Is Anything Real?

Most talented people aren't stuck because they lack ability. They're stuck because they are waiting for someone else to choose them.

A record label. An investor. A promotion. A gatekeeper. A permission slip.

In this episode of Is Anything Real?, Adam W. Barney sits down with Alex Fredericks, founder of ToneWell, to unpack the myth that success comes from being selected.

Alex brings a career built across music, consumer products, business development, and entrepreneurship to one powerful question:

Are you actually in control of your fate, or are you hoping the room gets kinder?

Alex’s framework:

FATE

Focus
Authority
Tribe
Emotion

becomes a practical operating system for builders, founders, artists, and leaders trying to create something that actually fits their life.

We explore:

Why waiting to be picked creates invisible limits
Why authority comes from scars, experience, and knowing what does not work
Why your first 10 people matter more than your total addressable market
Why emotion is the missing piece in brand building
What musicians teach entrepreneurs about resilience
The difference between chasing someone else’s scoreboard and defining your own

Alex also shares one of the best metaphors we have had on the show:

Too many people collect experience with a colander. The goal is to become a bucket.

Carry the lessons. Carry the relationships. Carry the proof. Because your next chapter should not erase what came before. It should use it.

Guest:
Alex Fredericks - Founder, ToneWell

ToneWell: https://tonewell.co/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexfredericks/

Host:
Adam W. Barney - Transition Leadership Coach, Author, Host

Book a Transition Leadership Foundation Call:
https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/foundation-call-20min

Creators and Guests

Host

Adam W. Barney

Adam W. Barney helps transitioning leaders navigate career and leadership inflection points with clarity and momentum. Author of Make Your Own Glass Half Full and creator of EnergyOS. Based in Boston, fueled by family and music.

What is Is Anything Real??

Is Anything Real? is the Reality-First Leadership podcast for builder-leaders who want outcomes, not optics. Each week, Adam W. Barney sits down with founders and operators to unpack positioning, marketing, community, energy management, and influence - plus the numbers behind what actually worked.

You’ll hear: a quick Reality Check, a practical Proof Stack (inputs → actions → outcomes), and one EnergyOS habit you can run this week. Specifics over slogans; humane systems over hustle cosplay.

New episodes every Wednesday at 12:00 PM ET.

👉 Book your 20-min Exploration Call: https://calendly.com/adamwbarney/explorationplugin-20min

Here's a myth that has quietly ruined a lot of talented people.

Success means getting picked.

But getting signed,

getting funded,

getting hired,

getting promoted,

or getting approved

or getting blessed by the gatekeeper in the Patagonia vest.

That might be an open door,

but it's not the whole game.

Because if your entire future

depends on someone else choosing you,

you're not building a life.

You're standing in line for permission with better lighting.

The real move is not waiting to get picked.

The real move is learning how to carry what you know,

build what matters,

and make yourself harder to ignore.

Welcome back to "Is Anything Real?",

the reality-first leadership show where we test advice,

publish the receipts,

and ship what actually works under pressure.

I'm Adam W. Barney,

transition leadership coach,

author of Make Your Own Glass Half Full,

and builder of a system where I

help leaders rebuild their operating system

when the tools that got them here stop working.

Today's guest is Alex Fredericks,

founder of ToneWell.

Alex has moved through music,

consumer goods, packaging,

business development, problem-solving,

and the wild human circus of helping people figure out

what to do with the thing they are trying to build.

His framework is called Fate:

Focus, authority, tribe, and emotions.

And the question underneath it is brutally useful.

Are you actually in control of your fate,

or are you just hoping the room gets kinder?

Alex also gave me one of

my favorite metaphors in recent memory.

Too many people go to the river with a colander.

They think they're collecting experience,

but when they lift it up,

everything is drained away.

The goal is to become a bucket,

or in my case, a glass.

Alex, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Adam.

I appreciate it.

All right.

I knew this was going to be a dangerous one when we

were five minutes in and somehow hit

Almost Famous, Will Daily, Mappari,

dyslexia, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu,

Micro business, and the original American Dream.

This is either going to be an incredible podcast episode

or a controlled detonation that happens

somewhere in the world here right now.

Well, you know,

it's all entertainment and fodder, right, so?

I love it.

All right, Alex, let's start here.

When you ask someone, are you in control of your fate?

What are you really asking?

So that came out of a notion of how to talk to people

in the brand space,

and it's a little confused today,

I think what brands are,

because you have a personal brand,

and an identity brand,

and a physical product that's a brand.

So I try to boil it down to conversation.

So as you said, I say to people,

are you in control of your fate?

And everybody says yes.

I should say that differently.

Most people building things say yes.

Yeah, there is a whole class of people that won't do anything,

so they're going to say no.

And in that I say,

okay, so you have a focus.

What is your authority?

Who is the tribe?

And what is the emotion you're trying to elicit?

Because I find that speaking in parsed sentences,

words that you can remember

that have greater meaning than just

what they were in the sentence structure

becomes important

when you're building business with people

because you want them to walk away and say,

he asked me about my fate,

he asked me about my fate.

As opposed to a very long diatribe

of how you engineer a brand.

So that's kind of how I stumble on that

and then have that conversation.

Because the reality of it is, is that,

if you are building something,

you also have to learn to pivot.

You have to be okay with failure.

You can't be upset when the door gets slammed in your face.

All of the boxes of no's that exist

for you to get to that one triumphant yes.

So that is your fate, right?

Are you in control of it,

or are you just going to cast it on the sea

and see what happens?

Yeah, and I mean the framework is really exceptionally clean

because it immediately pulls people out of vague ambition.

Right?

You everybody wants to say they are in control of their life

and that's not motivational fluff

that's an operating system.

But what part of fate do people think they control

but usually don't there?

So the thing that people admit first

that they don't control is their tribe and emotion.

Everybody thinks that they have focus

and most people think that they're an authority at something.

It's why I'm doing it.

I'm the best at, or my differentiator is X.

So all things being equal, I will give you that.

Go for it.

But who's the tribe?

And I don't mean your TAM,

your total addressable market.

I mean legitimately,

who are the first 10 people you're going to call.

Not, I think I could be a billion seller.

But who are the first 10 people?

Who are your tribe?

And emotion is the thing that makes the connection.

So, it's okay to make somebody angry at you or dislike you.

We can all name plenty of personalities that have made careers

on that, but they're eliciting an emotional response.

So if you're talking product,

is it a better for you product?

Ooh, my life just got better.

Is it something that challenges you

and you're, wow, this is really frustrating.

I love it.

But it's eliciting an emotion.

And those are the two things

most people haven't thought about.

And then you can argue about,

well, what's your focus?

Because you can't keep saying "and"

and then using commas if you have a focus.

And authority actually comes with

the scars, and the hardship, and the development.

And knowing what doesn't work

is as important as being the guy

that can decry the thing that is the answer.

Well, is it just the answer,

or is it an answer?

Right.

And that's where the interplay,

particularly when you're coaching somebody,

or helping somebody develop a product,

that's where the real thinking comes in.

I say to most people, I'm only married to my wife.

Everything else is just an idea.

It's so that we can play around and start a conversation.

And I don't need to be right.

I'm just trying to help you get to your solution set.

And I love how this actually connects directly to my work.

You know, Alex,

my book is called "Make Your Own Glass Half Full"

because I reject that little, let's say,

binary trap of glass half full or glass half empty.

And I say, screw that.

Throw those glasses over your shoulder, grab your own cup,

your own pitcher, your favorite beverage,

and build the reality you actually can stand inside.

And that's autonomy, you know.

But autonomy has receipts.

It's not just, I want freedom,

it's can I manage the focus, authority, tribe, and emotions

required to earn it.

And, you know, that fate is not magical either.

Fate is what happens when your attention,

your authority, people, and emotional regulation

stop working against you.

Yeah.

It's where you put your attention.

I can want to do something

and then never do anything about it.

Or I can be doing a lot of things that have no purpose.

Right.

And you're just spinning your wheels,

and you're wondering why, why,why?

As opposed to if you stopped for a minute,

you did an accounting of where you were, what's going on,

and then set your guides forward

with an intention of getting somewhere,

and then the actions to follow that.

That's where any growth happens.

It could be losing weight,

learning a new sport,

building a business.

Right.

Like, you have to, at some point, be accountable.

And that is your fate.

Right?

Like the great stories, the Greek myths,

they all spoke about the fate of.

But those were heroes' journeys, right?

The Joseph Campbell hero journey,

they call young hero journey.

And recognize in that hero journey, everything falls apart.

Right?

And then somewhere you find the light and the purpose

and the reason and the being,

and it all comes full head when you get home, right?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, I'd like to bring that back to music

because I think that's where both of us lit up

like two former college radio kids

who found the secret basement door.

You know, you started in the music business,

but you said something painfully accurate.

You learned disappointment perpetually, right?

Yeah.

And that's music.

That's also entrepreneurship.

But it's also corporate life.

You described your journey as basically living "Almost Famous",

and that's hilarious and brutal.

But what did the music business teach you early on

that still shows up in how you build and advise today?

So the music business is really interesting

because you can be a successful musician without being,

name the person at the Top of the Pops.

It's what your definition of success is.

Right.

So for me, I wanted to be like Wolfman Jack as a kid.

Meaning, I wanted to be a radio DJ,

but then Arbitron happened,

and there was no longer radio DJs.

So, what do you do next?

And then I wanted to be a producer and an engineer.

And here's the truth,

I don't actually read music,

so they were better producers

because they could get to it faster,

regardless of my ears.

And then I wanted to be a manager.

And every time that I would

bring a band to the height of success,

that's where that "Almost Famous" moment happened,

where I have a tour bus, that guy's got a plane.

I would get on the plane.

So, see you guys later.

And that happened enough times, but the fact is, is that it.

And I had to say this to a client

that broke my heart,

that I caught up a million years later with.

And I said, you didn't take into account

that I also had dreams.

And he looked at me very succinctly and said,

"you're right".

And it wasn't about Alex.

It really wasn't.

In my world, I am the hero of my own story,

but when you're trying to bring somebody else to like,

the heights of whatever,

it ain't your story.

And that was the thing I had to learn,

was that I didn't take it personally.

I mean yeah, I'd go lick my wounds for a minute.

But I didn't take it personally.

And if this is really what I wanted to do,

then you get yourself up,

you go find the next course,

and you just keep going at it.

There came a point where reality met the dream.

I don't have a law degree.

I wasn't going to be the president of some huge label.

I didn't belong to a crew

that somebody was going to bring me along.

And I had hit,

as much of a glass ceiling that was for me, my glass ceiling.

And I said, well, you can either be this guy

or go do something else.

So, I just took all of the things I learned.

It's the idea of having a bucket, not a colander.

Right.

You can take water anywhere with a bucket,

but a colander has to stay in the stream to be full.

So that's what I meant by that is like,

as soon as I went from one industry to another,

I took everything from that with me

because I had built buckets.

I had the network, and the understanding,

and the logistics and the.

I was a tour manager and a production manager and all the things.

Moving people around the world is complicated.

So being able to do that in my next industry

or my next iteration or the next invention of me.

Well, what are you taking with you?

And that's what music taught me,

was first off, don't take it personally.

You got to keep pivoting.

When I started making records,

we were using 2-inch tape and a razor blade to edit it.

By the time I was done,

Cubase and all of those things were already coming in

and it didn't.

And I say this like flippantly,

the saxophone player was still playing saxophone.

Do you know what I mean?

It was everything around them that changed.

Yeah.

And that's what you had to learn,

is that like, it stayed the same intrinsically.

Music is music is music is music.

And then everything else changed.

So, so do you.

And what can you take with you

when you're exiting through the door?

And it wasn't Jerry Maguire.

I'm taking the fish tank.

No, I'm gonna actually take the things I learned

and the relationships

and now apply it to what the next part of the journey is.

Yeah, yeah.

I think a lot of people change chapters,

but they don't hold on to that learning

that they get from it.

And I saw that across my own career,

20 years in marketing,

managing over a hundred million dollars in paid ad spend.

I got laid off twice.

But I think a lot of people would view that as

just career events.

And it's not really, it's not the way I viewed it.

It's curriculum.

If I treat them like proof

that the world is unfair and powerless,

that water falls out the bottom.

But if I ask, what did that teach me about systems, about energy,

leadership, risk, autonomy, and what I refuse to outsource again.

That's the bucket that I carry now.

And that becomes, you know,

for me, a book, a coaching practice,

a podcast, and a different life.

So true.

What's, what's the one lesson from music, Alex,

that you still carry into every business conversation today?

Well, fortunately for me,

I'm actually in the frequency space.

So what I'm doing.

What, excuse me.

My dog thoroughly disagrees me.

You are not.

Now what I'm doing today,

it's really interesting in what I'm doing with Tonewell,

we're using frequency as an analytic

withinside the wellness space.

So for music, I actually have taken my first iteration.

I was an engineer, and I was an early on producer,

mostly because I had bands I wanted to manage

and somebody needed a demo,

and I was the guy that could do it.

But when we were mixing at the time,

there was an oscilloscope on the mix desk, right,

which is a piece of technical equipment

that shows the pathway of frequency.

And when it was all fuzzy,

you would say, this is out of phase.

You would go through this stack,

and you would correct it.

So it was in-phase.

So now, in what I'm doing in frequency,

because I'm not a doctor,

I'm technically not the science team, right?

But I need to be able to explain my business.

And my business is predicated on very heavy science.

But because I can relate to it from music,

I can explain it in the most LEGO format necessary

for everybody to connect with it.

So I've taken that through.

The same thing is like when I left,

I was at Sony at the time.

And when I got my first client client

as a consultant in marketing and advertising

and brand building,

he said to me, hey, why do you think you can do this?

This after I think I had already gotten the job,

but, why do you think you can do this?

And I said, oh, you don't get the business of music.

You start in a basement, you end up in a stadium.

You have multiple companies, multiple insurers,

a ton of employees,

logistics are real, deliverables are real.

And now you understand, like

a million records that makes a platinum record

is what's shipped,

not necessarily what's sold,

which is how artist X can be a platinum-selling artist on week one.

Now, the trick is if any of that stuff gets returned,

super clunky, really expensive,

all of that stuff doesn't make you look good.

So you have to do your homework, where it goes.

So now, in like business,

before you got to the point

of spending a hundred million dollars in ad spend,

you didn't just fire that off.

Right?

Right.

You had a plan, and you did your homework,

and you knew what your ICP was,

and all of these things

and who's the first persona,

and what do I spend,

and how do I get.

That's all music.

Like, legitimately,

you ever put 15 people in a passenger van,

and you're only making X amount a night.

You better figure out how to sell merchandise,

you better figure out who's buying your dinner,

you better figure out where gas comes first.

Right.

Yeah.

That's what music taught me.

It really is a great entrepreneur crash course,

at least when I did it in the 90s and early 2000s.

I mean that, that's a great example of how experience

only turns into wisdom if you carry it.

Right.

And otherwise it's just history leaking through,

through those holes.

Right?

I mean, I want to also pull in

your musician friend example

because I think it's sneakily powerful.

Right.

You mentioned your friend in Vermont is still a guitar player.

That's what he does.

He's not waiting tables, he's not bartending,

and he makes the economics work.

Right.

I say this to people because

we live in this comparative scale

of everybody wants to be,

and then they name the biggest thing possible.

And I don't think they understand

the demands of that or what it takes.

And you can't just stop because all of the teams.

Fine.

But the reality of life is based upon what

your actual wants, expectations, and abilities are.

It doesn't disqualify you from being a something.

What I mean by that is this,

In my friend's example.

I have a friend in Vermont,

he's a professional guitar player.

Meaning he only plays guitar for a living.

Okay?

Right.

He doesn't bartend, he doesn't cut lawns in the summer,

but he's in a wedding band.

Okay?

So as I said to you,

between April and October,

not even worth giving him a call.

You'll never get a call back.

That is when he makes his living.

April, October.

That's when it works for him.

Right.

Now, in that, he is learning 100 new songs a summer.

He has insurance.

He owns his house.

He has 35 guitars.

He has everything that you would be like,

oh, my God, you're a musician.

And then he says, yeah, and I play in a wedding band.

And then people are like,

oh, you play covers for a living?

And he says, yes, for my living, I play guitar.

Right?

And that's where people,

they snicker.

And I think he's the guy getting the last laugh.

Yeah.

His wife is a nurse.

They have two beautiful children.

They own their house.

He's one of the best skiers I've ever met,

because guess what he gets to do in the winter?

Ski.

You know what I mean?

And you're like,

bro, you figured it out earlier.

And the reason he figured it out early was actually

because he was always the fifth man, so to speak,

or the sixth man, excuse me, so to speak.

He was never in the band that was like

the famous band in town.

But he's a great guitar player,

and he knows how to read music,

and he didn't care that you didn't know who he was.

So he just figured it out.

Never left Vermont.

Never tried to go to Hollywood or Nashville.

I'm never gonna be that guy.

There's a million of me already doing it.

But I knew if I stop right here.

And they've been doing it for

geez, I gotta say, almost 25, 30 years.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's not new.

He's been doing it since 96,

so that would be 30 years.

Yeah, right.

At 30 years, that's a career.

Yeah, right.

And because he was never gonna get the number one song,

he actually lives on a fixed,

in my means, know what I'm doing,

probably has a retirement fund.

I wouldn't doubt that he does.

Has a life.

Genuinely owns his life.

And that's why I laugh when people are like,

and I'm gonna be the...

and you're like,

first off, do you have any idea what that takes?

But, why?

If I was a tradesman today

and you were the plumber or the electrician.

Guess what?

You can still be a plumber and electrician in 20 years from now,

and you could have 30 guys working for you.

You could be the one guy that always answers the call,

you'll still be that person.

Right.

And that's.

That to me is success.

Right.

Well, and I think that gets into the disease of comparison.

Right.

To keep it in the music thread, you said,

everybody wants to be Bob Dylan,

but maybe the best version of you is the actual win.

And I love, actually, your point

you brought up then after that

about Tim Buckley.

Right.

A person does not need to be

the most famous name in the room

to leave a real mark.

There's different ways to matter.

I think a lot of leaders, artists, founders,

and micro business owners actually need to hear that

because they're just simply using the wrong scoreboard.

You know, they compare their meaningful thing

to someone else's maximum volume thing

and then wonder why they feel small.

And, you know, success isn't always about becoming the biggest.

Sometimes it's becoming undeniable

at the scale that lets you stay a whole human being.

So Tim Buckley is like

a double entendre.

Okay.

He's a two-time.

And you go, what do you mean?

Well, Jeff Buckley,

who people go, don't you mean Jeff?

No, that's his son,

is arguably one of the greatest artists of all time.

Maybe stands in the pantheon of like,

the best one album of all time artist.

Like him and the Stone Roses, in my life.

We threw one out, and we're done.

Unfortunately, Jeff is no longer with us.

Right.

But his father, Tim, who is a folky,

like you know, acoustic guitar,

wrote a song called "Song for the Sirens",

that, if you look it up,

it's been covered by everybody,

from Robert Plant to Sinéad O'Connor

to on and on.

Like, there have to be 50 covers of it,

because it's that good of a song.

And that is why he will live forever.

Because you die three times:

when you take your last breath,

when they put you in the ground,

and when the last person mentions your name,

you're done in time, in memoriam.

So he has a shot of living forever

because it's that good of a song.

Wow.

And that beats everything else that you could be.

Like, yeah, I played this huge stadium last night.

Three weeks from now, there's another huge stadium show.

You forgot that I played there.

Well, and I'm gonna move this into

a move that our listeners can run this week.

And you know, Alex,

thanks to your inspiration,

I'm gonna call it The Fate Reset.

And, you know,

before you choose the next opportunity,

client, promotion, investor,

or just permission slip,

answer four simple questions:

You know, first, focus.

Where is my attention leaking?

Second, authority.

Where am I waiting to be picked up?

Third being tribe.

Who creates the kinetic energy around me?

And the last one is the big one.

We started with emotions.

What feeling is currently making decisions for me?

And then take one agency move.

It could be a text, a conversation,

an hour block, to page written,

or just an old story retired.

But what, Alex, would you add there

to that Fate Reset?

So I think that that was fantastically laid out,

and I would genuinely think

that the thing that we've lost in today's world

is personal journaling.

And I don't mean diary keeping.

I mean, like, writing it down for yourself.

Because there's something very powerful that happens

when the thought becomes physical,

and then when you apply a rubric like fate to it,

like, I did that this morning.

I'm in my seed round for my business,

and I'm trying to reach more people.

So I literally sat down and said to myself,

who am I not thinking of?

And I just started writing names.

And then I said, okay, focus.

Who, why, where, and what am I trying to get out of them?

Because they're different people.

They need different approaches.

And of my long list,

I think I crossed out 30% of them.

They just weren't right,

but they were in my head.

So I put them down, and then I evaluated them against.

So I think that's the other side of it.

Make a habit of making things physical for yourself.

Writing something down actually makes it real.

It's called trying it on.

I've tried it on because I wrote it down,

and now I can see it.

And you might go, that's crazy.

Or you might say, wow, that's amazing.

And you circle it, and underline it,

and start making stars around it.

That practice is so underrated,

it's what I tell people to do.

Just stop and write it down, and then get back to me.

See how you feel about it.

And that speaks exactly to how we don't control everything.

Right?

We barely can control anything.

But if you control your focus,

your authority, your tribe,

your emotions, and remind yourself constantly, you know,

the world will happily control them,

and you can make forward motion happen.

Right, Alex?

True.

It's very true.

You know, momentum is like

when the lever and the fulcrum happen,

and then the hill does the rest of the work.

Well, Alex, you now how we end here

after all of this, whether it's music,