Bad Habits

There’s the obvious bad habits like drugs or yelling at people…but then there are other bad habits that hold you back in significant, but quieter, ways…

-Blaming the mix engineer for your songs not being amazing…It’s not surprising how much more you’ll love your mix engineer if you are confident in your songs.

-Waiting to put a set list together until just before the show...You travelled all that way and really want the show to be good and there’s a ton of expenses and there’s a live stream happening…this is a bad time to wing it.

-Talking about fixing problems…Don’t confuse talking with fixing. Sometimes they overlap but a lot of the time the talking simply feels good and therefore feels significant and that feels like a huge achievement in and of itself. So we relax and never actually change anything.

The obvious bad habits are incredibly burdensome but at least they’re not hidden.

The subtle bad habits can live on for decades without anyone recognizing them as bad habits…while the constraint is ever present.

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Probably Not

This whole thing is probably not.

Your big idea. My big idea. Yours might be better than mine but they both probably won’t work.

So ‘probably not’ isn’t a good enough reason not to go for a big idea…because they all fall into the category.

The biggest differentiator from one big idea to another is the willingness of the parties involved to put everything they have into the next actionable step.

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Slight Distraction

First Monday of the month, new Hum Love playlist on Spotify and Apple.

When you’re doing creative work, both your conscious and subconscious mind are spinning.

This is why slight distraction while being creative can be such a great thing…when you conscious mind takes a break, you’re subconscious is often still hard at work…except now it’s free to be creative and percolate without the conscious mind (or the other people in the room) getting in the way.

The phrase ‘it just came to me’ is often a result of this idea. After distracting the conscious mind for a bit, the subconscious serves up some of the best stuff.

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Shortcuts

We’re frantically looking for shortcuts when we may not have given much thought to where it is we want to end up.

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Bear Fighting

We weren’t good at fighting bears. They always won.

And I’m sure there was a group of people that thought getting better at fighting bears would be the best way to survive. But when that training kept not working…

Instead of focusing on getting better at fighting bears we got good at anticipating bears and learning strategies to avoid bear fighting.

While there are many problems that get solved by meeting them head on…some problems are worth avoiding so you never have to deal with them at all.

For instance…

Don’t focus on getting good at firing people…but rather, make better hires.

Don’t make it a habit of making the most of terrible shows…get better at saying no to them in the first place.

Don’t spend time coming up with better excuses for being late…instead, be on time.

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Convincing One At A Time

Gaining fans one at a time isn’t a good long term strategy for making a career in music.

If you have to sit in front of each potential fan and play some music, share your stories and put on the sales pitch…they’ll probably end up being a fan…but doing that two hundred or a thousand times in each city in order to sell out the venue isn’t the way to do it.

However…especially at the beginning…you’re going to have to convince some people. And it might be one at a time.

It’s worth winning over the right manager because the right manager is going to help you win other people over by the hundreds and thousands.

It’s worth winning over the right agent and marketer and PR rep and maybe even the person who runs the big playlist…they all make it so you don’t have to win fans over one at a time.

Hum Love on Spotify and Apple