When you advertise that your restaurant is open till 4am, it’s gonna shape the type of customer you have at 4pm too.
The new expensive fine dining place is super busy for dinner…so it would be easy to think ‘let’s keep this thing going and stay open all night’. But the instant that decision is made the whole thing changes.
If your advertising works, what does it say about the group of people who respond to it?
Politicians don’t get distracted by the question. Their scripts are locked in. They know the messages they want to get out there and they’re certainly not going to let an interviewer get in the way.
A politician’s repertoire of responses goes way beyond answering the question. They’re able to hear the question and take the answer wherever they want to go.
It’s annoying.
But most of us who aren’t politicians could stand to get a little better at this idea.
‘What COULD my answer to the question be?’ Rather than simply answering the question.
The only way you can bring passion is to have passion. The job or project or circumstance doesn’t give you passion in and of itself…it uncovers it and can then grow it. The circumstance works with what’s already there.
It doesn’t bring it to you. It can only bring it out of you.
»» If you’re having a hard time finding the passion within yourself, a closely related idea is caring. And then putting action into that care. Care and action are the shovels that uncover passion.
It’s frustrating to sit in your room knowing you’re a skilled artist while not having the levels of success you think you deserve.
Being good at music is different than being good at having a career in music.
To be good at having a career in music it takes a different skill set than learning chords and rhythms.
In short, the difference is…you have to get good at putting a team together. Recognizing skill sets, recognizing complimentary strengths and weaknesses, building culture, sharing and inspiring goals and vision.
»» If that sounds like a lot…then at a minimum you need to be diligent about finding a manager who can do all of this.
»» But ultimately it will always come back to the artist.
“We’ve got a bunch of great C chords! There’s gonna be some E minors and some G’s! And some cymbal hits!”
That’s not a great way to sell an album. Information rarely sells art.
People buy an album (or a song, or artist, or design) for the way it makes THEM feel…not because of what you did to make it…unless what you did to make it connects with them emotionally.
»» Hey Jude is in the key of F. Most of you didn’t know that…because there’s no need to know that. It’s not a selling point. The selling point was the excitement my friend had in middle school when he said ‘you need to hear this’ and then when I listened it made me feel something I never had before.
We’ve all replayed conversations in our heads and come up with what we should have said in hindsight.
After doing this a few thousand times you might find that your hindsight voice has a theme and a tone.
My guess for most of us, the theme is often clarity and the tone is often confidence.
So how do we move our hindsight voice up closer to our real time voice?
By practicing and doing it wrong and having to apologize and trying again. Eventually, instead of the hindsight voice showing up five minutes after the conversation, it starts showing up after a ten second pause DURING the conversation.