They cry of many a kid on Halloween when the pinnacle of the candy hierarchy is discovered somewhere in the neighborhood.
And if you’re the one giving out the full size candy bars, your one and only job is to just keep giving them out. Give one to every kid and don’t run out…and you’ll be the most famous house on the block.
If people find out that you promise (and follow through on) the thing they’re hoping for, the word will spread and you’ll get that line around the block.
Do you want to play to keep playing or do you want to play to win?
If you’re a professional athlete you better do some winning or you won’t play for long.
But for most of the rest of us…
1. It’s usually hard to define what playing to win looks like
2. It makes a lot more sense to play in a way that simply lets us keep playing
Because if we get to keep playing then we get to keep creating and contributing.
»» This might be a good time to highlight the difference between winning and achievement. For there to be a winner there must be a loser…while achievement has to do with specific goals, plans and actions.
There very well might be a time for winning and losing in your field but the road of achievement is always available.
Have you ever bombed on stage?
It isn’t bombing if you forget the words.
It’s bombing if you fail to connect. (And sometimes forgetting the words actually helps you connect.)
Sure you feel a bit unprofessional if you forget the words or hit a bum note but no one will remember that as long as you connect.
Every day is a comeback. Can you achieve the success you had yesterday? Or last year? Can you get back to, or exceed the previous mountain top?
Every day you gotta summon your energy, remember your reasons and make another miracle happen. The hard part is up to you and then everyone celebrates the last part with you. And then after the celebration it’s back to the hard part while the celebration is often forgotten and the only question you ask yourself (and think that everyone else is asking) is ‘can I do it again’.
Maybe it’s not about making a comeback as much as it is comeING back.
Because I’m not sure how a comeback is measured…but coming back…I think we all know what we need to do there.
The the cheap ones or the deluxe platinum vip?
There’s way more cheap tix than deluxe platinums, and the room fills up because of the cheap ones…so maybe a more interesting question is…which ones do you hope sell out first?
Or…last question…if you only have the cheap tickets on sale and then put five deluxe platinum vip tickets on sale, would anyone buy them? And if they did what kind of experience would make them feel like they got a deal?
You never know what you might end up getting good at.
Because getting good begets getting good.
There’s the thing you set out to get good at but then there’s a bunch of things that come along with it that you had no idea about.
If an eighteen year old kid gets hired to play piano at a piano bar a few days a week, the kid thinks it’s a decent pay check and a chance to get good at playing piano in public. But all of us who did something like that when we were eighteen know you’ll end up getting good at a lot more than that.
Showing up on time, selling the tip jar, handling drunk people, building a setlist, taking requests, playing to an empty room, playing to a packed room, knowing when and how ‘good enough’ applies to a song, squeezing excitement out of boring, squeezing variance out of repetition, and the list goes on…
Getting good at something spills over into so much more.