Telling about your new project is fun…And the person listening gets to be genuinely excited because the way your describing it sounds incredible.
But showing your project is different. Now the telling doesn’t matter so much. Now you and the person you’re with have to deal with the real quality of your project. No hiding behind excitement and tactics.
But when you have the opportunity to show your project and it connects, there’s no denying it. You did it.
When should you work especially hard?
Before you need to.
»» A little inside baseball here…
It took about thirty minutes to come up with this post. I thought the title was interesting and I wrote out a much longer post to go with it…but the longer post seemed like it was hiding and insulating and padding and wanting to be perfectly filled out and understood. And that’s not the point. So I chopped it back to the main idea…and that way we can each fill it in with our own details. That’s the point.
I do this sort of exercise a lot with blog posts. Less is usually more. But less also feels more scary.
Is it worth giving encouragement when you don’t know if the other person is going to take it to heart?
Yes
Is it worth accepting encouragement when you don’t know if the person giving it really means it?
Yes
That’s the beauty of it. Encouragement is inherently good. It doesn’t need to be taken to heart in order to make a difference…and it doesn’t need to come from the heart in order to make a difference.
»» Two sidebars worth noting…
We might hesitate giving encouragement because we believe our encouraging words are very important and superior…and if we think the receiver might not see them that way, we don’t want to ‘waste’ our valuable words.
We might hesitate accepting encouragement not because we second guess the motives of the giver…but because we second guess our own worthiness of the encouragement...thinking to ourselves, ‘Even if they really mean it, if they knew what an imposter I am, they wouldn’t bother’.
If you like The Killers you might like Coldplay.
If you like Ariana Grande you might like Sabrina Carpenter.
A good place to find new customers is by looking for already established things that you are similar to. It’s a good idea because in theory it’s easier for the customer to make the leap to you because the gap isn’t very big.
If you like Nelly you might like Tim McGraw.
If you like Aerosmith you might like Run DMC.
There’s a strange thing that happens sometimes where instead of reaching to your right and left for new customers, it can work to reach across to the other side of the table. Connections that are so out there they just might be true.
Piggybacking on yesterday’s post…
There’s a time and place for solely working on getting better at your craft.
But if you’ve been doing your craft for a while, then the idea of getting better expands…while it pays to keep building raw skills, the next part is…is what you do making the whole thing better? Do you make things better for the group by doing what you do?
And the answer to those questions has less to do with raw skill and more to do with group dynamics, creativity and cooperation.
»» It’s another reason why the best musicians don’t necessarily get the best gigs.
It doesn’t matter how it sounds.
It matters how it sounds in the mix.
Surrounded by everything else that it’s going to be surrounded with, what does it sound like then?
If it sounds amazing on its own but isn’t amazing in the mix maybe it’s not the right sound for this one.
Whether it’s people, tools, ideas or sounds it’s worth considering not only what they sound like on their own but how they fit and interact with the mix.