What NOT to Do With an Opportunity

Hey, welcome to progression success in the music industry. You know, when you hear that

these days that we're going unscripted, I thought that might be

fun. I've enjoyed the unscripted stuff that I've been doing

lately on the audio podcast, and, you

know, thinking about the YouTube and how the production value

there keeps going up and how those videos become

solo podcast episodes, I feel like maybe there's space to

just be really. I don't want to say honest and truthful, because I am

honest and truthful, but, you know, unscripted and off the cuff. In the spirit

of that, I am having a cocktail right now. It's an old

fashioned. I'm kind of a weirdo. I mean, any engineer

you would imagine might be compelled to

weigh their cocktails. And so that's what I do. I use a. I use

a dry scale. Uh, but 1.8oz of

bourbon or rye, 0.3oz of maraschino cherry

liqueur. That's my sweetener. Instead of a simple syrup, I

do two dashes of regular bitters and two dashes of orange bitters. And I use

a lemon peel, not an orange peel. So, now you know what's

going on with my evening, but let's talk about what's going

on with the podcast. So, this week, or I guess it's last week at this

point, mastering is dead. I mean, it's obviously not dead. If you listen to the

episode, then you know that it was very pro mastering. Uh, it was just

packaged in a YouTube style, and that video

did really well. I'm actually. I'm really excited

about how well it did. Uh, it's really grown

the progressions YouTube a lot, which is another reason that I think you. You know,

I want the audio podcast to retain some of the audio podcast character.

I don't want to script everything on here. But while thinking about how to

follow that video up, well, a. I felt the

pressure, right? It has 11,000 views. I've gotten, like,

almost 500 subscribers from it. And when.

When you get a big win, I mean, that's not a huge win, but you

get a win like that, you really second guess how you want to follow that

up. Do I do an interview? Do I do another solo video?

How much time do I have this week? And I just. I decided

I'm not comfortable just pushing something out to YouTube this

week that would also obviously be an audio podcast

that, you know, just fits into the amount of time that I have this week,

which is not. Not a lot. So I thought, let's talk

about following up on a big win or a

big loss, because I think that's really what separates

people from being super successful. And

not if you're the type of person that is not afraid to

just keep moving forward after a success

or not afraid to keep moving forward after a failure.

I think you're going to find yourself really way out in front of

the pack. It doesn't sound difficult, but if you've

maybe written a song that has done well

or worked on a record that's done well, or put a

YouTube video out that's done well, when you go to do that same

thing next time, you remember that

you did so well last time. And it's kind of, you know, it reminds me

of golfing. I used to golf when I had time every weekend

or every other weekend, and you're always doing battle with yourself.

You're always comparing your current score with your

score. Last time, my scores were horrible, but

whenever I had a good one, if I went out and actually played

respectable golf, still bad the following week, I would. It

would be like a 120. I'd be like, I'd want to, like, walk off the

course because there's all that pressure to follow that up. And I definitely

think that that obviously applies to any

creative or business endeavor. And I think mastering, not

having that fear of follow up, which is almost like

it's as much a fear of failure as it is a fear

of success, because obviously, you don't want

to have a failure after a big win, but then you

also have this momentum, and if you get another big

win, are you going to, like, propel yourself further ahead than you

never expected and not realize what the next step is? And it

sounds weird to say fear of success, but

I do believe that there are people that hold themselves back

because they're afraid of the change. Think of how many artists

that you might know that have had massive success

out of nowhere and then not followed it up

or waited forever to follow it up because there's a lot of weight there.

I think a good example is I think that my

worst mixes are the ones that I am

most concerned about following through on because they're an amazing

opportunity. I will overthink those mixes,

almost run them into the ground. In fact, I can think of two mixes where

they didn't use my mix because I probably didn't trust

my gut and trust my instinct, and I over thought it because it was

a bigger artist than I normally work with. It was a good opportunity. It was

a big producer, whatever it is I put too much weight on

that opportunity. And I think that's really what it is, is

when you're following up a win, a lot of us put too much weight

on that opportunity, and so it can be really easy to let

yourself down. That's what people are afraid of. They don't want to

come from that. That high and then transition into being let

down. And, you know, this is coming from the guy that is not doing

a YouTube video this week. Instead, I'm going rambling unscripted

with a cocktail on my podcast. But

I don't think that it's because I'm afraid of failure

or afraid of success. I believe that it's because I

don't have the bandwidth this week to

approach this opportunity with the right strategy. And I

think that is the angle that you

should be taking. If you put a song out and it's doing really well,

take a moment to think about why is this song doing really

well? What part of what I did

worked? Was it your marketing? Was it outreach

to people? Was it organic? Was it just that? It was a great song

and it worked. Look at that and think about that before you roll

your next song out. Because if there's something that you can take away and apply

it to the strategy for your next one, then you're going to set yourself up

for. For potentially compounding that opportunity.

So to kind of step away from that angle for a

moment, I think there is also something else that comes into play here

where the state of the world and the short

attention span ness of culture these days, I think

encourages you to follow up any

opportunity or missed opportunity with

quantity. This is a horrible example for musicians, but let's just say you want

to be like a influencer, right? Where you put a video out on

TikTok and it doesn't get any plays. So you put another one out. You put

another one out, you put another one out, you immediately want to follow it with

more, more, and you're not worried about whether it's better or

worse. Maybe you are, but you're just pushing forward with more

quantity. Or in the complete opposite situation, you

put a video out and it blows up and it goes viral and you do

the same thing. You just do more and more, more, more, more, more. And I

think that that's helpful. When you're starting out at something like, if you're

just starting to release music or you're just starting to mix records, the

reps are huge. You need the reps. You need to put

out more, write more songs, release more songs and you get

comfortable in that whole process. But I

think eventually, whether you are as successful as you'd

like to be or not, quality has to come into play.

And I think that's where a lot of people might go wrong. And

now I am. I am truly off script with no bullet points. So

hopefully, when this is over, it still makes sense. But I think if you

are on the quantity road and you're putting the reps in and you're

reaching a level of success and you don't transition

into quality, then you're missing an

opportunity. Because if you've done the work, you've put the reps

out, you've released the music, you've written the songs, you've mixed, what, whatever it

is, once you've put the reps in and you're actually good at that thing,

if you continue with the quantity mindset, I think that you're going to

plateau yourself and that you're going to be at a ceiling. And I

guess the ultimate would be to have quantity and quality. But in order to do

that, I think you need to do the quantity game until you're good at it,

then do the quality game, figure out how to do the best thing that you

can do and then put them together. Now that I say it out loud, that

is the end goal. And that is how you get there. Even if you're not

making music or making content or whatever it is, even if you're just engineering or

just mixing or just mastering, that's what your idols did. They did a lot of

work until they built their skillset. Then they really honed

and mastered their skill, and now they're able

to do a large quantity of great work. Yeah. So I think

that's where we're going to leave this one, I guess, to do a quick summary.

The takeaways here are to really believe in

your follow up. Whether it's from a win or from

a loss, that next opportunity that comes,

remember that you are going to overweight that opportunity

and don't let that prevent you from putting your best foot forward.

I guess to tie the second half to the first half of this little

rant, it's important to know where you are in your

career. Know whether you're in the reps skill

building phase, or if you're in the focus on quality

phase, or if you're transitioning into that combo

of the two that hopefully you'll spend the back half of your

career in. And I think if you're aware of where you are in your

journey and you can tie that to your wins

and losses and use that to trigger some confidence in your follow

up. I think you're going to be in a great place so I hope this

one was helpful. I appreciate all my longtime

audio listeners and let me know whether these unscripted things

are working for you. I'm enjoying them. I'm getting better out of my

hope. And also remember there's a new website progressionspodcast.com

dot. You can leave me a voicemail. At least one of you

please go to that website and leave me a voicemail and just tell me whether

I should do more of these, whether this was helpful. And yeah,

I look forward to hearing that person's voice or two or three or four

of you. So I'll see you all next week. Don't forget to subscribe to the

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and every one of you for sharing the show and telling people about it.