A handwritten note. That’s how it started.
Fifty years ago this week, a 14-year-old drummer named Larry Mullen Jr. pinned “Drummer Seeks Musicians To Form Band” to a noticeboard at Mount Temple in Dublin. Four teenagers turned up in his kitchen. Bono admits he and Adam were bluffing.
On Friday, the same four walked back into that schoolyard and played for a thousand students.
I keep coming back to that. Same four. Arguably the greatest rock band of our time, and not one of them replaced.
I spend my working life with leadership teams, and I know how rare that is. Talent is almost never the problem. Teams come apart when someone decides they’d do better alone, or when the reason they came together stops being enough.
U2 had every excuse to split. Egos. Money. Solo options. A near collapse in Berlin in 1990. Out of that fight came “One.”
The Edge’s explanation deserves a place on every boardroom wall: “we’re better off working with each other than we could ever be on our own.” Adam’s is humbler. They stayed in Ireland, stayed close, raised their families. Why would they split up?
The line that stays with me is Bono’s. What keeps him going is the thought that the perfect song is just around the corner. Years ago he said it another way: “the music of what might be is finer still.”
That’s the part most of us miss. Longevity isn’t about protecting what you built. It’s about still being hungry for what you haven’t built yet.
Fifty years. Twenty-two Grammys. A new album in November.
And they still believe the best song is ahead of them.
What would change on your team if you believed that too?
