Category: Uncategorized

When we tell people our intentions, it changes the context of how they see our actions. Not just does it make us possibly more sympathetic, it also may make us more dependable.

Even Free Shoes

Even when things are free, they can be a difficult sell. Think about these three possible first sentences. A stranger approaches with shoes in hand and says one of these three things…

1. “Here are some free shoes”
2. “These are great, top of the line shoes brand new”
3. “The way I spread joy in the world is I try to find someone every day who I think is perfect for a new pair of shoes”

The same person could say all three of them, but when they let their heart shine, or whatever, the shoe fits. We hear that person’s ethos and it changes the shoes for us. Hearing about the heart of the giver means that we know a lot of background of the product.

If we believe them, we know that the giver wants us to have something nice, they believe that the shoe is actually right for us, and that the stakes are high for them to get it right — as well as other positive assumptions.

For creative work that’s generous, we need fuel. We can’t be generous if we don’t have anything to give. More clearly, we can’t feel and act generously if we feel we have nothing to give. Fuel prices are going up. Validation from strangers is freaking expensive. Validation from loved ones is hard to accept.

We can fuel up for free with a small time and energy commitment. My family makes two lists. We try to do it every day.

1. A gratitude list
2. A level up list

Gratitude

Make it easy. Make it ludicrous. If I can’t think of anything… “air.” Who cares? This is a list for us. “coffee” usually makes the list. Stupid positivity is better than genius negativity.

Level Up

Leveling up is important in treating life like a game. These are kinda tricky to think of at first, but you get better at it. What’s a thing that happened today that will make tomorrow easier, better, more fun, etc. “got a new shelf” “figured out a new way to respond to email” “finally found a dependable plumber”

The opposite

The opposite of these lists is wishing and playing a narrative of being stuck. This is not about wanting. This is about having. That’s how we get power. We also get power by being able. The level up list shows us that we are moving forward by our own volition. Let’s get listing so we can give more to the world.

We have a big gap from what we see in ourselves to what our business is to what our service of our business is to what the result of the service is to the experience of our end-user/ fan / customer is. It really helps to get an outside eye on our stuff. But that outside opinion is not useful if the opinionator doesn’t know what the heck problem we’re trying to solve. So, when we ask friends questions like…

• what is my brand?
• which is a good photo of me?
• which logo design is best?
• would you say this is a good slogan?
• how does my resume look?

These questions are subjective and really don’t get us what we need.

We start by being candid about what we’re trying to be for our people, then we ask the real question of a friend…

Does this communicate my value to the right people?

If my friend knows what’s important in what i do to my people, my friend won’t be a genius marketer all of a sudden, but we can at least flitch our way to better promo.

People like putting contact forms on their sites. Some people have no way of contacting them except thru the form. It seems to be a way to get visitors to comply and give us the exact data that we want. Then, the hope is we can automate the relationship so we can work with a million clients at once… or at least quickly eliminate people who aren’t gonna be clients. Or, maybe they’re afraid of giving out their email address? I don’t understand the threat there, really.

We need to figure out the balance of what serves us and what serves our visitor.

ONE: Users are seeking a relationship,

so the more we seek to streamline the interaction — make it mechanical and assembly line — the more everyone suffers. The relationship and the conversation give us value as service providers. Humanity is worth something.

TWO: wasting time

Many people have autofill in their browsers now, so if a form is set up correctly (I’d say less than 20% are) the browser will fill in the user’s details for the really repetitive stuff. But there are often additional form fields that take some thinking and typing and I don’t want that as a user.

No matter how normal a form is, acclimating to a new interface takes mental power and commitment from a user.

THREE: something’s gonna break

Imagine this: you fill out a form, you submit it, nobody receives it, you have no idea. This happens all the time. This is not a nightmare. This is very common.

Contact forms are another layer of dependency for communication. They are another part that can break. They can break on the backend or the frontend, or there could be user error (eg: I thought I hit the ‘send’ button). Email is already not totally dependable. There are spam filters on sending and receiving ends, black lists, weird things and whatnot like email server downtime. These things break in just pure email sending from my gmail inbox to yours. If someone thinks they sent me a message and I don’t get it we’re all screwed.

FOUR: taking away tools

When I fill out a form on a website instead of using my email app,

1. I can’t CC or BCC anyone else who’s important.
2. I don’t have it in my email history.
3. I don’t have formatting options or other tools I might have in my email app that I use regularly.

FIVE: asking too much / wrong

So many forms ask for stuff that might not matter. I might just need a person to call me, but I am suddenly required to fill in the date of the gig I want to book them for? I don’t want to book them. I want to talk to them and I don’t know the dates of my very high-budget project. Again a waste of time and headaches trying to fill out the form most honestly and least confusingly.

The solution is skip the form

The solution is just don’t have them. Have an email address visible on a site, have it clickable to open up the user’s mail app or selectable so they can copy and paste. Have a phone number too, if possible. Start a real conversation. Figure out how to make it easy and be responsive. This is the answer.

As a new father on Father’s Day, I’m seeing how insecure I feel about how I’m showing up. This insecurity is more limiting than any of my other limitations. I see that when my dad was feeling insecure he was mean because he wanted control. He wanted to make good happen and he couldn’t wait. The self-hatred he felt held him back from being the gentle, sweet, compassionate person that he was inside.

This parallels to exactly what I have seen over the past few years in having so many candid conversations with circus and variety entertainers. When we are looking at ourselves and not sure how we’re doing, or afraid of fucking up, we are extremely limited. We put out bad work or no work or work in some weird direction that doesn’t serve anyone.

Proof of our good is out there. My wife is constantly telling me how awesome I’m doing. I have trouble absorbing it. Today, she gave me a Father’s Day card with so much encouragement and just objective truth written in it. I read it three times. I’ll probably read it more before I go to bed. Each time I could absorb it and accept it a little more, but it was hard.

As creators, we often buy the hype and “compare our insides to others’ outsides.” We forget about our own outsides. We forget about how inspiring, successful, genius, whatever others think we are. There is a lot of truth in the views of others.

What’s the hype about me? What does that look like?

I encourage people to go look at what they really look like to others. I get a confidence boost by looking at my online reviews. I get a confidence boost by looking at my resume. It is not bad to have confidence. It will not make me lethargic. It will give me the fuel to give more to the world. It will give me the energy to give more to my son. It will give me the security to offer vulnerability and true heart to the things I do. It will make my world a little less distorted.

Happy Father’s Day. Believe your own hype. Be a strong dad for yourself. Be a hype daddy.

We don’t have bandwidth to do everything and sometimes we’re most helped by doing a part of something that has a big effect, but doesn’t finish the job.

Here’s a question I posted on facebook and nobody had the answer. What’s the word for doing that big first chunk?

In lumber, a flitch is a rough cut of wood. It gets you a chunk of wood that you can stack and start working with.

Let’s say I want to write a book at a table, but my chair broke. I could cut a few flitches out of a log, nail them together and have chair.

I did not

1. I didn’t create a haven for writing, but I made something that works. It’s ugly. It’s rough. I might get splinters. I might not be comfy, but I can sit and write and that was my goal in the first place. I didn’t work for a week making a drawing, measuring, getting all the tools together, cutting, sanding, painting and whatnot. I’m a writer (in this scenario) not a carpenter.
2. I did not skip it completely and sit on the floor crying about how I’ll never write again.

Find the flitch

As freelancers, we are helped by finding the flitch. We can take big chunks out of our projects. We can be aware of our desire to create elegance from the start, or our feeling of futility.

Next up

Part of effective flitching is knowing what’s next. We can…

1. Leave it as it is. We have a rough chair that we’ll use forever.
2. Iterate with another flitch. The chair’s giving me splinters and it’s hard on my butt. hard on my butt is the worst part, because my writing is cut short, so maybe I cut out an indent in the chair so it fits my tush better. That might take care of most of my splinters too
3. I become a carpenter writer. I explore improving my chair making skills or maybe I just really enjoy making this one chair.

The important part of this stuff is that we do it all deliberately.

I’ve been weird. Undependable.

In recent years, I’ve realized that I’ve been driven through many things in life by my fear of criticism. 

I didn’t think of myself as being worried about criticism because I was weird. I had weird interests, a weird career, weird social behaviors, weird ways of living, weird friends. I didn’t want to be normal or boring. It seemed to me if I was so weird, I must be impervious to criticism. I must be brave. I must not GAF about the judgement of others.

While many people try to avoid criticism by complying with society and or being high achievers, my strategy ( kinda unbeknownst to me ) was to be confusing. If other people didn’t know my goals, they couldn’t tell if I was succeeding. If I wasn’t trying to do what others were doing, they couldn’t compare myself to them. If was doing stuff that other people hadn’t heard of before, they couldn’t tell me I was doing it wrong. I didn’t play the sports my dad was interested in. I studied magic instead of getting good grades. I flipped a pancake.

The good of this is drive to avoid criticism is I created a lot. I explored a lot. I learned a lot. I built a career and a personality on it that gave joy to a lot of people. I made entertainment that was very much about being bulletproof in society. I motivated and inspired people who felt weird but didn’t know if they were safe to express it. I became a vicarious avatar for people — even if just for a few minutes on stage.

The bad side of this drive is that rebellion is not the opposite of compliance. If I was a rebel, I didn’t have a chance to go with the flow when it would be helpful to me. A die-hard rebel is just as controlled by the status quo as a total sheep – we must rebel no matter what. I was constantly reinventing the wheel. I was constantly swimming upstream. I pursued confusion in my relationships. 

I ACTIVELY TRIED TO PROVE THAT I WAS UNDEPENDABLE.

When I felt that I was facing criticism in my life I would get very defensive and defensive actions are not good for people around me. It prevented me from listening to others and responding with my highest intention. When people looked to me and wanted to depend on me, I wasn’t there to do it. That wasn’t who I was.

In my career, I was impacted by not trying to outwardly build a fanbase (because that success could be measured by others) or trying to be financially successful (because that would have been another clear metric of my failure). It held me back a lot.

As I’ve realized that this criticism-avoidance was a major power in my life, I started to change. I started to listen to people and realize that most of the stuff they say is not criticism. I started to see how much I judged others and saw the world thru a lens of everyone being non-stop judgmental. I started trying to determine what I actually wanted in life – not just what I wanted to fight against.

I started being more of who I wanted to be in relationships. I started taking on more responsibility and standing behind that responsibility. Then, I started seeing what I could do with responsibility! If I took responsibility for entertaining an audience, I could take them to another level. I could say, I’m going to be your leader. I’m going to guide you through a good time. Then, I could deliver on that.

Now, I’m taking responsibility for earning a living for my family. I’m taking responsibility to deliver to the performers who hire me to make websites for them. I’m not flaking. I’m not making it weird. I’m not defensive. 

I’m still a recovering rebel. I’m not quitting being weird, but I wanna do it when I wanna do it. I’m still getting better at aligning with my intention. Being a husband and father has escalated my fear of public failure and my drive to be more responsible at the same time. I am not driven by the fear 24/7 anymore. I’m driven by love and generosity. 

It’s not that I’m a totally transformed man, but it is an exciting new chapter in my life. I’m okay with being seen as a failure sometimes. I’m okay with being seen as normal sometimes. I’m way better than okay with my life. Life is so good!

Here I am, publicly stating that if you are in my life, I will try to stick to my commitments to you and give to you from my heart. I prefer if you don’t criticize me when I fail, but I’d rather fail at that than succeed at pushing away responsibility.

A lot of times in entertainment is about selling drinks (that’s why a bar has a show. that’s why the nba has halftime shows). For a seated show like Scot Nery’s Boobietrap, this can be challenging. Here are some ideas to consider.

People don’t drink as much during the week. People don’t drink much at a seated show.

So you can raise prices on drinks, force people to buy drinks(like a comedy club), sell something else, change the environment, or promote to drinkers

Some ideas…

• Encourage everyone to Uber to the show
• Make special must try cocktails
• Add an intermission
• Presell drinks with tickets like a Hertz presells gasoline – it’s cheaper to buy drink tickets in advance
• Make the bar more fun
• Get a cocktail waiter
• Do something pre show
• Sell double sized drinks so people can sit thru the show
• Sell mocktails that you can’t get anywhere else
• Tell ticket buyers the drinks are great after they buy a ticket. Get them excited to drink but also ensure they don’t go to another spot before the show to pregame

My friend called me and asked what to do with his event. It wasn’t working right. The audience wasn’t happy and the night wasn’t flowing. He wanted to know what to do. Instead we shifted our focus to what we wanted the crowd to do.

With performance, art, creating, we are doing something. With entertainment, we are getting the audience to do something.

Entertainers often think…

• What will I do for the audience?
• What will it look like?
• What will it sound like?
• What format will it take?

The thing with entertainment is that it’s a craft. Crafts have goals. The goal is the audience reaction. Even if the goal is to have the audience remember what happened, that’s a goal. Even when an audience is sitting and watching a movie in silence, they are doing a lot in their heads. They are taking an adventure. Doing.

So, if we ask the question, “What do we want the audience to do?” it makes an easy problem for us.

My son is fascinated with basketball, so we paused on our walk at the school nearby to see some kids shooting hoops. They each had a ball and they were terrible.

Every single shot was out of their skill level. They were trying to shoot from far away and do tricky dribbling and ball handling and one-handed shots. I was counting. They got one out of 15 shots in the basket. They were going for heroic shots and missing almost every one.

I have a very performance-based mindset, so to me this was silly. To me, it looked like they were either trying to be cool, or trying to get better at basketball. To me, they chose the wrong path to do either. I could be wrong. Maybe they liked flinging the ball at the hoop and watching to see if they’re lucky. Maybe they had some other drive.

It made be contemplate three things.

It’s easier to fail at the ridiculous than practice the practical

If we practice and incrementally improve what we’re doing with a high rate of success, we will progress to the heroic level we want. We will practice succeeding, we will be able to analyze the work that we’re doing and improve on it based on straightforward measurements.

This is rough in the experience because we are not escaping to a fantasy – we’re staying present and aware that we are not there yet (for possibly a long time).

As I’m building my business, I constantly want to think of what it can be. I constantly want to look at parts that don’t matter, but are exciting. I want to escape to an under-the-leg three point shot instead of shooting layups for a week.

We’re affected by our peers

Even without explicit peer pressure, we are gonna do what they do. We can pick our peers, and also state our intentions to our peers so that together we work for improvement. If one kid wanted to work on easy shots to improve his accuracy, he might say “let’s see how many layups we can get in a row.” If the other kids wanted to improve their skills, or they see the game in it, they might want to jump on this opportunity too.

An example of this in entertainment is we so often focus on the wrong things when we’re around our peers. A show host might say to another show host “You look so good up there. You’re so funny” instead of “You changed the room. You took them to another level with that second thing you said!” It’s a simple change, but it reframes what we’re trying to do completely.

Success is only determined by one’s self

I don’t know what these boys were trying to do on the court. I could be totally wrong. I chuckled at them thinking I knew, but maybe they were hoping to throw balls randomly and watch to see how lucky they would get. Maybe they were succeeding.

People talk about multi-millionaires who are unhappy. They are not meeting their goals, even though some outside people might think that the goal is money. We don’t know whether other people are succeeding, and we have the opportunity to reframe our own success to be succeeding right now!

Wouldn’t it be great if people had the appropriate budget for things and they just told us how much it was and we told them, “Yes!”

Regular readers of my blog may notice that I don’t believe in entertainment budgets for most things.

For example, I want to buy shoes to run a marathon. There are several running shoes that cost $50, so I set my budget for shoes at $50. Then, I realize I need arch support. I research it and it’s complicated. Some shoes say they have good arch support, but don’t actually. I’ll need to spend at least $75 to get dependable arch support. Then, my running coach tells me I need a certain responsiveness in my sole or I will mess up my hips in a long race. So, I’ll need to spend at least $130 to get the ones recommended by my coach. What do I do? I change my budget because…

1. My budget was just a guess in the first place
2. I looked at the market and determined my budget was wrong
3. I had an expert I trusted tell me that the budget was wrong
4. I realized sticking to my budget would cost me more in the “long run.”

The budget doesn’t have to go up only. If we are trying to serve our clients, we might be able to save them money when they guess wrong about their budgets.