There are always those around us who end up having a huge impact on us. We may not realize it as it’s happening, but in retrospect, we can always see who offered a timely word that ended up helping us on our journeys.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David shares what he learned from his mentor and how he applied it.

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Highlights:

00:17 – The people who make the greatest difference are those who you are in direct communication with

01:08 – Mess things up

02:10 – #1: Analog vs. digital

05:26 – #2: Beware of who you take advice from

09:02 – #3: Community enterprise

11:57 – Reflecting on David’s community years

12:33 – Win-win-win

Transcript:

Three concepts I learned from my mentor.

Here is someone that I've seen as one of my main mentors over the years. You can have relationships with close people, mentors at a distance, coaches, even the books you read… All of it can end up contributing to you significantly. But inevitably the people who end up making the biggest difference are those that you are in direct communication with.

This is someone who has been… I've been by their side, creating projects with them, and they've been by my side, supporting my projects.

There are three key things I learned from them that ended up steering the direction of where we're going versus where things went with Music Entrepreneur HQ in the past.

Music Entrepreneur HQ was a grand experiment. We had so much fun with it. We tried a whole bunch of stuff. We made lots of mistakes and learned from them.

I think a lot of people are afraid of doing that. If they went out and started making projects, started messing things up… Go make a mess. The thing that often gets repeated, whether in network marketing or leadership circles, is “Go make a mess.”

That's what people who accomplish things are doing. They're not trying to figure everything out before they start. Never.

Commit first, get into action, and then figure out the rest as you go. This is how it works.

Commit first, get into action, and then figure out the rest as you go.Share on X

This is how courses are developed, right? At least the good ones, because it gives you way more leverage. You can share your course content with your audience before it's ever done. And you can test your stuff and see what people resonate with and see what works.

Anyway, the number one concept that I learned from a mentor that has made a difference is “Analog versus digital.”

I reinterpreted it into my ecosystem to make sense for me. But his whole contention was that I was doing so much digital marketing stuff. I learned a lot, and that's what a good entrepreneur would do, is they would go and learn. They would go and figure out how marketing works because marketing is your direct connection to revenue. If you don't have good marketing, you can't create revenue in your business.

Marketing is your direct connection to revenue.Share on X

I don't think my intentions or even my priorities were misplaced. I think that they were in the right place. But I spent so much time creating content, sharing on social media, and sending emails. I was disappointed with some of the results we were getting.

Something that he brought to me repeatedly. He would say, “But you know, I tend to think way more analog with that. I'm thinking like, if I look at events, how many people will come out? That's way more of a confirmation of how your project is going, versus passive content that people can just like, comment, or share, or just not even look at or respond to,”

And he’s so right, because we publish a lot of stuff that doesn't necessarily do anything, and it's easy to get discouraged with that.

When it comes to publishing, I believe you’ve got to keep going no matter what. But when you've done that for years and years, you can easily feel discouraged that things aren't going anywhere.

It's like you’re doing something wrong since all your mentors or coaches around you are guiding you. “This is how it's done, so just follow this method and you'll get there.”

And then you don't seem to achieve or accomplish the results that they, for some reason, seem to achieve very easily.

Which, it just so happens, leads right into the second concept, but I'll get there. The first concept, how that informs things was, that I realized I needed to create something where I was pressing flesh.

It doesn't have to be weekly. It doesn't have to be monthly. Annually might not be quite enough interaction. But that's where I started looking at all my experiences and the working models that I acquainted myself with.

And network marketing, some of their training programs have four major functions a year. So, I said, “That's the model.”

Like if I create… I'm going to be talking about the four major events per year that I'm basing my activity on. Not only that, but it's creating a physical presence where we can gauge the difference that we're making for people and whether they're enjoying themselves, whether they're entertained, and what content resonates.

So, it's an excellent opportunity to test, but it's also an excellent opportunity to look at what is going to resonate. How can we hit the ball out of the park with every single piece of content or every song that we present at these events? And so that's where the focus ends up turning to.

Concept number two would be “Who do you listen to? Now, one of the people that offers the best training on this is Kevin Trudeau. No one could articulate it better or express it more clearly in a way that can be gotten than Kevin Trudeau.

But my mentor… He kind of implied. He's not the type of guy who necessarily comes out and points something out and is super direct about it.

I think he said something along the lines of – when I was talking about the type of results that I saw other people achieving and what I knew to be possible – he would just go like, “Yeah, you know, but some of these people, maybe they have an incentive to do what they're doing, or maybe their method worked at one point, but now it doesn't work, or maybe they got lucky.”

It's his way of pointing to, “Who do you listen to when it comes to getting advice in your business or your career and the things that you're up to in life?”

I'm already the guy who says, “Question everything.” And I realized there was one area of life where I was not questioning. And that was the people that I looked up to, people that I admired as my coaches.

And you know what? It turned out to be a very healthy thing for me to start doubting a little bit. To begin looking at what they had taught me, how I'd applied it, and whether it worked for me or not. It was healthy to start separating the wheat from the chaff, right?

Like, “This stuff's good, and I want to continue using it in my business or my music career. But this other stuff, maybe it's an outrageous claim.” You go and follow their advice and it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t get you the results they said it would get you.

You sort of have to go, “Yeah, okay, maybe there were some things that I messed up. Maybe I didn't execute perfectly.” But if you stay in that space too long, it can sacrifice your self-image. You can start to doubt yourself if you stay in that space for too long.

I think at that point, you stop, you reflect. You start over based on what you now know.

Stop. Reflect. Start over.Share on X

You went and published for a full year, for example, and didn't get the results that you were hoping for. You stop, you reflect, you think about what worked, you think about what didn't work, and you create a new plan for what it's going to look like to publish daily. That's how I think about it.

But simply the act of publishing daily… Does that give you a dream business, a dream career? No, that act alone will not get you there. I already tried it, and I did it twice. It did not solve all my financial problems. Sorry, Russell.

It was something that when I started doing it, and once I had accomplished it more than once, this whole act of publishing daily, I realized it was something that I wanted to continue doing. I found a lot of value in it.

And there is a lot of value in it. And you will find your voice in it. And you will be able to interview and connect with great people that you might not otherwise be able to.

But you must have that framing. Why are you doing it? Without knowing why you're doing it, that whole thing… it's just a discipline, right? I would say even with something like working out, you've got to know why you're doing it to be able to keep up with it long term. You can easily fall off exercise plans, and I've done that far too many times. So, you've always got to be mindful of that.

And then, the third concept was “Community Enterprise.”

I don't know, I haven't heard it elsewhere, so it could even be a term that he specifically coined.

Now, when we think of “community,” we all have our experiences with it. Some of us have positive experiences, some of us have negative experiences. And then sometimes we have that perception that if it's a community, or if you're a community artist, you must be rinky-dink.

And we had a lot of conversations around that because that's never the perception that we wanted to put out with our community projects. We never wanted people to view it or think of it as being rinky-dink. Because it's not. We wanted to put out quality events and bring in quality artists who may not be known but know what they're doing.

So, we always aspired to a certain quality in creating these community events. That was one of the guiding principles.

Now, Community Enterprise being, in my mentor's case, of those two words, community was always a bigger one. If you saw them side by side, “Enterprise” would be the small word,