If you make a good show, then you have a good show.
If you have a good show, you can give a good show.
You can’t give what you don’t have.
And as it pertains to consistency, professionalism and greatness…you can’t have what you don’t make.
Most artists aren’t willing to make a good show. If you’re going to rise above the others you’re going to need to do the thing that most aren’t willing to do.
George didn’t want to do the roof top performance.
But when Mal came up with the police offers and turned off George and John’s amps to tell them what was going on…George turned his amp back on.
He had the perfect reason to stop but he wanted to keep going instead. Now maybe it was just to be a team player and finish the song for the sake of the film crew…but judging from the body language, he turned his amp back on because it was fun to be up there performing. He was right.
It’s fun to speculate about what this or that will look like in five years. It’s fun because everyone gets to be right…or rather, no one can be proven wrong. So at dinner parties and lunches and meetings it’s an easy way for everyone to chit chat about meaningful things without any real consequences or responsibility.
The more helpful conversation is what are we going to do right now…both in the face of reality (how things currently are) and how the macro ideas of five years from now might affect our tiny portion of the world.
The maintain is harder.
You’ve succeeded (attained) in raising the bar to a point where things are going well. All the thankless work, long nights, long years, the emotional rollercoaster…you’ve done it all and have made it through…not unscathed, but still alive. You’ve achieved a level of success that others in your field only dream about.
Now comes the hard part. Now you have to maintain the excellence that got you there. And excellence is a lot easier to achieve than maintain. There is a thrill to attaining that maintaining doesn’t have. Once you’ve attained, the thrill of attaining loses its power as the driving force. And when it goes away are you willing to maintain?
You built it, now go take care of it.
vs.
Next time let’s…
Two ways of saying the same thing…but different.
The thing that we should have done might be true but it’s only worth bringing up if we can apply it to next time. And phrasing it in a way that looks forward (instead of backward) reminds us that growth and a better outcome is on our horizon.
First Monday of the month, new Hum Love playlist on Spotify and Apple
In the documentary version of you making the thing you’re making there is narration over the top explaining what’s going on, a bed of mood music when things get hard and then it starts swelling when you start getting close to the answer…and in an hour when the documentary is over…there’s resolution. That’s why the documentary was made in the first place.
But back when you were actually making it in real life there was no uplifting mood music that lets you know this is the part where you’re about to find the answer. There’s no narrator guiding and explaining. And there’s no resolve in sight. Not even close.
That’s why making and releasing music is hard. You have to lay it on the line while no one else is caring. All of us in the audience, we want you to go through the suffering so we don’t have to…but we get to watch the documentary version and listen to the final song and feel good.