The Song Is Free
A few weeks ago I sat with three books open on the desk — one by Daniel Priestley, one by Gabor Maté, one by Brené Brown. All three had said versions of something I had just written in my own notebook the previous evening. The notebook line was unmistakably mine. The three book passages were unmistakably theirs. The thing being said was, in some essential way, the same thing.
I sat back and looked at the four passages together and realized I was not the source of any of them. None of us was the source. We were all holders of an idea older than any of us, singing it in our own voices, in our own moments, with our own bodies behind the sentences.
The realization has been quietly changing how I think about everything since.
Recognition, not segmentation
Let me begin with the audience, because this is where the recognition starts.
The woman two steps behind me is not a stranger. She is, statistically, of my generation, of my professional layer, of my cultural moment. She listened to the same songs in her thirties that I listened to. She watched the same shows. She read the same parenting books. She lived through the same financial crisis and the same pandemic and the same slow dawning that the future she had been promised was not the future arriving.
When I write to her, I am not inventing an audience. I am writing to a community that already exists, scattered, looking for the language that names them. The women who would respond to my way of saying it are the women I already know — friends, colleagues, neighbors at the school gate, women I sit next to at the dentist or on a long flight, women whose books I have read. Same stage of life. Same values. Same approach.
This is not market segmentation. This is recognition. The flare goes up. The women who can read it walk toward it. The women who cannot read it do not, and that is fine, because they have their own flares to walk toward, written by other women two steps ahead of them in a different direction.
The flare is not look at me. The flare is this is what I am up to in the world. Some people call this personal brand, and the word misleads. It points at the person being promoted, when the thing being promoted is the work.
But the personal in the word is real — it just lives in the wrong place. The personal is not in the promotion. The personal is in the idea. The idea I send up is mine in the sense that no one else could have arrived at exactly this idea with exactly this shape, because the shape was carved by my particular years — by my origin, by my trauma, by the practice I happened to fall into, by the marriage I happened to be inside, by the cultural moment I happened to be of. The promotion is of the idea. The idea is personal because the life that produced it is the only life that could have produced it. When the flare goes up, what is being signaled is the work, and the work carries my fingerprint without my needing to point at the fingerprint.
And even the idea is not mine to keep. The idea is free. It exists outside me the way a song exists outside any single voice that sings it. I am the holder, for this stretch — and another holder, before me, sang the same idea in different words; another holder, after me, will sing it again differently. Each performance carries the holder’s flavor. None of them owns the song. The flavor I add is my signature on the performance, not my claim on what is sung. To be a holder is to be a voice in a long line of voices, taking up the song for the years one is given and then passing it on.
Better to call this what it actually is — idea promotion, in the older naming, or simply the flare. A signal sent up so the already-predisposed can find the work, performed in the holder’s particular voice. The egoist verdict cannot land on a flare. There is no claim of importance in it. There is no claim of ownership either. There is only I am here, the song is here, walk toward it if it is yours, and pick it up after me if you can sing it better.
And this is the part that inspires. To be a holder is not to be alone with the work. It is to be the current voice in a long line of voices, given a stretch of years in which to add what only this voice can add, and trusted to pass the song on. The work does not begin with me and it does not end with me. It is older than I am and it will outlast me. My only task, for now, is to sing my part of it as cleanly as I can, in the voice that is mine, while the years are given. That is plenty. That is, in fact, the whole thing.
The previous holders
There is one more piece, while we are here on the lineage.
When I read Priestley, when I read Brené Brown, when I read Maté, when I read the long line of writers and practitioners whose work has shaped mine — I do not read them to copy them. The word copy is wrong for this relationship. I read them as previous holders of songs I am also being given to sing. Their performances inform mine. Their phrasing teaches mine. Their courage gives mine permission. But I cannot copy them. The body forbids it.
Even if I wanted to copy — even if I sat at the desk and tried, sentence by sentence, to reproduce another writer’s voice — I could not. My breath is not their breath. My hand on the page is not their hand. My years are not their years. The song would pass through me and come out in my own register, marked by everything I have lived, regardless of my intention. The body is the instrument. The instrument is unique. No two instruments produce the same sound from the same score.
This is the gift of being human. The fear of being derivative, which has stopped so many writers before they began, is dissolved by the simple fact of the body. You cannot accidentally sound like someone else. You cannot copy yourself into a smaller shape. Even your most faithful imitation will be audibly yours, because the imitation passes through you. The mentors are not sources to copy. The mentors are previous holders whose performances inform yours, whose courage gives yours permission, whose voices have already enriched the long performance of the song you are about to add to.
Study them. Inherit from them. Translate them into your register. Do not worry about copying them. The body has already made copying impossible.
The voice is the new currency
There is a larger frame to all of this, and it deserves more than a footnote.
In the agricultural age, the land was the differentiator. Who held the land, held the food, held the surplus, held the next century. The structure of wealth followed the structure of what could not be moved or replicated. You could not fake a fertile valley. You could not import the soil. The valley was the asset, and the owner of the valley was the wealthy person.
In the industrial age, the factory replaced the valley. The machines could be moved, but they were expensive and slow to build, and the person who got them running first captured a market for decades. Who held the factory, held the production. Who held the production, held the prices. Who held the prices, held the next century. The structure of wealth followed the structure of what could not be quickly copied. A steel mill is hard to build; a competitor takes ten years to catch up; the ten years are the moat.
In the digital age, the soil has been mapped and the factories have been automated. The platforms that take an afternoon to set up are commoditised. The software that took ten years of engineering can now write itself in a weekend. The ideas, in their abstract form, can be paraphrased by anything that has read enough. The moats keep collapsing as fast as they are built.
What does not collapse is the voice.
Voice, here, is not the sound of the throat. Voice is the audible signature of a particular life. It is the way the years have braided the sentences. It is the angle at which a person looks at a problem because of what she has lived. It is the rhythm of breath the body carries from infancy onward. It is the metaphors a person reaches for because those metaphors lived in her childhood kitchen. It is the values she defends because of where she has bled. It is what comes out when the person speaks, writes, sings, holds a room — not the surface style, which can be mimicked, but the substrate of having been this exact person, in this exact body, across these exact years.
This is the one thing the new tools cannot produce. They can produce text that resembles a voice. They can produce images that resemble a style. They can imitate the surface of a voice well enough that a casual reader cannot tell the difference for a sentence or two. What they cannot do is be a life. They have no body. They have no childhood kitchen. They have no marriage that broke open and rebuilt itself across a decade. They have no plot of land rediscovered on a birthday. They have no years of sitting with a particular grief, no trauma carved into a particular shape, no path of practice walked through a particular cultural moment. They have read about lives, but they have not lived one. The voice that comes from having lived a life is the one thing they cannot mint, because they have no mint to mint it from.
This is the new currency. And it changes how the economy works at the level of a person trying to build a living. In the old structure, value attached to assets one could buy — land, machines, buildings, dividend-paying stocks. In the new structure, value attaches to the voice itself. The audience finds the voice. The audience supports the voice. The audience tells other audiences about the voice. The flare goes up. The already-predisposed walk toward it. Subscription, recognition, recurring readership — these are not products. They are the response of an audience to a voice that could not have come from anyone else.
This is also why now is the moment, and why now is the right moment for the woman two steps behind me to begin. Not next year. Not after another certificate. Not once she has arrived. Now — while the voice is still freshly her own, before the years of trying to sound like someone else have buried it. The differentiator has shifted from what we own to what we are. The voice is the asset. The holder is the bank. The song is the work. And the only investment that compounds in this new economy is the years one spends letting one’s voice become more fully one’s own.
What this asks of us
So this is the economy I find myself in. Not the agricultural one my grandparents knew. Not the industrial one my parents knew. The one where the audience already exists, scattered and waiting; where the mentors are previous holders rather than sources to copy; where the voice that comes from a particular life is the currency that does not collapse.
What it asks of me is small and large at once.
Small: to keep showing up at the desk. To write in my own voice rather than borrowing someone else’s. To trust that the body has already made copying impossible, so the only choice is honesty. To send the flare up rather than hold the work back.
Large: to let go of being the source. To remember that I am the holder, for a stretch, of a song that was here before me and will be here after me. To let my flavor be my signature on the performance, not my claim on what is sung. To take up the song the years have given me and to sing it as cleanly as I can, while the years are mine to spend.
The song is free. It does not need me to invent it. It needs me to perform it, faithfully, in the voice that is mine, for the audience that is already there, while the moment is still the moment. That is the work. That is enough.
Bibliography
Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Knopf Canada. ISBN 978-0676973129. Available: Dr. Maté’s book page.
Priestley, D. (2014). Key Person of Influence: The 5-Step Method to Become One of the Most Highly Valued and Highly Paid People in Your Industry. Rethink Press. ISBN 978-1781331033. Available: Rethink Press.
Priestley, D. (2025, January 20). The Money Making Expert: The 7,11,4 Hack That Turns $1 Into $10K Per Month! [Podcast interview by S. Bartlett]. The Diary Of A CEO. Available: YouTube.