I was catching up on my RSS feeds and found several excellent posts from Seth Godin. There’s rarely a day that I don’t learn something profound from him and I hope you’ll take my advice and visit his blog regularly. Here are the posts:
Money, popularity, quality describes the fact that successful is now defined as “great.” Meaning that if something reaches the success level of riches, fame, popularity, then it must also be great.
We all know the two are unrelated, but if you want to make a living playing music – and I assume you do – then you’d be wise to “get good at predicting ‘great’ before the market takes action.”
Thrill seekers is about two groups of people: thrill seekers and fear avoiders. “Thrill seekers love growth…Fear avoiders hate change.”
“Seeking thrills was risky. But no longer. Now, of course, safe
is risky. The horrible irony is that the fear avoiders are setting
themselves up for big changes because they’re confused. The safest
thing they can do now, it turns out, is become a thrill seeker.”
Hmmm, so which are you? Are you moving with the massive changes in the music industry, or hoping they’ll go away?
And lastly, Choice is a powerful piece about the effects of choices on careers and success:
“The movie business provides us with a clear window on what happens when
people make good choices (and bad ones). Very few people–with the
exception of Sean Connery or Daniel Craig–have the option of sticking
with one movie forever. Everyone else in the industry makes critical
choices on a regular basis. Smart choice makers do far better than
those that don’t work at it. I’m willing to guess the value of smart
choices is responsible for a 10 to 100 times difference in lifetime
earnings in Hollywood.”
It’s easy to assume that the path to success is to take as much work as possible so you can hone your skills, get to know other artists and get in the public eye or industry network. But success is often thwarted by saying yes to everything.
