Meet Peter Benjamin

We were lucky to catch up with Peter Benjamin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Peter, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

For me, resilience is reliably found in two places. The first is the creative process itself. Creativity is actually a practice of making something new in the world, experiencing success or failure (usually the latter), and repeating the process over and over in a way that cultivates skill, wisdom, beauty, and function. Creativity, for me, requires a well-ordered space to create something beautiful using cultivated skill, knowledge, and awareness. Creativity requires both untrammeled isolation, free from interruption and/or judgment of others, as well as constraint and a confident sense of the limits of the project a hand. In other words, creating requires a carefully calibrated balance of freedom and limitation. The iterative process of making something both beautiful and useful is an endless source of sustained resilience for me.

Second, I find that having the right people around me is crucial to a sense of being able to continue to pursue a meaningful life. As indicated above, being a creative requires both freedom and limitation. Partnering with people who are willing and able to provide you with these things is crucial to overcoming the difficulties of the failures that will always result from creating things that have never existed before.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

For the past 20 plus years, I’ve been pursuing music as a career, This pursuit has found me in touring rock bands, teaching kids and adults piano, guitar, ukulele, bass, drums, etc., producing music for TV, film, and podcasts, and collaborating with many regional and national musicians. Now, I reside in Oregon State and live/work with my friends on their small vineyard on the southwestern reaches of the Willamette Valley. Here we are building a community of life-minded folks who love nature, ideas, beauty, music, good food, and want to preserve and pass down these things to the next generation. I moved here to bring my love my creating, performing, and teaching music to this expansive vision.

To learn more, you can visit www.harrisbridgevineyard.com and www.peterbenjaminmusic.org.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

First, start with a willingness to learn and to be wrong and make mistakes. I’ve found that the fastest path to skill building is by briefly embodying the negative emotions involved in a mistake or error and quickly moving past them to insight and confidence.

Second, seek a mentor and/or partnerships that give you space to work through this process of learning through mistakes. you need people around you who recognize the journey you are on and have faith in the difficult process of becoming who you want to be.

Third, extend this grace to others with a proactive attitude that sets clear and mutually-agreed upon goals and allows you to move toward them however obliquely.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

My current struggle is the struggle of speaking truth in difficult situation despite the short-term chaos, blowback, and even enmity that it can cause. I can sometimes lose my own sense of vision and identity in the forest of other peoples’ lives. It’s crucial to be honest about how I feel, what I see, and what I want my life to look like in the context our shared reality. Not doing this is a failure to participate in what I believe will be the best possible world of outcomes for all involved.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.peterbenjaminmusic.org

Image Credits

photos are taken by myself