Happy Monday fellas. Hope the weekend treated you right. We’ve got a slightly longer one today.

Here’s what’s on deck:

Let’s get into it.

And if you’re new here, welcome aboard. Glad you found us.

Eric Church’s commencement speech at UNC is having a moment, so I gave it a listen over the weekend. It was legit.

He built the speech around the six strings of a guitar. Different parts of life acting like different strings…faith, family, partnership, ambition, community, individuality.

And the idea was simple:

When the strings are in tune, life sounds pretty good. When one gets neglected long enough, the whole chord feels off.

It really hit me as a dad. Why? Because it’s easy to spend all your time tuning one string. Work. Money. Providing. Productivity. Etc.

Meanwhile, another string quietly drifts out.

Maybe you stop checking in with your spouse. Maybe you lose your hobbies. Maybe you stop showing up for your friends. Maybe home starts feeling tense because you’ve been running too hard for too long.

That doesn’t mean the song is over. It just means something needs tuned up.

That’s dad life in a lot of ways. Constant adjustments. Constant tuning. Trying to keep the whole thing from getting too out of balance.

No perfect chord exists for very long. You just keep tuning and keep playing.

Thought it’d only be fitting to feature Eric Church here today, so we dove in a little deeper after hearing his speech…

Most people know him as the outlaw country guy in aviators screaming “Drink In My Hand.” What people don’t realize is the dude nearly quit music before any of this happened.

Early Nashville years were rough. Broke. Spinning his wheels. Ready to head back home to North Carolina.

Then his brother Brandon moved to Nashville and slept on his couch for a year just to keep him from quitting.

A year later, things finally started happening.

Fast forward and Church builds his whole career doing things his own way. Too loud. Too long. Got fired from opening for Rascal Flatts because he kept blowing past his set times. Taylor Swift replaced him on the tour. Incredible.

Married his wife Katherine in 2008. Two boys now. Then in 2017, life punches him in the face a bit.

Massive blood clot in his chest caused by a congenital condition. Emergency surgery. Doctors basically told him it could’ve killed him.

A year later, his brother dies unexpectedly at 36. You can feel some of that perspective in the way he talks about family now.

At one point, talking about fatherhood, Church said watching kids grow up is “terrifying and wonderful and sad at the same time.”

Honestly…pretty spot on.

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