There’s a difference between what is good enough to write and play vs. what is good enough for others to want to listen to.
(But the first one is a healthy marker that second one might pan out too.)
It’s worth writing something that is simply good enough to write.
Then there’s a shift that must happen…it takes intuition and professional prowess to ask and answer, ‘It was good enough to write, is it good enough to share?’
We want a song we need to hear again.
We want a show that suspends time.
We want to follow a (great) leader.
We want to feel cool about telling our friends.
We want consistency, but tension too.
We want a rabbit trail of stuff to click down.
We want you to be larger than life in a very relatable way.
Sometimes it just is.
So often thankless and no one really knows how much energy you’ve put in. And if they do know, they still don’t understand.
In hindsight some of those details that you labored over didn’t really matter. But you couldn’t have known at the time, you were putting in the hard under-noticed never-noticed work.
You know what you’re aiming at but in the darkest moments you completely forget about the target and rely on the idea that you’ve trained yourself to keep moving toward it even in the pitch black.
Sometimes it’s work time. No pats on the back in sight. No time cards. No trophies. You’re just in it. You’re doing it. It won’t be like this forever so be glad for the hard work at hand.
If I started a hamburger stand tomorrow and sold a hundred burgers, that would probably make me the fastest growing hamburger place in the world. From zero to one hundred, thats ten thousand percent growth.
But in order to sustain that growth…on day two of my hamburger stand I’d have to go from selling a hundred burgers to ten thousand burgers, and on day three all the way to a million, and then a hundred million and then...
At some point growth tapers.
And it’s a bummer because number of hamburgers sold is a really easy metric to answer the question, ‘How are we doing?’
So when it tapers, your mindset must shift too. To things perhaps less measurable. Things that will sustain long after wild exponential growth.
There’s a handful of coffee shops in Nashville where if you were spend every day there for a year, you’d run into every Nashvillian you could ever dream of meeting in person.
Those elusive artists and writers and high up music biz execs. If you want to meet them face to face, you can get face to face. That’s not the hard part.
The hard part is…when you finally get those few precious minutes, whether it’s in a coffee shop or in a boardroom or on a phone call, what are you going to do?
Two things…
What do you need? And what can you offer? You need to be clear about these beforehand. You may not need both of them but you need both to be prepared.
»» And don’t get bogged down in super business-y answers to those questions, especially the second one (although they might be true too). Maybe you can offer humor, a light hearted spirit, a caring look, a thoughtful question, a heart felt compliment.