Derek Sivers, most famous for being the founder of CD Baby, wrote a book: ‘Anything You Want – 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur‘. I didn’t read the book yet, but everybody recommends it. In any case, Derek always writes interesting and thought-provoking stuff. On Music Think Tank, Ariel did a long interview with Derek and, among other things, he talks about his most important lessons learnt. I’ll cite the most interesting part (according my humble opinion). If you don’t have time, just read the part in bold.
My old musician friends are blown away that I’m not making music anymore, because from ages 14 to 29, I existed only to make music. My fingers were never off the fret board. When we would go to parties, I was the guy who would bring my guitar in the backseat of the car and continue to play while my friends drove. We’d get to the party and I just wore my guitar at all times. You couldn’t pry my fingers from the fret board. So they’re amazed that I’m doing this website now. But I hit this point when I was 29. I’d been making a full-time living as a musician for 12 or 13 years of touring. All of a sudden, I was really enjoying learning how to program in PHP and SQL databases and all this stuff that made CD Baby. It was what was keeping me up all night. It was 2 a.m. and I was like, okay, hold on. The girlfriend would be calling me, “are you still up, come to bed”. Hold on, I’ll be to bed soon. And I’d stay up until 3:30, learning about PHP and SQL and I was so into it that eventually I started turning down gigs to focus on the website.
On the flip side, the most common cases, like the bass player in the band will be the one who is booking the gigs. Okay, I’ll take care of it. Then, after a while, the bass player’s really enjoys booking the gigs and starts booking gigs for a couple other friends. Pretty soon realizes, I think I should just get a different bass player for the band. I’m just going to be the booking agent now.
Dina La Polt is a really successful music attorney in LA that was like a guitarist in a metal rock band and then picked up one of those big, giant, boring books about music business law because they had to work out a deal. She found herself fascinated, just stayed up all night learning how about cross-collateralization and points on contracts and loved it and said, “oh my God, I think I want to do music law”. Good for her.
The lesson is that whatever bores you or drains your energy, someone else somewhere loves doing that. So your goal is to find those people that love doing the things that you hate and as soon as possible stop doing the things that you hate because anything that drains your energy, you will never be successful at. Just stop it immediately.
You should only be doing the things that excite the hell out of you and spending as little time as possible doing the things that drain you. That’s the single hardest lesson I ever learned.
The flipside is what I’ve seen happen far too much is somebody gets into music because they love playing drums, for example. They love having the drum set setup and playing along with Zeppelin records and they love the physical feeling of the drumsticks thumping on the drums. So they decide that they want to be a musician for a living and a well-meaning person says, “oh, well, if you want to be a musician, you should really read this book by Donald Passman” about this business of music written by a lawyer and it’s a 500-page book about negotiating major label contracts. They tell you that you need to read this book if you want to be a musician. Then somebody else says, “well, if you’re going to be a musician, you’ve got to have a good website”. So you’ve got to learn HTML. Then somebody says, “oh, you can’t just learn HTML, you’ve got to learn Flash, because all good websites have Flash.” So now you’ve got to do this. You also have to be a really good networker and you have to be a really good this and you have to be this. You’ve got to be a good booking agent. You’ve got to be so and so. You’ve got to promote yourself.
After a while, this person who just really wants to play drums has been so discouraged by all this stuff that they hate doing, that everybody’s saying they have to do, that they just end up saying, “oh, fuck it” and they get a day job somewhere and they just end up playing drums for a hobby.
Whereas, instead, if that person would have just paid more attention to their compass in their gut and realized what was draining their energy, and found somebody else to do those things that everybody said were important. More importantly, it’s just realizing that only you know what’s best for you. Every well-meaning person, including me and you in this interview, giving people advice or anybody that will ever give you advice means well, but only you know what’s best for you and what excites you. What’s best for you is what excites you. Only you know what that is. So anytime somebody tells you that you should be doing this, should be doing that, you have to be the final judge to say, “okay, but that drains my energy, that bores me, so I just need to find somebody else to do that, because I just love playing drums.”
