A Word About Fame And Fortune
Fame and fortune.
They don’t always go together these days.
And I don’t think we even have a shared definition of the terms themselves anymore.
How many people have to hear about you until you’re famous?
How much money is a fortune?
The only way you’ll know if you have fame and fortune is if you define what it is far in advance of getting there.
Saying Hello
Keeping Track Of Your Word
A big part of keeping your word is keeping track of your word.
‘I’ll give you a call this week.’
‘I’ll check out your song.’
‘I’ll connect you with so-and-so’
It’s easy and fun to say things like this…and easy to forget to follow through.
It’s more likely we’ll keep our word if we care as much for the person we’re saying it to as we do about the emotional pop we get from saying it in the first place.
Open Ended
When we ask the question, ‘Did we do a good job?’, it’s retrospective.
And it’s usually the completion of a task or project that triggers the look back to survey the quality of the work.
The problem most artists run into is that their career is viewed as one long open ended undertaking. There are rarely points of completion along the way that bring up, ‘Did we do a good job?’
But maybe that could change. Maybe you could start looking at your career as a rolling series of projects. Projects that have a beginning and end. Projects that can be learned from and moved on from.
If we want to do better next time we need to be clear about how we did this time…Did we do a good job?
Great Things
You don’t get great things in large quantities.
They come in small quantities.
So if you’re wanting more greatness, more great material, more magic moments…the only way is to keep going, to keep working.
Related to this…
The burning desire to keep working is often a byproduct of discomfort. When you’re uncomfortable, you’re willing to work really hard to get comfortable.
So then the hard won comfort (and success) actually becomes a block to being willing to do the hard work necessary to keep generating great stuff over the long term.
If you want to keep making great work…keep discomfort around, keep doing the work.