What You Should Know Before You Sell Out

I loved Pixar when John Lasseter was directing every film.

I loved Jack Johnson’s music when he was a poor surfer.

The First is often the best

The first version, the first album, the first move, the first season is usually the best.  The quality and soul of version one is often unmatched by the “post success” subsequent versions.

After companies, bands, athletes, writer, entrepreneurs and artist score big they seem to regularly loose their original identity that underpinned their break-out success.

It reminds me of Rocky Balboa from the original 1976 movie. Do you remember when he lived in a cellar, owned two greasy wife beater t-shirts, drank raw eggs in a plastic cup and slept on a cot?  He didn’t have fame, but he had heart.  

Heart drove his training.  

Contrast that image of Rocky to the Lamborghini driving, mega-wealthy, soft champion distracted by what he would be wearing in his next television commercial.

Rocky after he made it big

Count the costs before you cash the check

Before we sell out we should really give some strong consideration to the fact that we might loose The Eye of the Tiger.

A few questions to ponder:

  • Are you ok with that trade?
  • Has the money and the prestige been the goal all along?
  • How much of your present success is because you’ve been the hungry, idealist, dead-set on doing it better than the other guys?
  • How much of your shoe-string budget has forced you to be more innovative?

I have a few friends who are on the verge of this status change.  They have pursued their dream to the point of earning a well-deserved chance to stop punching meat in the freezer.

Will they keep doing version one work even after they make it big?

Real world examples

Were they better before they made it big? 

  • Bon Iver From a Log Cabin to the Grammy’s
    Can he still infuse his music with the melancholy angst that he found in his secluded Wisconsin cabin?  Now he has Grammy albums, fame, distraction and likely not a lot of solitude.  Now that he records in a fancy studio, how will it sound?
  • M. Night Shyamalan Film Maker
“I see dead people”.
    Do you remember his 1999 breakout film The Sixth Sense?  This Indian-American screenwriter’s early work is studied by film students as great works of art.  Today, he is producing mega-blockbusters for Walt Disney Studios.  Which movie would you rather go see?
  • Mossimo Beachwear Designer
    
In 1986, he started making shorts for beach volleyball and schlepping them up and down the California coast.  As his website states, They gained notoriety for their humble, grassroots start.  Now you can find his clothing line in every Target superstore across America.  Is the original aloha vibe still alive?

You Can’t Be Brilliant Every Time

Mining for Gold (photo by Creative Commons)

Everything isn’t epic.

Everything isn’t brilliant and better than the last.

We aren’t always remarkable.

Some days are simple, mundane and even average.

Yet our western culture is bannered with headlines that suggest otherwise.

I know titles sell, attract attention and shock us into investigating further.

The number of headlines that race across my screen making outlandish promises is causing me to not believe any of them.

  • 10 immediate steps to improve
  • 15 ways to be awesome
  • 3 reasons you keep failing
  • 7 simple things to fix everything

I don’t believe them.

  • Not every idea is going to work
  • Not every sale is going to close
  • Not every blog is going to have hundreds of thousands of followers
  • Not every client is going to get great results
  • Not every run is going to feel fast
  • Not every new hire is going to stay

Digging for gold

It reminds me of when you buy an entire album from your favorite band. Yeah I know most of the time we only buy the one song we love, but that feeds my example even more.

When you listen to the whole album you usually find one to maybe two songs that you really love.  The rest of them are fine, but they don’t strike a note in you like the others.

Why is that?

Why does the artist ship twelve or fourteen songs on an album when clearly only one or two are super solid?

He had to write twelve songs to find the gold one.

Were the others a waste of his time and talents?

No, instead we should consider that this is the process of extracting the art from within each of us.  In order to find the gold, you have to bust through a bunch of rocks in order to find a vein.

The artist wrote twelve songs in search of the one.

He knew immediately when he wrote it.  This one, the golden mother load, magically flowed out of him with ease.

The other twelve were just the prelude to the treasure.

I think this is how we should view our life’s work or as Pam Slim names it as our Body of Work.  Stop being eluded by the latest headline, frankly some of those writers are offering self-promotion more than substance.

Be willing to do the work, to ship your art without fear and know that every now and again you will find the gold you were looking for.

In the meantime, embrace that the other twelve versions are getting you closer each day to the brilliant one.

You are brilliant; you just need to keep digging.