It's Fun To Be Excited

It’s even more fun to be excited when it’s at the same time as someone else about the same thing.

The Paul McCartney six part series on Hulu is worth watching. (If nothing else watch until you hear the isolated vocal/drums on Sgt. Peppers).

Interlaced throughout the stories is the idea of excitement…about a chord, a song, a sound, an idea, a new way.

Excitement that came from coupling current joy about something new with curiosity about where it might lead.

That said, maybe excitement doesn’t only have to be bestowed upon us magically…maybe it could be something we learn to develop. Joy plus curiosity.

It’s certainly worth a try. Maybe even worth getting excited about.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Band Or Solo

We all wish we were in a band…to be in a gang with magical and musical connection.

We all wish we were a solo artist…autonomy to steer the ship.

Bands are the worst…you can never completely have it your way.

Being a solo artist is the worst…it’s lonely.

A band says…no one is bigger than the group.

A solo act says…I am willing to lay my name on the line.

There’s a wide range of give and take, pros and cons. It all centers around buy-in, connection, leadership, vision, chemistry…and luck.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Write vs. Share

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?’

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

What The Fans Want

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.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Hard.

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.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Hamburger Stand

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.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple