Category: Uncategorized

Stage shows are good for people, but they’re even better for respiratory viruses. In person theater shows are…

1. best experienced with an audience close to each other
2. best inside a closed environment
3. best if there isn’t lots of air circulating
4. best if everyone’s having fun and laughing and breathing
5. best if we’re not nervous about dangers or being socially irresponsible

The questions I’ve been asking myself are … How do we do this? How do we make shows with the Delta surge? How do we make shows afterwards? I think the answer is that, in most cases, it’s still not time. We need more patience.

I’m currently on an island in the Caribbean doing shows. The case count here is really low. I’m vaccinated. The shows have been okay. They haven’t been riotous, and they haven’t felt communal and tribal, but they’re alright. When I get back to the states, I don’t know if I’ll be doing any gigs in the next months.

I’m very specific with my boundaries. I do believe that my greatest value is as a stage entertainer (in the correct circumstances) but right now, I don’t have that value accessible because of the sitch and my own boundaries and risk threshold. If I didn’t have an unvaccinateable child at home, maybe things would be a little different. This perspective that I have is interesting. I have a chance to take my time and wait until things are right. Right now, things feel very far from right.

I would love herd immunity to happen and for people to just bounce back to amazing live interactions, but I don’t think either of those things will happen. We are trying to keep each other safe, we are careful, and we’re a little scarred.

I’m a little excited to see how entertainment evolves thru all of this, but i’m also bored of not knowing.

There’s this site called record setter which became the largest database of world records quickly overwhelming Guinness by allowing anyone – mostly unmoderated – to post their own world record. It wasn’t that people were suddenly achieving more incredible things, it was that the categories got more specific. A person didn’t have to juggle the most balls, they had to juggle the most neon green balls, or juggle the most neon green balls with a hat on, or juggle the most neon green balls with a hat on while wet with german vodka.

It bummed me out that people would participate in this at first, but now I love the long tail of the internet. I love that there’s always someone out there doing something that noone requested. On the flip side, there are a lot of people that we can reach that are out there requesting something that doesn’t exist yet. They have a need that’s not being served that is so specific, no business has offered it to them yet.

We have the opportunity to be the best in the world, to be the leading expert, to break the world record for one of these groups of people. When people tell me they don’t see themselves changing careers or that what they do is worthless during the pandemic, I’m surprised. We can conquer a market tomorrow if we invent it. Or, we can learn the skills of an existing market and own a corner of it most likely in less than a year. We just gotta be driven, specific and ready to fail for a while.

The way I hear it, when we eat stuff, there are a bunch of little life forms (more bacteria cells in us than human cells) that eat our food and help us digest it. When we eat a bunch of sugar, the ones that like sugar thrive and reproduce while the ones that don’t like sugar die. Then, we get cravings for sugar because our microbiomes are like, “More please.”

Some people call it the law of attraction. We head toward the thing we’re already doing.

• I tell entertainment folks they need more empathy.
• They ask how to get more empathy.
• I tell them try.

Seek illegit validation, get illegit inventions

If we focus on the things that are most important to the process of great entertainment, we will make great entertainment. If we focus on some sugar; like youtube comments, getting compliments after a show, trying to impress other people in our field, or making something that’s just neat… we build momentum toward creations that are fueled by junk.

If we remind ourselves of our core mission, we can seek validation that means something — fanbase growth, audience response, income, or whatever.

It’s harder to eat a salad, but we didn’t get into this for easy. The stuff that’s inside of us is going to crave whatever we feed it. We need to feed it useful validation.

I don’t like to think of myself as an idiot. Not that I don’t make mistakes. I try to keep track of the type of words I use.

I make lots of mistakes. I think a way to improve the phrase “Everyone makes mistakes” would be “Everyone makes lots of mistakes all the time.” We do. The phrase “I’m only human” doesn’t completely give us the leeway we want, because humans do incredible things and they often look more flawless from the outside.

So, instead of the self-talk of calling myself a dumb dumb or saying that something I did was a stupid mistake… I call myself a dingle. I am not special. Everyone’s a dingle. I can call other people dingles too. Instead of an insult, or a method of shaming, this is a method of forgiveness. We need lots of forgiveness. We’re all flawed and vulnerable and most of the time not conscious of our actions. That’s okay. We’re dingles in a long line of dingles and we’ll be okay.

Why did that person cut me off? They’re a dingle. Why did I leave the faucet on? I’m a dingle. Why did my dentist forget my birthday? dingle.

I got really into productivity. I read so many blogs and books and tried so many systems that eventually, I had to admit I wasn’t making my life more efficient. I was making it less. Productivity study became my hobby.

My understanding of it helps me today. It’s not my hobby anymore. All that learning helps me help my clients to cut thru crap and get more to what they want.

All the productivity methods come down to two basic things

1. Feeling like things are completed
2. Getting things completed

Although most people just come in wanting to do #2, they are both really important to the process. The reason we’re accomplishing is to feel accomplished. The reason people look into productivity is because they feel like stuff isn’t getting done.

Getting things completed is actually not a problem for anyone. We can’t not do something at any given moment, so if we’re keeping a list of all the things we did today, it would be the same length every day — super long!

The thing that comes before productivity is prioritization

By prioritizing and tracking our goals, we feel productive and that helps us achieve the more important things and that helps us feel more productive.

No productivity system works perfectly because we’re all dingles, but the core of the system we choose needs to reinforce our flow (good feeling) and help us accomplish high-priority stuff.

Some things, especially the things we care most about are difficult. Starting is hard, but then following thru over a long period, is nearly impossible. That’s why so few people have great acts, that’s why so few bands create great albums. The follow thru is rough.

In addiction programs, the addiction is so linked to the addict’s identity and daily life, that changing feels like a destruction of self. There’s a lot of resistance there. Even after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, many drinkers keep on drinking until they get to a point called rock bottom. This is the end where nothing is worth another drink. Something happened that made sobriety more important than social circles, old patterns, identity, and maybe even a sense of survival.

It’s completely life changing to reach rock bottom… The addict is confronting issues that are not just from their whole life, but probably from generations before them. It might sound simple, but this is a matter of priorities. Solving the addiction becomes the number one priority over maybe everything else, and the addict becomes willing to make major changes, get help, and follow the guidance of others to get rid of their demons.

One interesting part of this to me is that rock bottom isn’t a specific thing. Everyone has their own. Even though it probably feels to them like they had no choice, they did. They chose that rock bottom. For some people it’s ending up in the ER with broken bones from a car crash that killed people. For some it’s having a fight at thanksgiving. Every rock bottom is legit.

I’m not trying to make light of the subject, but I think it’s a peek into how humans operate. We would like to be victims of the world. We’d like to get to a point of having no choice, because it takes the responsibility off us. Those people who recover from addiction might feel they have no choice, but they do and they chose to do something very scary.

If we think about this for more mundane creations and revolutions for ourselves, we can maybe channel the rock bottom mentality into our scary realms. We can decide, “I have not written that book because I need help and I need to give up a lot of beliefs, and habits, and some fun things maybe to get this thing done. This is the final day of not being a writer. This is my rock bottom.” Then, we can do the hard things that we know we can do to follow thru on creating something amazing for the world.

Audiences want themselves. Audiences want a story for themselves. They don’t care about the thing we care about until we bridge that gap and somehow communicate that “This is yours”

We, as audience members, are grateful when we know just how to react. Give us a reaction shot.

Movies and TV show the person listening more than the person talking. That’s how we make sense of the meaning of the interaction.

When we make online content, it can fall flat because we’re not including emotion, not making it clear what reaction we expect, and not bridging that gap.

This is the power behind David Blaine and Billy on the Street and Candid Camera.

Here are three examples of using audience reaction in live online stuff. Hopefully it will be inspiring.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are super helpful for tracking progress, making progress, and feeling like something is getting done. It’s very hard for solopreneurs and freelancers to keep track and stay accountable to their KPIs. It’s also hard sometimes to feel in control of things like income and set a goal like “I will make $40k this month” because it can feel like it’s not in our hands.

I propose a tangential KPI. If we can connect the thing we want to something that seems more graspable, we can work on the graspable thing.

Let’s say we are making $1000 per week on youtube and that’s somehow related to our view counts on our monetized videos, but not directly. It’s also coming from several different videos at the same time. We could decide that the thing to work on is not getting more money this quarter, and not getting more views, but we try an experiment. The experiment could be:

• I am making $1000/wk on youtube
• I have 60k subscribers
• I’m good at getting subscribers
• If I had 120k subscribers would I make twice as much?
• My goal is to get 200k subscribers by the end of the quarter

Then, we make all our promotions, all our videos, the majority of all our work focused on getting more subscribers. WE don’t care if our view count goes down, we don’t care if we get terrible comments on our videos. Just are just tracking those subs and seeing:

1. can we increase our subscriptions at will?
2. how are our subscriptions directly related to our income?

Since the finances can be an emotional burden, this takes some of the heat off. This also gives us more clear tasks. Instead of just thinking all day “I gotta make more money!” We think, “what video got me the most new subscribers? Can I repeat that? What can I do better for subscribers today?”

“Fifteen casting directors know about me and I’ve gotten in one commercial. If I meet fifteen more, will I get another booking?”

“I made 10 phone calls last week to agents and three of them asked for a headshot. If I make 100 calls next week, will I get to send 30 headshots?”

We don’t need to protect the arts. We don’t need to protect specific arts. We can let things die. We can let go of what’s not working anymore. Arts aren’t one of those things. They’re still serving us. They’re still valued. Don’t worry about it. And, if something’s not serving us, we can let it die. It’s okay.

Live entertainment is not dying in the pandemic. It’s changing and waiting. It’s valid, not because we protect it, but because people still want it.

Usually I’m an advocate for high value services. We find out true solutions that the client / customer needs and we create a package of services with extreme value. Then, we give them a price that’s below the value of the thing. These prices can fluctuate a lot and they’re based on us listening, planning, doing the math, and responding (LPDR).

I don’t do this for everything. Tickets for my shows eg are not sold based on how much someone needs the show and how perfect their exact seat is. They are sold usually for a general admission price. That’s because low value items like a ticket are not worth the LPDR. There are other things that are pretty much the same every time. They’re going to take me the same amount of hours, the same resources, and I know that scope of the all the work will be pretty much the same. In these cases to, reinventing the wheel to come up with a new price isn’t worth it.

We can set the Single fee with grudges

Immediately after we provide the service can be a great time to set our rate for the next one. The goal is to walk away from gigs giggling – not giggling because we ripped someone off, but giggling because we did what we do, we did it well, and everything was taken care of financially to make that happen. That’s a good feeling. If we’re not giggling, we can question why.

• Were we met with too many expenses?
• Was there more work than expected?
• Was it not fun?
• Were there a lot of headaches?
• Did we provide more value than expected?

Then, figure out if charging more is the answer.

Everyone who did something great, something beyond… What they did was wrong. What they did didn’t fit in with what people expected or what people were looking for. It was a failure from many perspectives. Many innovations take a long time to get acceptance because they are so easily seen as failures.

They are failures. Absolutely. They fail by the standards that are set.

With art and entertainment, the existing standards are already outdated.

What perspective are we taking towards what we’re creating?

If we do anything outside of the bounds of what’s normal, even better than what’s normal, it can easily be seen as a failure.

We are also tempted to think fitting-in is a success. Our internal protectors and vultures want us to stay small – to fit in and not make waves. That’s not our job. That’s not our calling. We are demanded to stay innovative.

For an exercise, I think of one of my favorite works of entertainment in the world. Then, think of 5 ways it was a total flop. It’s easy. It’s just as easy for us to get down on our own work.

Entertainment pros like me come from a world of normal people. We connect with, and are possibly raised by people who work at jobs. The whole marvelous universe of freelance / entrepreneur lifestyle has mega challenges that can cause lots of burnout, disappointment, and loss of flow. While everyone else is enjoying their weekend, we’re working. When people are going out to be entertained, we’re the ones entertaining them. Leisure is our work.

Here are some skills that are crucial for our line of work.

#1 Separation of self and service

The purpose behind what we do is a often a big part of who we are, but…

• the work is not us
• the results are not us
• the accolades are not validation
• the career is not us
• the job title is not us

It’s hard to keep track. It’s hard to keep pouring ourselves in to our work without being emulsified in it. It never gets easy to separate ourselves in a healthy way, but we can learn and be very strengthened by this skill. When we lack this skill, the emotional rollercoaster gets exhausting and the fear of being destroyed can become paralyzing.

#2 Separation of boss and worker

In most big businesses, there’s one CEO and a lot of workers. Similarly, in a solo venture, there are high-level decisions to be made, and then there’s the work to do. The CEO can not spend all their time on the factory floor gluing things together, because they have big decisions to make, and the worker is too busy with work to really think clearly about the motivations of headquarters.

We as small biz owners often have more work todo than thinking. Finding a way to delegate tasks to ourselves can be a big relief. Once we separate the labor from the brain work, the labor becomes lighter and the big-picture becomes clearer.

#3 Audience empathy

We are not independent. All of us rely on millions of people every day. In showbiz, our reliance is heavily on people with whom we interact. We need empathy for our collaborators, customers, and fans. Empathy helps us understand our value for ourselves and for our audience. It helps us relate more to our work. It helps us understand the purpose of what we do. It helps us connect more and make more of an impact.

When our empathy is strong…

• we don’t wonder why we’re getting paid
• we don’t feel like such imposters
• we interpret feedback as fuel
• we are exhilarated by challenging our audiences

Building more empathy often involves more conversations with our audiences than we are often comfortable having.