Category: Uncategorized

I used to believe that production value was detrimental to presenting authenticity in performance. I thought a stripped down street performance as more real than a Hollywood movie. I was afraid to make things too polished as to avoid pushing my audience away.

Entertainment is fake

A painter uses paints (pigments that block light) to represent light. In entertainment, we artificially recreate a truth that resonates. If we show up and entertain people, we are not being completely true, but we’re connecting with truth. Any tools can be used to connect with that truth.

Nobody that cares thinks a bathroom wall writing is more real than a New York Times best seller.

This kind of thinking leads us to questions like “Which magician do you trust, the one with the nice suit or the one with the tshirt?” The answer is “Neither, they’re both freaking magicians!”

Higher value is higher risk

The waste sticks out to me when I experience an expensive production that falls flat. I wonder, “How could all this energy go into something without a story. Something that seems so meaningless.”

This is the real issue with big stuff. When things go bad, we notice. We know that these people really tried and they failed. When a street show goes bad, who even knows what the intentions are?

Try

My suggestion is always try. Higher production value is trying. Give more. Make a bigger promise and fulfill it. This is generous. This is what an audience deserves. Taking responsibility for a commitment is one of the greatest gifts we can give to anyone.

We’re sending signals here

If we’re afraid to add to production value, a good first step is to identify what’s important for us to convey. Then, we use production value (and everything else we do and have) to push that importance forward to our audience.

We could add in fancy makeup and lights and sound effects to try to cover up our insecurities.

It’s a simple question. “Am I using production value to distract from the important thing, or am I using it to clarify it?” The question is not “Do I improve production value?”

This is my favorite way to easily light for a portrait. Get out of direct sunlight and let the ambient light outside a garage door light the subject. It’s pretty straight forward. The ultimate would be a black garage, but this white one with all the garage-type stuff does fine. I have an extra light for a kicker on the side, but it’s not necessary. Enjoy.

Seth Godin recently put out a podcast about protecting ideas which funnily sounds like it was written by me. I don’t spend a lot of time trying to protect my ideas.

• I have faith that the things I create are not easy to implement
• I like making new things because they need to be made
• I know I don’t want to spend time fighting someone who steals my ideas
• I know I have more ideas

Generosity comes from a feeling of security, but also security comes from generosity.

There are people in entertainment who spend a lot of time trying to protect themselves by putting up walls, by scraping every last cent out of people around them, by being savvy, by being litigious… There are other people in entertainment that just keep making and giving.

Recently, my wife started a meal train for one of these generous people. It blew up. Everyone jumped in without question and contributed because they knew who she was and that she deserved it.

I can not guarantee that having a potluck for neighbors every week is better for home security than getting a tall fence, but I know that it will help, and will allow us to live with more sunshine.

I’ve spent a lot of energy in my past waiting for a hero to save me creatively, financially, business-wise, socially, etc. The hero always came, but it was always me.

I want to remind my readers that we have a lot of awesome parts. If we survived this long, we’re making it work. Things might not be working perfectly. Things might not be how we’d like them to be in the future, but that’s what progress is for. We’re capable of living the life we’re living right now and we’re capable of great progress.

We must get help. Look for people who empower us. We will never find the person who knows us completely and can fix everything, but we can find lots of assistance toward being our own heros.

Think of things we are fans of. We tell people about them, we look forward to the next thing they create, and most importantly we buy from them.

For someone or thing to deserve our fandom, it needs to be awesome, yes… but it also needs…

• brand / unique identity
• consistency
• benevolence
• prolificness
• dependability
• value

We are not a fan of everything that we follow on Twitter, so why do we hope for everyone who follows us to be a fan? The percentage for me is probably less than .5%. Also, the number of followers we have is not directly proportional to how many fans we have.

Sponsorships

We can get more sponsors / advertising partners by having a big following, but we don’t really escape the fandom game. We need those sponsors to be fans of our following. If we have no purchasing power or demographic to offer the sponsors, they’ll be sheepish about our flock.

My relationship with practice was not good as a kid. I thought practice was about non-stop self-criticism and really sinking in to the fact that I’m messing up over and over. “I’m not good enough” was the mantra.

We’re now in an age of over-educated and under-experienced creatives. We have so many ways to learn about our field. We can download anything ever made, but we don’t get our hands dirty.

The result is

• Standups that can reference any comedian in history, but don’t breathe on stage
• Writers making impossible allusions, but not connecting with our hearts
• Film makers that make a gorgeous thing that doesn’t represent anything

Practice is a gift to the world

It’s a cop-out to practice something tangential to what we want to do. If we want to be a great musician on Zoom, we’ve gotta get on Zoom as much as possible and play our hearts out over and over. The more we can do the whole thing in a practice session, the better.

I’ve practiced a lot of things. Some things I didn’t know I was practicing until it was too late — I was already good at them. I learned a lot about how a good practice session works from juggling. There was my own practice, then teaching lessons.

Goals

People are motivated by service of people and a higher cause. Here are mantras in order of reverse helpfulness,

1. “I suck at juggling”
2. “I want to be a better juggler”
3. “I want to be a cool juggler”
4. “I want people to see juggling in a certain way that nobody else is doing it.”

We can take the focus off ourselves. We can be positive. Progress will still be made.

Session Goals

Each time we practice, the primary goal is to show up. If I commit to doing an hour a day of juggling practice and I juggle for an hour, that’s a 80% successful practice.

Sometimes, the stuff we do in the practice seems like a big leap forward, sometimes the opposite. Setting goals like, “I’m going to get 300 throws without dropping” is great for keeping focus, but not a good measuring stick of whether it was a successful practice. We can’t always see the progress, and the sucking is why we’re practicing. The sucking can be celebrated, because that day that I had crappy practice is a day that I didn’t share with crappy juggling with my audience. That was a hurdle I had to get over to make something better for the future. That better for the future is my bigger goal.

Children see progress

I believe an important part of why kids are so good at learning is they don’t have baggage. They don’t have success. When kids stumble, they think “Wow, I walked further than ever before!” instead of “I’m supposed to be good at walking. I’m a grown up!”

So, three things to steal from kiddos…

1. Forget past success
2. Look at progress
3. Don’t try to know how fast progress “should” come

Focus… But not too much

The best way for our bodies and minds to learn is not by squeezing things in our mind-vise, but by finding a lot of periods of relaxed focus. I want to get in a state similar to driving a car. Paying attention, but not tense.

Long enough

Once we get warmed up in our practice, our brain can make progress. Usually, it takes me at least 15 minutes to get warmed up for something. With juggling, I would feel warm when my skin started to itch a little with the first sweat. Then, my arms were ready to learn.

Safe space

In order to do all this gentle and present practice, we need a safe space to do it. The stakes must be low and it must be not too laborious to step in and do it regularly and a lot. So, if we want to get better at writing jokes or photography, we can set up an anonymous instagram or twitter account and pile them on. See if they work. We’re not trying to get noticed or trying to build whatever. We’re trying to practice – and we’re succeeding.

The message is not positivity or optimism or silliness or cleverness. The message is a story of resilience. Even our saddest great journeys have a glimmer of hope for the hero.

Let’s send out a beacon of buoyancy to the world today. That’s the light that spreads. Positivity without humanity is cynicism.

A lot of us keep struggling to be popular. If only everyone knew about us, we would be loved by everyone and it would be great! Popular is not the only approach, and thanks to the new climate of the world, unpopular things are even more desired and accessible. We can be unpopular and cash in big.

Amazon is built on the long tail principle. While major retail stores only have shelf space for the most wanted items, Amazon can sell things so specific that only a few people want them without great expense. This is the power of a global economy and an inexpensive internet.

“The Long Tail” is based on this graph…

While old style stores needed to focus on only stocking the popular stuff (eg: size 9 shoes), there is much much much more unpopular stuff in the world (eg: size 19 narrow shoes).

Not just Amazon.

The whole internet is growing to make niche things more available to the people who want them. That means we don’t need to be defined in broad categories, we don’t need to be for everyone. We can serve one person in each country in the world and have 195 clients.

As we serve our niche more specifically, the value to that niche inflates. If I make a crossword puzzle book for most people, I could sell it in the supermarket checkout line for 99¢. If I make one for trilingual English, Spanish, Mandarin speakers; I could probably sell it for $40. In the olden days, we couldn’t find those rare people. Now, there are more of them and we can target them with ads.

When we say “I’ll do this thing,” then we do that thing to top level, we are doing a generous act. We are being leaders. We are telling our audience “You relax, I’m serving you everything you need in this realm.”

It’s not easy to say “I will be a standup comedian.”(promising lots of laughs) or, “I will make a video game.” (promising electronic fun) or, “I will write a novel.”(promising a literary story that is compelling)

Since entertainment is objective (we must entertain to be in entertainment) These are commitments to an outcome.

Sometimes we are tempted to avoid responsibility by “being creative” or “breaking the rules” or being “alternative.” When we do this, it is selfish. If I tell people I’m a juggler, but I don’t want to juggle, it is a cop-out and it puts the burden of work on the people. They have gotta figure out what I’m doing. If I want to create some new label for myself to skirt the issue, I can do that too, but then my audience might not find me.

All the great entertainment people who we admire promised something and followed thru on it over and over. They took that responsibility and gave us the wonder.

When trying to reconnect with someone who trusts us, we often think completely backwards on three things.

1. Give them a lot of information
2. Try to help them
3. Ask them for something big

TMI, Pal

A big huge email is a lot of responsibility. This is the gift we’re giving someone when we perfectly craft a big old message that conveys everything we’re thinking.

We are giving them work to do.

They have to set aside time, get in our mindset, process what’s being said, consider what it means to them, and then figure out an adequate reply. If they’re going to reply to it, they have to show that they read it and respond to all the points.

This is if they’re not just totally turned off by the size of it.

Most of the time these huge emails also look generic, so they don’t really warrant a reaction.

Oh, also… why now? Why are you suddenly dumping all this stuff on me when we haven’t talked in months?

A cold offer might be way off base

When we’re not in regular communication with someone, most likely we don’t know what they need at the moment. So trying to help them either comes across as…

• unsolicited advice (criticism)
• salesiness
• tone deafness
• apathy
• cluelessness
• hostility
• exploitation
• spam

People don’t like to be helped.

Even polite people over-ask

I personally have messages that are hard for me to reply. It could be a simple question like “Can you meet at a cafe this month to discuss your show?” This question at the right time can send me into a tailspin of internal questions like

• is it better to pick a date soon, or later?
• a cafe near them or near me?
• where are they located?
• is it worth it to spend an hour discussing my show with this person?
• do you think this person wakes up early enough for me to have coffee with them, or would this be a lunch time thing?
• what will we be discussing?
• are they trying to be social or are they trying to get an answer that could be sent thru email or do they really want something else from me?
• what does my schedule look like this month?

The little question list goes on and on.

Solve it

Conversations are how we make sales, start collaborations, and learn about the impact of our creations. We need them. If our goal is not to broadcast and ask, but to serve; it’s much easier to get started in a conversation.

Help is a one-way street. People don’t like to receive help, but they like to give it if it’s real help.

Here are some conversation starters…

Jeff, Hey! long time no see! I am forming a new business and i thought you might have wisdom to share. If i told you about it, do you think you could give me quick feedback?

Margie, I respect your eye for fashion! I’m thinking about changing my costume to this… (picture attached) because I want to be more bookable in Vegas. Do you think this is a good direction?

Frelma, I’ve been thinking about you a lot because my cousin just moved to Hawaii. I was thinking of setting up a booth at a good trade show next year, but I can probably only afford one. Do you have a fav?

Look how casual. Look how straightforward.

Some other things to consider that I forgot to mention in the video…

• mounting a webcam is meant to sit on a desk or mount on a computer. that’s easy. It’s light weight. A zv1 or other camera will need some kind of screw mount; either a tripod or some kind of camera tripod adapter
• connecting getting video from a webcam to a computer is pretty easy. Most of them (if not built in) use USB. The zv1 has a USB option, but you can get better quality with an HDMI connection. Some DSLR cameras have USB and wireless options.
• age some people try to get around high prices for DSLR cameras by buying old. The technology for this stuff has improved dramatically – especially picture quality and autofocus – in the past years, so buying elderly cameras is not a hack.
• powering webcams are made to set on a desk and run continuously. These other cameras are not. The zv1 can get its power from the usb port (if enough amps are running into it) other cameras may need a dummy battery (looks like a battery with a plug coming out of it)

One incredible part of taking a commercial acting class from Chuck Marra & Megan Foley Marra was the opportunity to sit in on a whole day of auditions. I sat in the back of the audition room with two other students watching 67 actors. We heard the same four sentences about an Indiana gas company over and over. It was eye opening.

These people didn’t all look identical, so they weren’t just chosen for their type or their appearance. They were vetted candidates who the casting directors thought would most likely be able to execute the script. These people sucked. At the end of the day, I felt like three of them were even capable of doing the job. Two of them would do well.

During the auditions, they tried to…

• compliment us (who they thought were the client)
• make small talk
• make jokes about their performance
• sweat a lot
• improvise lines
• add a lot of physical movement
• really shine

They were instructed to…

1. read the script ahead of time ( commonly you memorize it voluntarily )
2. listen to direction ( basically stand there, smile and confidently say the line)
3. dress conservatively and casually
4. say the lines

Most of them didn’t do all four of them those things.

This blew me away. I had been one of these offenders at past auditions, but mostly I thought I was always going up against people who followed the directions. I thought it was a competition between people for the right look and the right powerful acting.

I want to remind you, these people had all been prescreened by their resumes, agent affiliation, and track record. 64 out of 67 were likely to embarrass the casting director on set.

I’ve done a lot of casting since then

I keep seeing similar things. When we do what’s requested we’re 95% of the way to getting the job. Being good is so much less important than being passable.