You’re not with the band unless you have the lanyard. And then you get the lanyard and you’re cool. The freedom to come and go. The freedom to talk to everyone, to walk around backstage, to eat and drink, to witness all the people wishing they were where you are.
Being with the band is electric. And being in the band even more so.
Because the band is a weird special thing.
It’s easy enough to learn how to juggle.
Putting together a show with a LED jumpsuit and light up balls all color synced with music and video…that’s a lot harder. That part isn’t juggling. But it’s how you take the skill of juggling and get paid for it over and over again.
»» Of course if you’re happy to simply juggle for fun, then juggling is enough.
Who has a say and who has a vote?
If you allow someone to have a vote in your life, on a problem you’re facing, or the way you’re doing your business…they probably have a say as well.
But not all the people who have a say have a vote.
And when we take the time to think about it, both the Say list and the Vote list are pretty short.
The real key is taking the time to think about it…and maybe even write it down.
When I ran cross country in high school we learned about surging.
Surging is breaking out of your pace and going faster for a period of time before settling back into your sustained pace. It’s not sprinting. It’s adopting a faster pace that pushes your limits but still allows you to settle back in without stopping to take a break.
Surging isn’t easy. And knowing when to do it and for how long can be tricky. But it’s worth learning.
We’ve seen this in music over and over.
An artist has a hit record and rides it for a while. Then puts out a follow up (or two) and it falls flat. There’s no need to do a surge for the next one since they can still ride the pace of the first hit record.
On the other hand…a hit record, then couple duds…and then the artist digs deep and surges. Pushes hard all over again. Breaks out of the comfortable pace and lays it on the line.
I’ve never walked by a shop with a sign in the window that said ‘Kind of Open’.
The sign in the window says Open or Closed. It’s clear. Both to me the customer, and to the person running the shop. We both know our roles.
An interesting problem we run into in the digital world is we can start a bunch of things and keep them kind of open. To the digital public it looks open, or at least not closed…but there ain’t much happening behind it.
(There’s a million band profile pages on Instagram from 2012 that don’t have a closed sign on them)
If you’re open, get to work.
If you’re closed, have the guts (and care) to switch the sign.