Cumulative Score

The GPA you graduated high school with was a cumulative average of all four years. So every year it became harder and harder to bump that thing up. Senior year, when you’re finally understanding why this score might be important, is the year you have the least effect on it. The further into high school, the more stuck your score is.

This is not the way the music business works.

Because it doesn’t matter how many misses you have, a hit redeems everything.

If you’ve struggled for a long time, failed a lot, been way up and way down, put out mediocre music…you are not stuck. It’s not about cumulative…it’s about: how good is your next thing?

And the next thing doesn’t have to care about what came before it.

ie. It’s as if you’ve been a D student forever and all you need is one A+ to graduate with honors.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

What You Have

What do you have and what do you really have?

Yeah you have twelve songs but when you play them for people or in front of people how many of them connect…how many do the thing you were hoping for?

Don’t play songs because you have them, play them because they do what you and the audience are hoping they’ll do.

That’s what you really have.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Surprise And Familiarity

Great movies are easy to watch.

Great songs are easy to listen to.

The ease comes comes from a magic combination of surprise and familiarity. You don’t know what’s going to happen next but as soon as it does, it couldn’t have gone any other way.

Being surprised and instantly connected.

As creative people, making stuff like this is a huge part of path forward.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Picturesque Beach

On the tv commercial, the beach resort looks beautiful. So you book a trip. Turns out you weren’t the only one who thought it looked beautiful and booked a trip. Lots of other people did too. Now the beach isn’t quite so picturesque. In fact, it’s far from it.

The commercial worked, thereby underdelivering on the promise.

We don’t like being over promised (and underdelivered).

We think we like being under promised (and overdelivered).

But what really helps the most is telling the truth and keeping your word.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Something Else

If you can make people stop worrying about missing out on something else, you win.

It’s not that we have short attention spans, we just can’t stop thinking that we’re missing out on something that might be better.

Are you good enough to make us forget?

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com

Changing It or Sticking With It

As a small business one of your greatest strengths is the ability to make quick, new decisions and take new action right away, changing as circumstances and culture change, while maintaining clear communication with everyone on the team.

As a small business one of your greatest strengths is knowing exactly what your purpose is and being singularity focused, unshakable, adamant about the goal, not changing for anyone because they don’t get what you get.

We can’t A/B the past or the future. We’ll never know what would have happened if we stuck with the plan or if we changed it.

Our strength is in that we have the choice of what we do next and enough scars to discern the next path forward.

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Drop me an email: gabe@gabethebassplayer.com