is an important difference between fantasy and possibility.

The difference is usually work.

A dream can begin the journey.

It cannot complete it.

THE IDEA BEFORE THE EVIDENCE

Almost everything human beings create exists twice.

First, it exists in somebody’s mind.

Then, if enough things go right, it exists in the world.

Think about a building.

Long before anybody walks through the front door, somebody has imagined something that is not there.

There may be an empty lot.

A drawing.

Measurements.

Engineering calculations.

Permits.

Budgets.

Schedules.

Equipment.

Materials.

Workers.

Problems nobody anticipated.

The finished building comes much later.

That is something I understand because I have spent much of my life around construction.

The strange thing about creation is that there is always a period when the creator can see something other people cannot.

Not literally.

They see the possibility.

That period can last minutes.

It can last years.

Sometimes the idea succeeds.

Sometimes reality teaches the creator that the idea needs to change.

Sometimes it fails completely.

That does not make imagination worthless.

Without imagination, there is nothing to test.

THE VALUE OF TRYING

I think we sometimes talk about success and failure as though they are opposites.

Life is rarely that clean.

Failure is often part of success.

That does not mean every failure eventually creates a victory.

Sometimes failure is simply failure.

You can work incredibly hard and still lose.

You can make a responsible decision and still get a terrible result.

You can prepare properly and still encounter circumstances beyond your control.

That deserves to be said because I do not want DON’T CALL ME CRAZY turned into one of those messages that tells people they can accomplish absolutely anything if they believe hard enough.

Life does not work that way.

Belief matters.

Work matters.

Preparation matters.

Circumstances matter too.

So does opportunity.

So does timing.

So does luck.

The useful question is not whether determination guarantees success.

It does not.

The better question is whether fear should automatically make the decision.

That is what the song challenges.

There is knowledge available only to people who attempt something.

You learn what you underestimated.

You learn what you misunderstood.

You learn where your strengths actually are.

You discover weaknesses you did not know you had.

Sometimes you discover that the goal itself needs to change.

Trying produces information.

That information can become valuable even when the original attempt fails.

RESILIENCE IS NOT INVINCIBILITY

Resilience is another word closely connected to this song, but I think it is sometimes misunderstood.

A resilient person is not somebody who never gets hurt.

It is not somebody who never becomes discouraged.

It is not somebody who can absorb endless punishment without consequences.

People are human.

We get tired.

We become frustrated.

We lose confidence.

We need help.

We sometimes need to stop.

We sometimes need to recover before we continue.

Resilience is better understood as the ability to adapt and keep functioning through difficulty, often with the help of relationships, resources, experience and learned coping skills.

That makes resilience much more human.

It also means asking for help is not the opposite of resilience.

Sometimes asking for help is exactly what allows a person to continue.

There is no medal for making everything harder than it needs to be.

I have always respected independence, but independence does not mean refusing useful knowledge.

If somebody knows something I do not, I can learn from them.

If somebody has already made the mistake I am about to make, listening could save me years.

Determination and learning belong together.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CRITICISM AND DISCOURAGEMENT

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY pushes hard against criticism, but criticism itself is not the enemy.

Good criticism is valuable.

If I create something and everybody around me is afraid to tell me there is a problem, they are not necessarily helping me.

Sometimes the person who disagrees with you is the person you most need to hear.

The question is what kind of criticism they are offering.

Useful criticism addresses the work.

It might say:

This part does not make sense.

Have you considered the cost?

There may be a safer method.

Your numbers appear wrong.

You need more information.

I tried something similar and here is where I ran into trouble.

That gives the person something they can examine.

Discouragement is different.

You are crazy.

You will never make it.

Who do you think you are?

You always fail.

People like you do not do that.

Those statements do not improve the idea.

They reduce the person.

That distinction matters in workplaces, families, schools, relationships and creative environments.

We can challenge somebody without humiliating them.

In fact, some of the strongest support we can give another person is an honest question.

Not blind agreement.

Not automatic rejection.

A question.

Have you thought this through?

What do you need?

What happens if it fails?

What happens if it succeeds?

What is your next step?

Those questions respect both the dream and reality.

THE FEAR OF FAILURE

Failure has a public side and a private side.

The public side is what happened.

The business closed.

The application was rejected.

The project failed.

The relationship ended.

The invention did not work.

The person lost.

The private side can be much harder.

What does this say about me?

That question can do damage.

A failed attempt is an event.

When somebody turns it into an identity, the problem becomes much larger.

I failed becomes I am a failure.

Those are not the same sentence.

One describes something that happened.

The other describes the person.

That difference is at the centre of:

“You said I was broken
You said I’d never last”

People need room to become more than something that happened to them.

They also need room to become more than something they did wrong.

That does not remove responsibility.

It makes growth possible.

THE PEOPLE WHO BEGIN LATE

There is another group of people I think about when I hear this song.

People who believe they missed their time.

Maybe they wanted to study something.

Create something.

Start a business.

Travel.

Write.

Learn an instrument.

Change careers.

Repair a relationship.

Begin exercising.

Learn another language.

Whatever it was, life happened.

Then one day they look at their age and think the door has closed.

Some doors do close.

That is reality.

But not every door closes at the same age.

There are things a person can begin at forty.

Fifty.

Sixty.

Seventy.

Beyond that.

The goal may have to change.

The method may have to change.

Physical limitations may change.

Responsibilities may change.

But curiosity does not come with an expiry date.

Neither does learning.

That is one reason I dislike the idea that everybody has one timetable.

We do not.

People develop differently.

Life interrupts people differently.

Opportunity arrives differently.

Some people know exactly what they want when they are eighteen.

Some are still discovering themselves decades later.

Neither story is automatically better.

What matters is whether we are still participating in our own lives.

WHEN DETERMINATION BECOMES STUBBORNNESS

There is another side of determination worth discussing because every strength can become a weakness when taken too far.

Persistence is valuable.

Blind persistence can be destructive.

Sometimes quitting is intelligent.

That may sound strange inside a Learning Centre connected to DON’T CALL ME CRAZY, but I think it belongs here.

There are times when new evidence tells us the plan is wrong.

There are times when continuing would endanger somebody.

There are times when the financial cost becomes irresponsible.

There are times when a relationship, business, project or goal is consuming everything while giving nothing worthwhile back.

Walking away from something that no longer makes sense is not always failure.

Sometimes it is growth.

The challenge is knowing the difference between quitting because we are afraid and changing direction because we learned something.

That answer is not always obvious.

Ask better questions.

Why am I stopping?

What evidence changed?

Am I exhausted and making a permanent decision from a temporary feeling?

Have I asked somebody knowledgeable?

Can the plan be changed instead of abandoned?

What am I protecting by continuing?

What am I sacrificing?

Those questions turn stubbornness back into thinking.

I would rather change direction intelligently than drive straight into a wall just so I can brag that I never turned.

That is not determination.

That is refusing to learn.

THE COURAGE TO BE WRONG

One of the strongest people in the room may be the person willing to say:

I was wrong.

That sentence can be difficult.

Especially after you defended an idea.

Especially after people warned you.

Especially after money, time or pride has been invested.

But being wrong is part of thinking.

If we never allow ourselves to change our minds, then we are not really searching for truth.

We are defending identity.

DON’T CALL ME CRAZY is about believing in yourself.

It is not about believing yourself to be infallible.

Those are completely different things.

You can believe deeply in your ability to figure something out while still admitting that your current answer may be wrong.

In fact, I think that is stronger confidence.

Fragile confidence needs to be right.

Real confidence can learn.

WHAT DO WE DO WITH DOUBT?

Doubt gets treated like an enemy in a lot of motivational language.

I do not think it always is.

Doubt can protect us.

It can make us check the numbers again.

It can make us slow down.

It can make us ask somebody with more experience.

It can prevent arrogance.

The problem begins when doubt stops asking questions and starts giving orders.

Do not begin.

Do not try.

Do not speak.

Do not risk looking foolish.

Do not let anybody see you fail.

That kind of doubt does not improve the plan.

It prevents the plan from being tested.

Maybe the goal is not to eliminate doubt.

Maybe the goal is to put it in the right job.

Let doubt inspect the brakes.

Do not let it drive the car.

THE LABELS WE GIVE PEOPLE

The title also opens a larger conversation about language.

Words such as crazy, lunatic and insane have long histories, and they can carry meanings far beyond the way they are being used in this particular song.

In DON’T CALL ME CRAZY, the language represents dismissal.

Someone has a vision that another person cannot understand, so instead of engaging with the idea, the person gets labelled.

The song is not making a statement about psychiatric diagnosis.

That distinction matters.

Mental illness is real.

People experiencing mental health problems deserve serious care and human respect, not mockery.

Using a casual label to dismiss somebody is different from understanding an actual health condition.

That is worth remembering outside the song too.

We reduce people too easily.

Lazy.

Stupid.

Crazy.

Failure.

Loser.

Troublemaker.

Hopeless.

Labels are efficient.

People are complicated.

A label can describe one behaviour and slowly become a verdict on the entire human being.

We should be careful with that.

THE PERSON WE HAVE NOT MET YET

There is somebody you will become five years from now.

You have never met that person.

Neither have the people criticizing you today.

That future version of you will know things you do not know now.

They may have skills you do not currently possess.

They may understand failures that currently make no sense.

They may laugh at something that presently keeps them awake.

They may also wish you had made a different decision today.

That is what makes life interesting.

We are always creating somebody we have not met yet.

Every choice contributes.

Not every choice is enormous.

Most are small.

Read the book.

Make the phone call.

Save the money.

Take the course.

Apologize.

Practice.

Ask the question.

Show up.

Rest when you need to.

Begin again.

Small decisions do not look dramatic while they are happening.

Neither does laying one brick.

Eventually there is a wall.

THE DREAMER NEEDS DISCIPLINE

I would never want somebody to leave this page thinking dreaming is enough.

It is not.

A dream without discipline can become another form of avoidance.

You can spend twenty years talking about what you are going to do.

Eventually the question becomes simple.

What did you do today?

Not what are you going to do someday.

Today.

Did you learn something?

Did you practice?

Did you make progress?

Did you solve one problem?

Did you move one step?

That is where ambition becomes real.

The fire inside you may start the engine.

Discipline keeps it moving after the excitement disappears.

And excitement always disappears sometimes.

There will be boring days.

Frustrating days.

Days when the work feels ordinary.

Those days count too.

Probably more than we realize.

THE OTHER PERSON IN THE SONG

There is one more person I do not want to forget.

The critic.

It would be easy to finish the discussion by making that person the villain.

But what if they recognize themselves?

What if they have spent years shooting down other people’s ideas?

What if they realize some of that came from their own disappointment?

Then they have a choice too.

They can change.

Maybe they begin encouraging somebody.

Maybe they finally begin something themselves.

Maybe instead of saying, “That will never work,” they ask, “How are you planning to make it work?”

That is growth.

The song does not have to belong only to the person being doubted.

It can belong to the doubter who decides to become different.

That may be one of the most useful things a song can do.

Give two people standing on opposite sides of an argument something to think about.

CONTINUE EXPLORING

The ideas surrounding DON’T CALL ME CRAZY connect naturally to resilience, creativity, learning, entrepreneurship, innovation, fear of failure and the psychology of motivation.

Readers interested in resilience can explore educational material from the American Psychological Association on how people adapt to adversity and develop coping resources.

Readers interested in invention and innovation can explore the National Inventors Hall of Fame, where the stories behind inventors and their work show how ideas move from imagination through experimentation into practical use.

For lifelong learning, universities, public libraries and reputable educational organizations offer courses and resources on creativity, entrepreneurship, psychology, engineering and personal development. You do not have to become an expert in everything that interests you. Sometimes learning begins because one question bothered you enough to look for a better answer.

And perhaps that is the best place for this Learning Centre to end.

Not with somebody telling you that your dream will succeed.

Nobody can promise that.

Not with somebody telling you that your dream will fail.

They cannot know that either.

With a question.

Is there something inside you that you still owe yourself an honest chance to discover?

MOITA