Revisited: How to Turn Stress Into Creativity With Grammy-Winner Jacob Collier
3/3/202659 min
Team Simon here! As we take a short hiatus, A Bit of Optimism will return with brand-new episodes on March 24, 2026. Until then, we’re revisiting some of the conversations you loved and we still think about long after the microphones turned off.
This week, we’re rewinding to Simon’s conversation with the wildly creative and endlessly curious Jacob Collier.
To create something truly original, do we build something new or break what came before? Perhaps the answer is both—simultaneously.
Jacob Collier does exactly that. A songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and Grammy Award winner, Jacob has...
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJacob Collier· Guest0:00
B flat. It's like this- What do you mean by arrival and departure? So th- th- this is my home. If I'm in F, this is my home.
Simon Sinek· Host0:05
Right.
Jacob Collier· Guest0:07
[piano music playing] I can exist in the key of F for a while, and even if I go somewhere else, like to E flat, when I, when I get home- You know it ... you still feel like, ah, I, I remember this feeling from before. So the idea of arrival, you could say, comes from being not F, something that is not F, like C, arriving at F, right? And I'm home. And then you can kind of augment that arrival into something much more [piano music playing] colorful. And the, the joy of music is how to make the best, most satisfying kind of tension, and then resolve it. [piano music playing] You know?
Simon Sinek· Host0:50
Creativity is about breaking something. Nope, it's about building something. No, it's breaking. No, it's building. Or maybe, just maybe, it's both at the exact same time. But how can you build and break something simultaneously, Simon? Well, enter Jacob Collier.
Jacob Collier· Guest1:14
[upbeat music] Oh, wow. Thank you so very much.
Simon Sinek· Host1:20
Jacob is a Grammy-winning musician who has an uncanny ability to turn anything around him into musical instruments, including