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I talk to people who have been in showbiz for decades who say “I’m bad at business.” To be blunt, this is just victim mentality and victim mentality is shirking responsibility. I will tell you how to take responsibility.

According to Josh Kaufman, there are 5 parts to a business…

1. Value Creation – Discovering what people need or want, then creating it.
2. Marketing – Attracting attention and building demand for what you’ve created.
3. Sales – Turning prospective customers into paying customers.
4. Value Delivery – Giving your customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied.
5. Finance – Bringing in enough money to keep going and make your effort worthwhile.

If we’re running a business that’s still operating (even as freelancers), we are adequate at this collection of tasks, but probably not great at all of them.

The way to take responsibility is to pick a major part and work on it. Someone’s better at sales than me isn’t smarter than me. They don’t have some sales gene. They have a skill. Skills can be developed. So, I look at sales, and I subdivide that. What part of the sales process needs work? Looking into a prospects eyes when I say the price? I can google that.

I know, this takes some of the magic out of being a creative person. Suddenly, it’s not a world of good and bad. It’s not a world of destiny. It’s a world of “Do I make the decision to putting in the work for the future of my business?”

Step 1, decide it’s a lacking skill. Step 2, figure out what skill it is. Step 3, divide that skill down into a manageable piece. Step 4 work on learning that skill.

Most skills can be learned via a youtube video. Getting accountability can help us follow through. Mentors / coaches can help us do both and can help us ask the right questions for google.

When we take responsibility for our missions, we get the great feeling of being the hero in the hero’s journey!

Daniel Packard, Chris Karney, and I were performing at comedy clubs in Seattle. We stayed together in a youth hostel. News spread through the hostel. People woke us up and we saw the second plane hit. So surreal. I don’t remember being extra displaced by visiting a strange city.

I do remember them shutting down the Space Needle in Seattle because they thought it would be another target. You know what wasn’t shut down? The Showboat Comedy Club. The owner said he wouldn’t pay us if we didn’t do the show.

There was one patron at the club… A white-haired veteran at the bar… In the other room. We could see him and his disapproval through a doorway.

Show business is weird. We did the whole show. We laughed and clapped for each other. We did our jobs. So grateful to have friends. So grateful to have something to do on that day of so much discombobulation.

I am going to put myself out there and say I don’t like terrorism. I feel like a lot of my life, I’ve felt a lot of instability, fear, danger, and confusion. Tomorrow, probably another 2000 Americans will die from Coronavirus. It’s a different nastiness and I booked a show for a small outdoor party. It makes me more grateful for my loved ones and my life-long relationship with entertainment. So consistently goofy and so consistently buoying.

Lynn Ruth Miller recently died. She was a friend. She was fun and old and a woman. I think those are the important things she’d like you to know.

I found out about her passing last night and I thought, “Here we go. Here comes the sadness…” but it didn’t come. I have good feelings. She was inspirational and she was on the same mission as me.

Lynn started doing standup at age 70, about 17 years ago. I met her about 17 years ago. She already had a standup set, was already funny, had a personality, and was already doing shows. Her comedy set was still not super. It was fun to watch her, but not packed with laughs. Well, she worked on that. It’s pretty cool that I got to see her develop — from working in standup, in theater, creating her own one-woman show. Then, she performed in Scot Nery’s Boobietrap last year and killed it. She really locked in to her persona, perspective, what the audience wanted from her, and her jokes were all so precise. She came to kill.

Off stage, Lynn was the way you’d expect except probably nicer. She was very sweet whereas on stage, she had much more attitude. The attitude was still there in real life. She was still dirty minded and still liked to get a rise out of people, but she was genuinely concerned with connecting with people that she liked. I was one of those people. We were mutual fans.

Although she was much older than me, I was more established as a performer when we met, so she would ask me for advice and feedback and we would talk shop.

Her position on the industry (although she obviously cared a lot about it) was “fuck ’em I’m almost dead.” It lead to a very playful pursuit of comedy but she never gave the finger to the medium. She was respectful of entertainers and played by the rules of comedy to make her act tight and to give the audience what they needed. I hadn’t seen that in many people and it was really motivating to me.

I can tend to toggle between rebellion and buckled down. Lynn taught me about creativity with lightness and ease. That’s why I have a positive feeling about her death. I hope that I bring the same legacy. Ease, creativity, and continuous progress. Can you imagine? Starting standup at 70! ugh! amazing!

Graphic design is not just a way of presenting communication. It’s a way of communicating in itself. The tricky thing; when people are looking for a graphic designer, they’re often looking for someone who can make things look good. Great graphic design is about function.

The left coupon is actually good

The coupon on the left looks cheap. If you’re looking for something cheap, you might not even look at the righthand coupon. The coupon on the left does the job. It gets cheap-seekers to see it, read it and clip it. Beauty may be a disservice to TacoXpress in this case. It may cost them customers.

When we work with a graphic designer, we’re looking for solutions. We’re looking for the college kid to clip our taco coupon, or the publisher to read our sample writing, or whatever. We want action. Even reading text or looking at a photo is action. Rad graphic design communicates and leads, just like rad entertainment.

Magicians are an example of entertainers who have it easy. A person can buy a trick at the magic shop and perform it within a few minutes. It’s basically show and tell. “Look at this thing I bought.” It works immediately. It gets applause right away.

What we get from great entertainment is human connection. We get a story and a tribal learning. We get heart.

Because magic works so well out of the box, it creates a false early reward that easily blocks that connection and rewards a performer not willing to pursue empathy. Other performing arts, like mime, are unwanted initially, so mimes need to fight to find out what the audience wants.

All performing arts are on this spectrum from immediate response to kinda hated. The magic to mime scale.

Here’s where I say the opposite

Like I said in the “Do what you hate” blog post, I am fascinated by the potential of magic. Great magicians have it hard. They have to get past the fake early validation. They also have to stand up boldly in a landscape of easy-adopters. They have to then, figure out how to do something that people haven’t seen. Then, they have to bring empathy.

Jugglers have to deal with some of this too, but magicians dedicated to greatness are really swimming salmonwise up the river of shallow performance. That’s why great magicians like Henning, Copperfield, Carbonaro, Blaine, Willman are such standouts. I’ve gotten to see and become friends with so many greats that are not as popular too! They battle it all and give us heart. That’s why they give us that good feeling.

Magicians suck. People are awesome. We want to connect deeply with people. Give us the good stuff. No matter how easy it is to get started we gotta keep striving to find the humanity in what we do.

When I moved to L.A. from San Francisco, a lot of people told me that L.A. was fake, that the people are fake, that the culture is fake. Well, first, there is no culture. It’s a huge city with a million things going on. Nobody’s decided that L.A. has one unifying culture, and there’s not really unity. That’s part of what’s attractive to me about it. That diversity, that division, that ability for people to be whoever they are and clash and coordinate with so many others… that’s what’s beautiful about the city experiment. That’s what’s so real about the people here.

Authenticity is not equilibrium

The imagined authenticity is some kind of purity of person. We who would be the same in a cabin in the woods as in a walmart. I believe authenticity in private life or on stage is automatic. It’s whatever is happening. If I’m guarded and showy in social situations, that’s authentically who I am.

I love to see when people are a little thrown off. I get to learn more about who they are, what are the boundaries of their character when they don’t have a game plan or when they’re transitioning from one mode to another.

L.A. is destabilizing

This town is so full of obstacles and stuff and surprises, it destabilizes everyone and gives everyone a chance to expose more colors. Some people are trying to present something without much understanding of what’s behind it. That’s okay. That exposes who they are with that.

The real fear is non-existence

I think when people see other people who put on an obvious mask, there’s a little bit of the uncanny valley. There’s a peek into the emptiness that is behind it. It doesn’t feel substantial, and so we fear the part of ourselves that might be lacking. If this person is not really there behind a mask, am I not really there? Do I not exist? The thoughts, attitudes, and feelings that I think give me life, are they not really there?

Quick interactions make empathy hard

Another thing about Los Angeles is that stuff is moving constantly. It might be hard to sit down with someone and hear their story. It might be hard to empathise and understand why they’re putting up the mask they’re wearing. I’m not saying I’m awesome, but there was something about my past that made it easier for me to see what was up with the actors and artists I met when I landed. I saw a lot of ambition and I loved it. I saw ambition that caused people to challenge all their values and their stories and see what was left. This left people raw and struggling and engaging and embracing new mindsets and opportunities.

Advice is usually bad

While a lot of people gave me warnings about L.A., my favorite was from Bob Mendelson who told me “L.A. has everything you could ever want whether you want it or not.”

People everywhere are real… including Tinsel Town.

Lots of entertainment companies are going with WordPress. It’s running a lot of the web. People also jump on Squarespace or Wix or Weebly or whatever and that’s great. I highly recommend 8b.com also if you want to do things fast and cheap. Sometimes a person just needs to get a site up and have it not look terrible and give people contact info or a signup form or something.

Now, all these folks are getting hired to create sites on these DIY platforms for clients. It’s pretty nuts because the solutions usually aren’t good and it leaves clients with a clunky, bloated, and non-bespoke site.

Most of the promises of WordPress and the like are true, but do we need these promises. The most beloved promise, but also the most useless promise is “You can update it any time.”

In most cases, a good site can stay stagnant for three to five years and keep performing well

Keeping the value

The purpose of a site is to give great value, reinforce the brand, and send no red flags. When we update our website, it is no light job. To be responsible with it, we are reevaluating these aspects every single time. We are thinking about how the entire website works together to do this heavy lifting. It’s a lot to empathise with the user, to remember our identity and to align with the market. If we have a plugin with our instagram feed, are we ready to standup for our latest post every time and make sure that it’s showing our best side? That puts more unnecessary friction in our social flow.

Keeping out cobwebs

Oh, we want to add a news section or a blog or a performance calendar to our site so that it looks fresh. Usually this is like adding a produce section to a furniture store. Oh, it’s great to be able to get a banana while looking at beds, sure but the staff isn’t ready to keep it good.

Not even celebrities have constantly good news. So, either we have that appearance on Comedy Central from two years ago and it looks like a “gap in the resume” or we have some news that makes us look amateurish or low achieving.

Same with a blog. There are a lot of sites out there with the latest blog post that says “this is my first of many blog posts” or it describes what will be on the blog in the future. Silly.

When blogging, do we want to write something interesting and at the same time on brand? If not, our visitors will probably not search carefully for the most flattering blog post. They will read the top ones. Those top ones either need ot make us look rad or the website is not doing its job.

I’m right

I’m blogging right now on wordpress. I blog every day, though. My website doesn’t promote my blog. It might be hard to find this blog actually. I use it to communicate ideas, backlink my knowledge and practice codifying principles so i can help my clients more. It’s not because I think i should have a blog on my site.

Keep it Static

It might seem counterintuitive, but most of the time, we want a site that just sits there and looks good. A site made with a clear brand and technical prowess. Yes I make websites for people. I do things that I think are useful to making entertainment better.

When I suggest big course corrections for people or organizations, they are often flabbergasted. This gast of flabber doesn’t come from them being dumb or even surprised by the idea of change. They are going thru a little bit of a window of pain where they realize that the way they’ve been doing things might not be working for them.

The question that comes up first is “How long have we been doing this wrong?” This question isn’t verbalized, it’s just turned into a feeling of anger toward the messenger (me) or shame towards themself. So, this question is not really necessary at the start.

The second question is “How?”

• How do we cast for diversity when all our friends are white?
• How do we focus on empathy?
• How do we become leaders of our audience?
• How do we take responsibility for our mission?
• How do we make a new brand?

The answer is “Try.” It’s important to remember that this question of “How?” is our second line of defense to protect us against that first question. It hurts to change and “How?” is trying to save us from the pain. If the answer happens to be “Nevermind, it’s impossible!” we’re saved. No need to change.

The answer “Try” makes it obvious that we can give it a go and we can start answering our own question pretty easily. We could brainstorm in one hour probably some methods to try to make major changes.

The great thing about major changes is that a little bit of effort can yield mega results. When we’ve been training for 5 years, running a little faster than our best speed is hard. Running a lot slower is easy.

Over the past 500 days I’ve been able to connect with a lot of entertainment people. I don’t know anyone who’s making more than they deserve. I don’t know anyone who’s getting more attention than they deserve. That means we’re over-delivering. We can feel good about that!

When we question whether we’re good enough, whether we’re actually helping, or whether we have anything to offer we can shut up and stop questioning. Start committing. Start giving. Start letting people know that we’re here and ready to do our thing. We have a lot to give. Every moment we’re holding back we’re doing a disservice to those that need us:

• A person feeling less than
• Someone who needs a laugh
• Someone who just got bad news
• Someone who forgot how loved they are
• A nervous boy
• A longing girl
• A numb man

They’re all out there and ready. We’re not enough for everyone, but there are probably at least a million people we are good for. We have something that’s missing from their lives right now. Let’s give it.

We’re in a new place where companies are finding that remote workers are still working. This can lead to the idea that very remote workers (overseas) can do the job just as well. In some cases they’re right.

As we small business owners and freelancers in entertainment are pitching for gigs we need to not just offer the same stuff to get more money. We need to offer tremendous value to our potential clients. If I’m a video editor, how to I offer more valuable video editing to people than some dude with a super low cost of living? Here are some ideas.

We have built in value by living in the US.

• We were raised with English as our first language
• we understand the language and culture of the United States
• We were raised with great public education
• We know how to connect with other Americans
• We have dependable internet
• We have health
• We have network connections in the united states to solve tangential problems
• We’re in the same time zone
• If location matters at any point, we’re there
• We’re legally on the hook. It’s hard to sue someone in another country
• Familiar feels safer

Taking a moment to consider what all these things might mean to a client can help us explain our value a little better. There are a million more ways we can exploit our ingrained value. It’s not just about “Buying American” There’s more to it than patriotism – although that works too.

Some tasks are uncomfortable. In fact, all the crucial things we want to do to move ourselves forward are uncomfortable. Accountability and social pressure are the best ways to move through uncomfortable tasks, but asking someone to hold us accountable is kinda annoying. Here’s a bitesize version of accountability.

We can ask someone if we can bookend a task with them.

Text: “I am sitting down to send ten emails to agents. I’ll text you again when I’m done.”

The other person doesn’t even have to respond for this to work.

Text: “I need to call this publisher back. It’s been 3 days. May I check in with you after?”

This bookending expects very little from your accountability partner. It also may give some great emotional support on the other end to reinforce that we took a great healthy step toward our future.

I used to hate going through act submission videos for Boobietrap because I held myself to a high standard of curation and I did not like sending rejection emails. After bookending a bunch of these submission sessions, I absorbed a lot of friend encouragement and started appreciating the process. I started seeing my patience, attention, kindness, and responsiveness as a generous act. I built that activity into a much more positive part of my life.

Type #1 Hire Downs

I heard this story of a guy who ran a tshirt company that was at first very successful, but eventually crashed. He was charismatic and driven and he was the powerhouse behind his company. He started very independently and built the company around this cult of personality. His employees were mostly much younger than him. He would train them and hope to retain them as underlings. If they got to be too influential, he would let them go. This worked well for some things, but ultimately didn’t work. He became embroiled in scandal, was too diverted from the business and could not be the only tent-pole holding everything together.

There are many people like him.

Type #2 Hire Ups

There are also people who have no idea what they’re doing or what they want to do, so they hire someone who does. Then, they hire the next person who is also great. They hire people who are better than them and by doing so, they look genius. The work they do has impact and the work their staff does is self-driven and high-level.

Both types can fail

There are all types of failures and successes that can happen with these styles. Hire Downs can be extremely strong in vision and voice. They can manage from their strengths and, by respecting others, can be very well branded and established.

Hire Ups can fail because they get too wishy washy, or they have trouble locating the team that truly serves their mission.

I’m a Hire Down in transition to becoming an Up

The thing I’m calling for is an evaluation of how we’re operating. Are we trying to be the thing holding up everything we’re doing?

Freelancers consider: are we willing to invest in progress, or are we trying to constantly learn new skills to expand our realm of control?