What is your Hamilton project?
A few weeks back, I finally succumbed to peer pressure and watched the hit broadway musical, Hamilton, on Disney+. As the show moved forward, I felt more and more inspired and rather obsessed by the two main characters: Alexander Hamilton and — no, not Aaron Burr — Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The musical was obviously as much about Hamilton as it was about its creator. Sixteen years ago, the talented 24-year-old composer, lyricist, and singer saw himself in the clever, determined, and ambitious statesman. It was personal. So, Miranda dedicated a considerable chunk of his life to creating the masterpiece. And the outcome was a staggering success.
Accomplishing a project like this is deeply satisfying. So, on my birthday, I reflected on key learnings from Miranda’s project to create a list of four questions that could guide me plan my own Hamilton project (which in this article, I’m going to refer to as “the project”):
- Do I have unique insight into the project because of a meaningful, personal connection? Miranda identified with Hamilton, but that was not all. His own lived experience gave him an exclusively insightful access into Hamilton’s. In his interview with Atlantic he says: “I was like, ‘I know this guy.’ I’ve met so many versions of this guy … That’s a familiar storyline to me, beginning with my father and so many people I grew up with in my neighborhood.”
- Can I leverage “what I’m good at” as the thread that runs through all phases of my long-term vision for the project? This is more than making sure that the project is a good long-term companion for my core competencies. It’s also more than phased execution of a long-term vision. It’s about phased execution of the project in a way that would persistently leverage my differentiation. The fact is that Miranda didn’t start with Hamilton. He was the composer and lyricist for the Tony award winner musical “In the Heights”. The show was produced one decade prior to Hamilton, but like Hamilton, it incorporated rap and hip-hop (in addition to salsa and merengue). He also started his Hamilton Mixtape project in 2009 — six years prior to the launch of the musical. This shows his persistence in building on and leveraging his differentiation in the service of a long-term vision.
- Does the project have potential to make impact on a cultural scale? This is what sets the project apart from launching a new brand of energy drink or buying the right stock at the right time. This is about creating new meaning for folx, it’s about capturing the zeitgeist but then making my own rules by flipping assumptions (which is how A. Hamilton lived and how Miranda works), and it’s about inspiring Stanford to offer a course about the project. Miranda employs the multicultural cast, unique musical genre, epic story, and innovative storytelling to flip the dominant narrative in American musical theater. A narrative marked by, what Churchwell refers to as, “the mainstream’s appropriation of minority cultures (Show Boat, West Side Story). Hamilton reverses that process, exploring mainstream history through the music of subcultures”.
- Is the project going to make me 10X bigger? Can you imagine what it’s like to immerse yourself, for a full decade, in the lives, thoughts, and emotions of giants? Truly knowing and reimagining the lived experiences of some of the smartest, bravest, most driven, and most ambitious leaders in the history? Most things we do in life help us grow as people, a few things we do can turn us into giants. With all of his humility, Miranda has such a timeless perspective about life, history, and America — take a look at these interviews in Rolling Stone, Variety and npr where he talks about compromise, racism, immigrants, and even dealing with the pandemic. Even if you take away all the musical’s success and publicity from him, Miranda would still be the person who views the world through quality lenses.
Tough to find a project that’d check all four boxes. Do you have one?
