Artist Jobs

Your job as an artist is to make.

Your job as a professional artist is to make connection.

Your job as a career artist is to become a reliable source of connection.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Intensity

Don’t confuse intensity with number of hours worked.

Committing to working twenty hours per day has little to do with intensity. Intensity has to do with extreme strength. And working twenty hours per day probably just means you’re behind.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Subtlety

It takes courage to build subtlety into your song, project, approach, career, offering to the marketplace.

Subtlety takes patience to make.

Subtlety is often tedious.

Subtlety is expensive.

Subtlety is risky because it won’t be noticed by most people.

It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of your subtlety.

You’ll never feel like you get enough credit for the effort and creativity it took to add subtlety.

Subtlety gives something to be discovered by those who want to dig deeper.

Subtlety often comes in the form of layers.

Taking the time to build in subtle layers ensures your thing is more than meets the eye. And something like that is worth offering to the world.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Committing To The Clean Up

That’s the hard part of play dough.

It’s also the hard part of throwing a party or putting on a show or reorganizing the kitchen cabinets.

So when we say yes to those things we know the full spectrum of what we’re committing to do. The hard part isn’t a surprise. The hard part is what makes us make a conscious choice rather than a frivolous one. To do it on purpose.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

Cutting Through

Prefacing, filler, padding, preamble…it has its place. It softens the message. But with too much softening it won’t cut through at all.

Softening is easy. Cutting through is hard. Stay sharp.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple

The Outsiders

I’ve listened to a lot of interview podcasts, you probably have too. Most of the time the interviewer is asking about the guest’s story…how they got to where they are.

One commonality to every one of those interviews is that no one ever claims to have been an insider…rather, everyone talks about how they’ve always felt like an outsider.

(Even after having success, they still feel like an outsider, like an imposter.)

So if that’s the way you feel too, you join the ranks of some pretty good company.

But feeling like an insider or outsider (and oscillating between the two) pales in importance to simply deciding to do the work and deciding to make an important contribution.

 

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple