The David Andrew Wiebe Show

Life is unfortunately full of unequal exchanges. You give more than you get. Or you get more than you give. Over the long haul, these types of exchanges always tend to balance out. But the process the universe uses to balance things can occur as chaotic.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David shares his experience with unequal exchanges.

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Highlights:

00:17 – Treat others as you would like to be treated

01:36 – Enduring hell

02:46 – You can control what you say, not what others feel

Transcript:

The golden rule is “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” So, for as long as I can remember, I've always treated others with kindness and respect and understanding and given them plenty of space. Even if they get angry, even if they're weird people, they'd usually get a second and maybe even a third or fourth chance with me.

As things went on and I got taken advantage of and didn't want to be a doormat anymore, I decided that I couldn’t be that kind or that giving. I couldn’t be that respectful of everyone.

Because the reality is a lot of people just don't deserve it. But those seeds were planted.

And I'm still a kind person. I try to treat people with respect and treat them the way that I would like to be treated as much as possible. So, I'm not just thinking about me and my convenience.

If it's about me and my safety, that's a whole other fucking matter. I will get out of a situation as quickly as I possibly can if it's about my safety, and I've had to do that.

But if it's not a matter of safety, I'm the gentlest giant you're going to find. And I'm not that big. 6'1”, 6'2” is tall, but I'm not huge. I'm not Michael Jordan. I'm not an NBA star.

And so, when I think about the way that I've been treated – and I'm not referring to my friends – but when I think about the way I've been treated in the last year plus… In a situation where I can't find a fucking home or I'm having to go from place to place, at times paying for exorbitant Airbnb fees, trying to figure out what the fuck I'm going to do next, working my ass off every single week to make sure that an income comes in so I can sustain some kind of lifestyle.

Have I been treated all that well? I mean, it's human to look at the situation and evidence for all the reasons why people didn't treat you with respect. I could do that, and I'm sure I could find a bunch. But the reality is I haven't been treated badly by everyone.

But some of the most disappointing ones are the ones that should know better, in my opinion. But they do say that when crimes occur, it’s usually someone you know. It's more likely to be someone you know stealing from you, taking from you, or doing things to your property than someone you don't know.

And it's just like, “I may have made you feel a certain way, but you have to take responsibility for how you feel.” It doesn't work the other way. You can't put that on me. I can control what I say, but I can't control how you interpret it and how you feel about it as much as I might want to.

So, if something is going on, man, come to me first, and let's have a conversation. Seriously. Don't just go assuming things. Don't just go and make plans of your own. I'm a safe guy. I'm not going to do anything to you.

But if it's something concerning my living situation or my lifestyle, come and talk to me first. Jesus Christ.

The entertainment industry isn’t interested in taking any chances. They only want to work with entertainers who have a proven track record. They only want to bank on ideas that have already enjoyed success.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David considers the future of the music business.

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Highlights:

00:17 – Disappointing meal at Barcelos

00:34 – Covers of Top 40 songs

01:02 – It’s not a crime to record covers

01:22 – Where things have been going in the film industry

01:40 – Gambling on the unproven

01:50 – How sad would it be?

02:04 – Adding insult to injury

Transcript:

So, I was at Barcello's having a mediocre dinner. It wasn't terrible, I guess, but it wasn't the best either. I've had very good meals there before, so by contrast, I was a little disappointed. I had a chicken sandwich. I guess it was okay.

Anyway, on their sound system, they have this music playing and it's covers of very popular tunes from the last 10, 20 years or so, and it's this female singer. It's just one cover after another of Maroon 5, Linkin Park, Katy Perry, and who knows what else? I couldn't even identify all of them, but I recognize the songs because they’re all Top 40.

I'm sitting there thinking to myself, “Is this the direction the music business is going in?”

Recording covers is not a crime. Many of us were inspired by different artists and when we pay tribute to them, I think most of us are very sincere.

But with the business side of things, it could move in that direction. Think of movies. In recent movies, they don't take chances. It’s like, “Let's make a sequel” or “Let's make something with the same storyline from so and so or a very similar plotline from this other movie.”

And very rarely do they take risks on anything else that's not proven. Of course, the music industry has kind of been that way for a long time, as far as the artists that they sign go. Unless it's a proven concept, they're not going to work with them.

But I mean, how sad would that be? Like, do you want to be listening to the hits of the 2020s, 2010s, 2000s, and the 90s for the rest of your life? Yeah. I don't know. It wouldn't be much fun.

To add insult to injury, these are pop songs being covered in a pop genre. Like there's no change. Maybe there's a little bit of an electronic or atmospheric, vocal trance-type quality to it. But aside from that, it's the same thing we've heard just with a female voice.

There was one song, I think it happened in recent history where a song took the hook of, “Blue (Da Ba Dee),” which was never a great song to begin with, but whatever. And they're covering that.

So, I'm sitting here going, “You're covering a derivative work, a hook from a song from the 90s that was taken and put into a modern song, which you're now covering.” I just thought like, “Wow, the level of meta here has reached a new level.”

And then the most hilarious thing was listening to her rendition of Linkin Park's “In the End.”

She's singing just Chester's parts. In other words, Mike Shinoda's rap is completely absent. And I'm like, “This may as well be a karaoke track.” This is so cheesy. You forgot to put the rap in, or you just decided it didn't need to go there. You could have vocalized it. You could have come up with some creative way. Instead, you just ignored it completely and only sang Chester's part.

Things don’t always work out with significant others, landlords, partners, investors, bandmates, or otherwise. It can be devastating, and figuring out your next move can be tough.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David vulnerably shares about a rental situation gone wrong.

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Highlights:

00:17 – Raw emotions

01:00 – “You’ve got two weeks”

01:28 – Trying to find a place in Vancouver

02:38 – Taking responsibility for the role you played in dysfunction

03:40 – Somehow, it will all work out

Transcript:

All right, so I'm going to talk about this while my emotions are still raw. And this is not something I used to do, but I think nowadays I'm realizing it's okay to complain. It's okay to react to life. It's okay to vent and rant sometimes.

Assuming you come back to that place of understanding or realizing that everything's going to be okay, something's going to come up, it's all going to work out, and an opportunity will show up. If you believe that it must happen, right?

But in the meantime, I'm like, this is bullshit. That's why I'm going to share while I'm still raw because I know that's going to be more relatable than me waiting for later to collect my head and think about what I'm saying.

So, I've been staying with this lady now for about six weeks in her basement and it's been fine. I stayed with her last year too, so like, obviously that generosity has been super appreciated, and I've communicated that to her, and I'm paying rent. Pretty normal rates to stay there.

So, it's not like there's no benefit in it for her, but she came down and told me today that, I've got two weeks to stay there. It's not like I was going to stay there forever, and I knew I'd have to move on and find something else.

And at the same time, it's like, “Could you give me more than two weeks to figure out where I might be going?” It's September, we're almost in October here. I think October starts tomorrow or Monday, but Vancouver is nuts. The rental market, the housing market in general, is insane.

So, in September, people have just settled in, and there is nothing. I guess you can find the occasional apartment for a bazillion bucks or whatever, but what in the world? Why would you think that there's still something out there right now?

I probably need to wait until after December, the way that things have been filling up this year, to have any chance of finding anything that's within my price range. And I wouldn't even say price range. Moreso what I think is reasonable.

Some people might be okay renting a closet for $2,000 and a police check. And I'm not willing to do that, right? You’re going to have to do a little bit better than that for me.

I understand. It's maybe not a buyer's market as much as it is a renter's market, but give me something here, please.

Anyway, the message is delivered, and I’ve got to be out of there. Of course, I can take responsibility for the part that I played in this whole thing, which is that I agreed to stay there in the first place.

Could I have explored other options before staying at her place? Yes. Could I have maybe communicated some things about my life, what I'm up to, and the things that are going on in my life before staying there? Yes.

So, there hasn't been a lot of communication, and I can take responsibility for that part. But I don't know, I think she just wants to be buddy-buddy or something like that. She has a whole world going on that I don't know anything about and I have a whole world that she knows nothing about, and no part of that's been communicated.

Leaders take responsibility for the lack of communication.Share on X

So, it's one of those things where it's a two-way street, right? There's no power in thinking of it in terms of a two-way street, but neither of us has taken many steps to interact and communicate with each other on this whole matter.

And even though she said, “This whole space is yours,” sometimes I don't feel like it is.

So, whatever the case, it's not the place to be, and I know it's going to work out for me, but the whole situation is just stupid. Like, if she wanted me out by the second week of October to begin with, then why not just tell me that, so I can adjust and make plans? Now I've got two weeks to try to figure something out. It's just nuts.

So, you’re looking to climb your social media mountain. But you’re not sure where to start. What should you do?

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David shares the exact steps you can take to get started, stay started, and find your footing on social networks.

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Highlights:

00:17 – Figuring out the social media landscape for the first time

00:50 – Determining the right course of action

01:39 – Pick a channel you like

02:52 – Make a daily video

03:37 – Share your stories

04:01 – Covering off the technical details

04:42 – The benefits of posting daily

07:03 – Social media strategy summary

Transcript:

I was talking with someone who was trying to figure out the social media landscape for the first time. She's in the skincare business, and she wanted to attract people from all over the world to her content because she was convinced, or rather she knew, that she could make a difference for people.

This is one of those questions where… What do you say to someone completely new to all this? Someone who wants to attract attention and knows that there's a way to do it but hasn't gotten started with the process?

And I thought about that for a moment, and my mind immediately turned to all these great tools and content distribution and taking advantage of Fiverr. And I'm like, “I don't think that's what a beginner needs to know.” That's just too much. It's overwhelming.

People make this mistake all the time. They try hard to create a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and on and on. And that's where people get scattered.

That's usually the first mistake. Down the line, yeah, try to post everywhere. But when you're first getting started, when you don't even have a team helping you, it just doesn't work. It’s a tremendous amount of effort. Plus you always tend to find more resonance on one or two channels versus all of them.

The first mistake in social media is trying to be everywhere at once.Share on X

The advice that I gave was “Pick a channel. The one that you like.”

And the reason I say that is because beginners aren't knowledgeable about secondary channels. They don't know about Rumble and Odysee. They've heard of YouTube and TikTok. Those are the ones they know. And those are the safe ones. They have a significant user base.

And people sometimes go “I need to grow my audiences” and I say, “Yeah, true, but if you pick one of those, you're safe. For example, you can't go wrong with YouTube or Facebook.

I get that Facebook is not the cool kid on the block anymore. And some kids are like, “Yeah, it's only for old people.”

Yeah. Sorry to tell you though, Facebook still has the largest user base of any social network out there. And as other countries come online that haven't already, sorry to say, I think that's the first place people are going to be crowding. So, Facebook is not out of the game in any way, shape, or form yet. I'm not a big fan of it or anything, but let's face facts.

Secondly, I said, “Commit to posting a video on one channel, just one, choose one, every single day.” And I think it took her a while to get this, but eventually, she was like, “Okay, so that's like brushing your teeth every day. I don't necessarily feel like it, but it's a good idea and it's a discipline and I do it every day anyway.”

Publishing daily is like brushing your teeth. It's a good habit to get into.Share on X

And I said, “Yeah, it's kind of like that.” Not that you want to make it hard on yourself. Like, you don't want to hate posting to social media every day.

But there are days when you might hate yourself, right? Especially when you're like, “I’ve got to make a video again, and I'm going to talk about something again.” By and large, you don't want to make it difficult on yourself.

This is why the next thing I said was, “What you want to do is show up and share stories”.

Notice how I'm sharing a story right now. I'm talking about something that just happened moments ago. I was on a phone call with this lady.

You want to tell stories in your videos, and you want to keep it to about a minute or two minutes, and you want to film it all on your iPhone or your Android phone. That is good enough nowadays.

That also minimizes the time you spend in editing, which will help you. Minimize time spent posting and coming up with captions for social media and stuff like that, too.

Of course, you could spend an infinite amount of time looking at hashtags and headlines and all that kind of stuff. But the quickest way is to set aside a few minutes in your day to grab your phone, film a video for a minute or two, and transfer it over to your computer.

Or if you prefer to edit it on your phone or mobile device, I know there are apps out there nowadays that can do that. Spend a couple of minutes editing it, and then post, and then do that daily.

What do you get out of this process? Well, you're going to find your voice. You may not quite have that down yet. There might be a certain tone, there might be a certain style about you that you haven't quite uncovered yet, and so if you posted every day for a full year and made videos and published them every day for a full year, do you think you would start to find your voice, even if you don't know what you're doing at first? Yes, you would.

And then your audience is going to find you. Now, that doesn't mean that finding your audience must take a full year. Some people do this for 11 days and suddenly blow up. But it's an ongoing thing. One day you blow up, but in the meantime, you keep testing.

It's like, “Oh, this didn't do as well. This didn't do as well. Oh, but this one blew up and this one didn't do as well. And this one didn't do as well. And this one didn't do as well.” And that's the way it works.

The other reason that this is so important is that it's sometimes missed… you can grow a social media account without content. But at the same time, you're going to pay for followers who don't care about you, who aren't going to regularly interact with your new posts, who don't care about the specific type of content that you're publishing, who aren't likely to come back and aren't likely to become buyers.

So, at the end of the day, like if you have a YouTube channel sitting at over 1,000 subscribers who never watch your videos, you have no engagement. That doesn't do you any good.

The problem is content. First, you’ve got to have something to share with people. Publishing every day for a full year or even beyond is not necessarily about the content at that point because you probably hit upon at least a few things that your audience would be interested in by that point.

But you’ve got to have something in your library. It's not even worth advertising before you have content. It's not worth sharing your profile with other people. Unless they're friends and family who are amenable to following you, it's not worth going and doing that. Unless you have content, it's not worth promoting your link in description, or any kind of link outside of the platform.

Think about content first, and then we can build an audience, but it's not likely to work the other way around.

So, that recipe again, for beginners is to pick a platform. Film a video on your iPhone, Android, or other smartphone, whatever you’ve got. Edit it, post it, repeat, do that every day.

And content-wise, tell stories. Always tell stories. Tell stories that help people connect with who you are and why. Like, why did you choose this business? Or why do you do what you do? Create bridges so people understand where you're coming from.

Tell stories that help people connect with who you are and why.Share on X

People don't always remember “How to's.” But they almost always remember stories.

People don't always remember tutorials. But they always remember stories. Share on X

Spending can easily get out of control, even if it is spending on seemingly helpful, worthwhile tools and resources. Sometimes it’s necessary to cut back.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David shares how cutting your subscription bloat can free up energy.

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Sponsors:

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Highlights:

00:17 – Cutting costs is often a necessary aspect of business

00:38 – When pride gets in the way

01:12 – Successful entrepreneurs are willing to cut expenses if necessary

01:38 – A time to reevaluate

02:07 – Giving up pride

02:47 – Cutting costs will free up energy

03:34 – A helpful app

04:02 – Get good at managing your finances

Transcript:

Entrepreneurs sometimes must cut costs. If this weren't true… Just look at the big businesses out there that sometimes lay off employees in droves. Sometimes for a business to survive, it's got to cut away at the fat to be able to survive.

But sometimes it is so easy to fall into a sense of pride, like, “I know what I'm doing, things are okay. I don't need to cut costs. I just need to be more consistent and make more money.”

And, I mean, how many times have I or someone else or people in general thought that way that they could just go and make more money and solve all their problems?

It's partly right. But many have had that experience where they weren't able to generate that amount and found themselves treading water because their income stayed about the same. Their expenses also stayed about the same or just went up.

But if you think about the fact that successful people are those who are willing to do what others are not willing to do, that means successful entrepreneurs are willing to cut expenses, even if temporarily, if need be.

Now I've heard people do insane things just to be able to meet payroll at times. I think in those cases it pretty much paid off, but I don't know how much I could recommend being reckless in that sense.

But I do think there's a time and place to evaluate your finances. Look at all the subscriptions that have stacked up. Do you need those right now? Are those contributing to you? Are they helping you make more money or are they just eating away at cash reserves?

As someone who's had to file for a consumer proposal, I can tell you that it is possible for those to keep eating away at your cash reserves to put you into debt.

Subscriptions may seem harmless, but they can add up and even put you into debt.Share on X

So, we must give up pride. And I say that as if it's always an easy thing to do and it can be hard at times. It’s like, “Oh, I know what to do. I've got the Midas touch, man. I've got the golden finger. Everything's going to work out.”

Well, sometimes it doesn't. And we can have a bias towards our success and that's a good thing, but sometimes we can go from success to success to success and suddenly encounter failure and go, “Well, that was the anomaly.”

But the reality is that it's usually a mix of failures and successes on the way to your eventual success.

And I think this is what I recognized about cutting expenses. What it does is it frees up energy. And this is something I noticed this last time I went and cut a few costs that were idle and not doing anything for me. When you trim away the fat, you don't have to think about it anymore.

Cutting expenses frees up energy.Share on X

Then you can free up yourself and free up your mind to concentrate on ways that you can improve your financial outlook and improve your income. And what matters is your takeaway or your profit, right?

So, if you haven't done some purging recently and things don't appear to be going well, it might be time to explore purging to look at what you can do to cut away some expenses that aren't serving you.

And while I'm not sponsored by them or anything, maybe I should be. This app is primarily serving U.S. customers, but there are apps like Rocket Money that will help you identify your monthly subscriptions. All you've got to do is connect your bank account and it will start to populate all the things that you're sinking money into each month and then you can choose the ones that you don't want to keep anymore. I think this is a freaking great idea. We need that in Canada as well.

But app or no app, get good at either creating a document or a ledger or spreadsheet with all the things that you're spending on, so you know exactly what you can cut, or you're pretty much stuck with having to do the process completely manually, which may not be that painful, but you do usually requires you having to dig into your bank account and figure out your monthly costs.

You may begin your journey thinking to yourself, “This the band that’s going to make it!” But as with so many other things in life, the vehicle you started with may not be the one that gets you to where you want to go (and of course, this can be LITERALLY and FIGURATIVELY true!).

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David expands on the importance of persistence and iteration.

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Highlights:

00:17 – The vehicle you started with may not be the vehicle that gets you there

01:18 – There’s nothing wrong with the dream

01:53 – Be flexible

02:27 – David’s experience

03:18 – The power of iteration

Transcript:

I think I've written and even spoken on this before, but it hit me today in a new way. And that is that the vehicle that you started with may not be the vehicle that gets you there. And the reason that's the case is because your dream has nothing to do with the vehicle.

Your dream and the vehicle that gets you there aren't mutually inclusive.Share on X

You may want certain things such as the ability or the opportunity to play in front of thousands or tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people. You may want financial independence. You may want the ability to travel anywhere, anytime, and work from anywhere. You may want to write songs. For other artists, maybe it’s being known as a great songwriter.

So, that's the dream. That's the grand vision, but whatever vehicle you might be using to get there right now, it might be a band. It might be a specific project. It might be your solo performances or your solo project. That may not be the vehicle to get you there.

And this is the thing that I think we struggle with. It's like, “Okay, our dreams are not reality because our chosen vehicle, our band, our project, our solo project, whatever it is that we're working hard on, isn't getting us to where we want to go.”

So, when our project fails or doesn't capture people in the way that we think it should, we give up. Then we make the dream wrong, but there's nothing wrong with the dream. Your dream is attainable, and you don't want to let anyone, including yourself, steal your dream, right? The dream is attainable, but we must be flexible in what vehicle we choose to get there with.

There could be a different avenue. There might be a different project. There might be a different band. You might have to start releasing music on your website. There might be things that you're not doing right now that are going to lead to the results you want. So, I think where most people give up is they give up because the vehicle they've chosen didn't work, wasn't working, or they can't find a way to make it work.

I've launched a few vehicles for teaching and sharing my experiences about the music industry, and the music business. Some things I've been able to accomplish as an author, as an artist, as a composer, and so forth.

And look, the reality is some of those just didn't work out. Maybe some of them generated traffic, but no money. Some of them generated money, but no traffic. Not that all that is problematic. It's just a matter of, “This vehicle that I've chosen, for whatever reason, is not quite resonating in the way that I'd hoped.”

And that's because of the things we create, we must focus on our audience as well. We can't just be thinking about ourselves. And what would audiences want? What would they want to hear? What would they want to see? What would they want to learn? What would they like to check out? And we’ve got to be thinking about that too.

Therein lies the power of iteration. So, if something kind of works, but not quite, make some subtle changes and try again, right? And keep trying and keep iterating and keep trying.

This is what comedians do. I'm not sure if you've heard of this before, but comedians who kill it don't just show up at a bar and give a bunch of jokes and everybody laughs and every joke's a winner. It doesn't work that way.

They head out to the dive bars, and they test 10 jokes and maybe one out of those 10 jokes lands with people. They save one joke, and they delete the other nine. Then they repeat this process over and over.

They keep going back to the bar, and maybe two more jokes land. Now they have three. They delete the other seven, create seven more jokes, go back to the bar, and test them all over again. Maybe they get another one or two. They keep going back until they have five, until they have seven, until they have eight, and until they have 10. And that's when they're ready to hit the big stages. Because they know they've got 10 jokes that are going to land with people.

And we must think about our music that way too. You might have one song that lands with people, and you might need 10, right?

But my whole point is that you must show up and keep trying things, keep iterating, and keep working to get to where you want to go.

So be open to new vehicles, different vehicles, and so forth, because you just never know.

There is nothing wrong with personal achievement. But you can’t necessarily equate your accomplishments with serving the world. And unless you’re serving the world, your successes could end up feeling very empty.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David breaks down the three types of motives and the results one can expect from each, as well as what he learned from blink-182’s Tom DeLonge.

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Highlights:

00:17 – Deeper realizations

01:12 – Doing things for personal gain

02:20 – Selfish gains quickly crumble

03:10 – Three types of motives

06:04 – Serving the masses (what you can learn from blink-182)

07:40 – See your projects through this lens

Transcript:

There is something I recently found that kind of gave me pause around the whole constant “Go, go, go, push more, publish more, always be productive, get more done” side of things.

And surprisingly it had nothing to do with health. Although, of course, health is important. And I came back from Calgary with eye floaters. I’m doing what I can to reduce them by cleansing and cleaning up my diet and it seems to be helping.

But this insight didn't come from some kind of health scare or anything else. It came from some personal development work that I've been doing, and as you know I'm constantly reading and listening to things at this point.

It's like there's only deeper realizations in a way. You're not going to discover something completely new for the first time by the time you've read several hundred books and read thousands of articles and listened to thousands of podcasts and been through various personal development programs.

But the essence of what I heard was this… and again, it's not something revolutionary or completely new. I've probably read or heard or seen stuff like this dozens of times, and yet this time it hit me square between the eyes and that was this.

When you do things for personal gain and selfish reasons, even the successes you do get, and you can get successes being selfish… even the successes you do get tend to crumble or be taken away or is stolen from you.

True success is not based on personal gains alone.Share on X

I've had some successes that were like that. I just couldn't quite figure it out. It's like I accomplished all this, but suddenly something appears to distract from that success or detract from that success.

Or the success itself just doesn't seem meaningful to anyone but me. Like, it makes no difference whatsoever in the eyes of the people that I'm supposed to be serving and care about most, and I couldn't quite make sense of that.

But I've started to have some growing awareness around this more recently as I've been diving into some, personal development material.

So, first and foremost, success earned through selfish means or for done for personal profit or selfish gain tends to crumble. These successes don't last. They're not meaningful.

And the things we do to benefit those around us, like our team members or collaborators or partners or employees, and the things we do to benefit customers…

You might remember me talking about win-win-win before and that's in line with us. We want to create a win-win-win situation where there's something in it for everyone. Like there's something everyone cares about.

And that made me go like, “Yeah, I love creating things. And on the other hand, I feel like it's okay to kind of slow down and look at what it is I'm doing.”

And I think there's sort of three broader categories as I think about it. The first one is something that's done completely out of selfishness. You know that there's a gain in it, you know that there's a credibility or authority boost, or you might be awarded or credited in some way, and you do it because of that. And of course, I've done stuff like that.

And then, the second category is stuff that you just do for fun. You ever notice how sometimes, you go and work on a fun side project that has nothing to do with your main one, and suddenly it takes off? You're not the only one. This has happened to many people. The things you do for fun, it's almost like people get to join in and be a part of the inside joke.

And then, the third category is I don't want to call it “philanthropic,” but it's doing something for humanity, right? Your products and services in some way, shape, or form benefits humanity.

Lots of people hate McDonald's, and lots of people hate Starbucks, but they are adding value to society in some way, shape, or form. That's why they're valuable and that's why they're successful because, at some level, they're valuable. There is a win and it's not just a win for the person who created the company. It's not just a win for the executives. There's another win somewhere for the customers most likely.

So, for me, I'm starting to think the sweet spot is not in category number one. You can probably tell from everything I've said that selfish pursuits may not get you where you want to go.

You might get a few PhDs and MDs and some letters after your name. Dr. This and Mr. That and titles and whatnot. And look, some people are really into that stuff and some people take that seriously. And there's nothing wrong with that.

But it's probably not going to do a whole lot more than that. Like a doctor who earns a whole bunch of degrees and gets a bunch of letters after their name, unless they benefit humanity somehow, it makes no difference whatsoever, right? It's just a matter of status at that point.

So, I think the sweet spot is number two and three, right? Doing something for fun with no expectation that it's going to do anything or go anywhere. No monetary gain, no viral social media, nothing like that. You're doing it for fun and it might go there, right? It has the opportunity or the chance to go there, but the reason you do it is for your fulfillment.

And that's much better than category number one, doing it for profit and selfish gain.

And so the sweet spot then is between two and three, and three is creating that win-win at least and hopefully a win-win-win. Creating a product or service that benefits you, sure, but also benefits humanity.

I recently watched a guitar video with Tom DeLonge and it's not like I'm the biggest blink-182 fan in the world, but like in their own words, they were popping in the 90s and early two 2000s.

And how could you get away from that? So, I heard “What’s My Age Again,” and some of their other popular songs, “All The Small Things,” and I enjoyed it.

That's kind of where I got started on the guitar too. And he was saying like, “The thing that we try to do is create music that is simple enough to get across to anyone.”

Like he says, “Sometimes you’ve got to take a step back. You might have something that you specifically want to do with your art but recognize that if you do complicated things, if your chord progression is super sophisticated, if you've got swept arpeggios all over the place, then maybe there's an audience that relates to that.”

There’s another audience – probably the masses – that doesn't get it. They don’t get all the technical side of things and they just want to hear something cool or fun. And that's the kind of music that blink-182 plays.

So, when you think about that example, it's like, “Okay, their music benefits the listener and you know, by their admission, they may not be the best at singing, they may not be the best at playing, but they sort of struck this balance where they're good enough at what they do to command an audience.”

So, to me, that falls somewhere between two and three. So next time you have a success and you're wondering, like, “Why wasn't this more meaningful?” Like, “Why didn't this take me somewhere? Why don't people recognize me as so and so with this credential or this award or anything else that I've accomplished?”

And the reason is probably – and you do the looking yourself – but the reason is probably that what you were working on was number one, selfish and not number two, doing it for the fun of it, or number three, doing it to serve a greater cause.

Things will happen in life. That’s a given. But it would be unwise to ignore the fact that some of the greatest opportunities were created in times of great adversity.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David clears a pathway to help us discern when a specific situation is adversity or an opportunity.

Sponsors:

Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: Get a free copy of the “Definitive Guide to Productivity for Artists and Entrepreneurs.”

Highlights:

00:17 – Things you need to do but don’t necessarily want to do

01:08 – When opportunity is confronting

02:12 – Examining lack of motivation

04:50 – You are what you do

06:29 – Adversity or opportunity?

Transcript:

Coming soon.

Chasing shiny objects and pursuing trends is human. You see one person succeed on one platform, and suddenly you start thinking to yourself, “Wait, why am I not doing THAT?” Yet most artists don’t have a plan beyond posting more content.

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David shares why posting alone won’t get you anywhere.

Sponsors:

Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: Get a free copy of the “Definitive Guide to Productivity for Artists and Entrepreneurs.”

Highlights:

00:17 – Talking to musicians about what they’re doing to market themselves

00:43 – What is your strategy?

01:03 – Where to post

01:54 – Building on rented land with a plan

02:59 – Bringing intentionality to the process

Transcript:

Coming soon.

You see a highway. You decide to take it. It may be the only road you can take to get to where you want to go.

But what if there was a way to build an entirely new highway? And what if that new highway ended up becoming the better opportunity?

In this episode of Creativity Excitement Emotion, David shares how this analogy carries into building a successful artistic career.

Sponsors:

Productivity, Performance & Profits Blackbook: Get a free copy of the “Definitive Guide to Productivity for Artists and Entrepreneurs.”

Highlights:

00:17 – Driving through high mountain roads

00:26 – The state of Highway 1

02:35 – Driving 50 km out of the way

02:50 – Why not build another highway?

04:03 – How this applies to building a music career

06:55 – Different ways of solving a problem

Transcript:

Coming soon.