One Hundred Commonalities

Just because you make a plan to be wildly successful doesn’t mean you will be. But everyone who has become wildly successful has made a plan to do so…so if that’s what you want, you might as well.

Every successful artist has a manager. Doesn’t mean you’ll become successful by having a manager…but it’s an even longer shot if you don’t.

If an artist writes a song and it becomes a hit and then you ask them, ‘what other songs have you written’…it’s unlikely they will replay with, ‘none’. So it’s probably to good idea to follow suit and write lots of songs too, especially if you want a hit.

There’s no hundred step program to achieve what you want…but there’s probably a hundred commonalities of the people who have achieved what you want.

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Overrated Comfort

New artists are starving for attention.

‘If people would just pay attention we could get this thing off the ground.’

And often the proposed solutions revolve around making it more comfortable for people to walk in the door, click on the link, check out the video.

‘How can we make people comfortable?’

But what if you went the other way instead?

What if you created sharper edges, took a firmer stand and went to the extremes…creating discomfort for many, thereby making it the perfect a select group.

I listened to a podcast a while back with Shep Gordon who managed Alice Cooper. Their strategy was simple…They figured out all they had to focus on was getting parents to hate Alice Cooper and then the teenagers would come running.

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Professional Results

You want the results of a professional…but if you’re not willing to identity yourself as one and thereby aren’t willing to commit like a professional, you won’t get the results you say you want.

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Switching Lines

When discontentment in regards to a certain situation goes away, it doesn’t mean that contentment will come to take its place.

Often when the discontentment of one situation is eased, discontentment in another area simply fills it back in.

When we are discontent we look for (quick) solutions to ease it. And it’s quite interesting that adopting an attitude and posture of contentment usually isn’t one of the things we try.

Instead we’re happy to move from discontentment to discontentment, wondering if we’ll ever get to the end of the line. We won’t.

We have to switch lines.

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Your Best Stuff

When you’re in a writing session it’s a lot easier to try and write a song you can be known for (a hit)…rather than writing a song you can be known through (an expression).

You’re in the room with a couple other writers, everyone’s got publishing deals, everyone’s trying to make sure they recoup, everyone want’s to make their publisher happy by turning in something that’s easy for the publisher to go make money with.

So you write with that in mind. You try and write a hit. And then when it hits everyone will know you wrote it. You’ll be known for it. Wonderful, congratulations.

On the other hand, writing to become known THROUGH a song is scary indeed. Because some people won’t get it. Lot’s of people will reject it. And it hurts a lot more to have one of these songs rejected than one where you were just trying to write a hit.

And then sometimes ‘being known for a song’ and ‘being known through a song’ come together in a magical way. That’s your best stuff.

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Above And Beyond

There are two primary instances when you go above and beyond…

-When you’re asked

-When you see it’s needed

The first one can be tricky because when you’re asked to go above and beyond, you don’t know if they know what they’re asking. i.e. You don’t know if you’re going to get credit or an extra thank you for going above and beyond. And frankly, you’d like a little extra appreciation.

The second one requires even more from you. The intuition to see the need and then putting in the extra effort to meet it.

You can’t go above and beyond all the time, but if you haven’t done it in a while the second option is usually available.

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