There is a moment early in Nashville entrepreneur and industry visionary Scott Scovill's life story that sets the tone for everything that follows. He was a kid so afraid of failing that he found clever ways to avoid trying altogether. Getting by on exam scores while skipping the homework that would have actually counted toward his grade, is just one early example. But it worked for a while until it didn't. He ended up failing out of college. But owning that failure is where something clicked for him.
"My fear of failure was making me a failure," he says. "For the first time in my life, I realized that I had become the thing I was most afraid of."
Scovill is, and has done, many things. He is the founder of MooTV and has collaborated with music legends like the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Paula Abdul, Ozzy Osbourne and more. He is also a songwriter, a filmmaker, a Christmas record maker, a man with a photo of Jennifer Garner hugging him on his wall, and now a published author who is opening for Brad Paisley in front of 10,000 people this month. He is also, by his own admission, "something of a hot mess."
Tenacious: The Art of Relentlessly Pursuing Your Wildest Dreams, Scovill's debut book, seven years in the making and the subject of a billboard in Times Square, is part memoir, part manifesto, and the work of a man who has spent the better part of his adult life proving that tenacity is not just a character trait. It is a practice.
The inspiration for the book came from an unlikely source: a late-night conversation with author Tim Ferriss. "My friend Tim did not have a life worth writing about. First, he started writing and then he suddenly had a life worth writing about." The implication was life-changing for Scovill. "I'm going to start living my life like I'm writing a book," Scovill says. "And every day when something's presented to me, I'm going to say, 'Would this make my next chapter more interesting?' And if it will, and it's not going to totally blow up my life, then I do it."
What followed was a remarkable series of chapters. Including one in Norway, where a night of singing at a party led to an impromptu stage appearance the next morning. "I've always loved music and I was blown away to find that people actually liked listening to me," he says. "And I just said, 'That's it. I'm going to do this.' And to be in your late 40s and start singing, and now I find myself opening for Brad Paisley again in June."
Tenacious features seventeen inspiring people including Olympic Champion Scott Hamilton, music icons Brad Paisley, Peter Frampton, and Dierks Bentley, as well as NASA astronauts, athletes, CEOs, a Navy SEAL, and many more, alongside Scovill's own story. Connecting every chapter is the same simple yet difficult idea: don't give up.
"Tenacity is so simple, right?" he says. "It's just not giving up. How do you write a book about that? And the answer is, as simple as it is, it's incredibly hard on execution and that's why we aren't all living our very best lives."
One of the book's most memorable passages involves Thomas Marshburn, a NASA astronaut who spacewalked multiple times. Scovill asked each of his guests a question he thought would yield interesting answers: What came from your tenacity other than what you were originally gunning for? Marshburn's answer surprised him most.
Marshburn described a moment near the end of a six-hour spacewalk, perched on a robotic arm 120 feet from the space station, when darkness fell and his eyes adjusted to reveal the depth and scale of the universe around him. "I perceived the universe, not blackness," Marshburn told him. "I felt it in a way that I cannot describe and will never be able to describe even to myself, but I felt so incredibly small and yet everything about us felt so tiny and at the same time so important." He paraphrased Nietzsche: "I looked into the abyss and the abyss looked into me."
"Tom took the time with me," Scovill says, "and for you, the readers, I got to experience that and I believe it changed me a little bit, and isn't that the cool thing about telling stories?"
The writing process itself was, appropriately, a lesson in tenacity. It started with Post-it notes covering an entire wall. It involved writing in three-day bursts. "Just vomit it all out," Scovill says. It was followed by rounds of revision with editors who eventually helped him honor his own voice without surrendering it. When an early partner rewrote a chapter in a way that didn't sound like him, he pushed back hard.
What does he hope readers take from it? Not a formula, not a shortcut, not a list of rules. "I hope when people read the book, they'll think of something they're not doing and do it more and harder," he says. "Even if you never make it, if your dream is to go to the moon and you never make it to the moon, I think you could have a lot of fun trying. I would feel great about these seven years it took me to write this book, if I could feel like I helped one person a lot, if I helped a few people a little."
As for what's next on the Scovill horizon? Another album is in the works, a possible film project with his partner Katie, and maybe another book somewhere down the road. But for now, Scovill is doing something he admits has not always come naturally: pausing to appreciate what he has accomplished.
"I'm getting so much better at taking a second and feeling like I'm enough," he says. "Just do it because you want to, and when you achieve something like this, just sit here for a minute and just be happy. Just be like, 'Wow, look what I did.'"
Tenacious is available now wherever books are sold. TenanciousBook.com / ScottScovill.com
"I hope when people read the book, they'll think of something they're not doing and do it more and harder."
"Even if you never make it, if your dream is to go to the moon and you never make it to the moon, I think you could have a lot of fun trying."