The Icks

What I mean by "the icks"

Every so often I get what I call “the icks.” You may know the feeling. It’s a small, sour twist in your stomach when something just doesn’t feel right. It can come from an idea, an action, or even a particular person. I don’t always know right away why it’s there, but I’ve learned to pay attention to it.

I think of the icks as my warning system. Long before my brain has built a tidy argument, my gut has already waved a little red flag. Sometimes the flag turns out to be nothing, but more often than not, when I slow down and look closely, it’s pointing at something real: a value of mine being crossed, a corner being cut, or someone being mistreated.

When the icks hit hard: Oberlin, 2023

I felt them strongly in 2023 while I was applying for a scholarship to attend the Violin Society of America’s Bow Restoration Workshop at Oberlin. The application required some market research on which bow services were available here in Hawaii, from basic rehairs to more advanced restorations. So I reached out to a local business to ask what they offered. The answer was that they weren’t going to share any information with people from the mainland.

I wasn’t asking for trade secrets. I was a teacher trying to learn a craft so I could serve my community better, to help save musicians money by not having to ship or travel off island for repairs. That’s when the icks hit hard. It wasn’t anger so much as a sinking feeling that this is what scarcity thinking looks like. When we treat knowledge as something to hoard, we shut the door on the very people who might help carry the work forward.

The irony is that the Oberlin workshops are built on the opposite idea. The spirit of the VSA’s summer programs is that everyone teaches and everyone learns, with makers sharing techniques and research so the whole craft gets better.

That experience points to one of the biggest places I feel the icks: running a business. Operating a music education business inside our capitalistic system gives me the icks. The message I hear over and over is that success means winning, that every other teacher or business is a competitor, and that the way up is to climb alone. 

Rugged individualism gets sold to us as the only way to survive, and I don’t believe that has to be our reality.

Why I believe we are better together

My whole philosophy about business comes back to one central idea: we are better together. People learn from one another. Communities grow stronger when we share what we know instead of guarding it. That belief shaped how I built Maui School for Strings here in Wailuku, where I bring other teachers under one roof instead of trying to be the only voice in the room. It helped shape the Maui Community Orchestra, where our conductors observe each other and give honest feedback, because nobody gets better in isolation. Music itself taught me this. An orchestra only works when every player listens to the musicians around them.

So when the icks show up now, I pay attention. I ask what they’re trying to tell me and usually the answer is the same: somewhere along the way, we forgot that we need one another.

Choosing collaboration over competition

I’m not naive. Bills still need to be paid, and a business has to be sustainable to serve anyone. But I’d rather build something that lifts the people around it than something that stands tall by stepping on them. We can run a business and still choose collaboration over competition.

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