Hey everybody, just a very quick note to say, Happy New Year!
It’s nearly 2am here in Berlin and things are gradually slowing down, might be able to consider sleep soon.
As outlined in my previous couple of posts, I am preparing for a very big year in 2010, with some challenging and personally important projects underway – and I’m looking forward to sharing them as they unfold!
Thanks for your attention, support, comments, and so on…I hope it has been a good year for you and that the next will be even better, more fulfilling, fascinating and fun!
As mentioned previously, I am participating in a ‘blogging contest’ sponsored by Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR. The objective is to write 9 blog posts, one for each of the 9 chapters of Ariel’s book, ‘Music Success in Nine Weeks’. This is part two of my first ‘official’ blog entry.
Well, as promised in Part 1, I went off to battle with my demons and came back victorious, carrying the Spoils Of War: some goals for 2010 that I am prepared to stand behind. I wrote these by hand last night, after turning the computer OFF, as it’s about the only way I can really isolate myself from distractions completely enough for such a task.
I also did this between 2 and 3 am – a time when the phone is extremely unlikely to ring, the family is asleep, and really nothing else is going on. My brain, if I am not asleep or exhausted or surfing, is often a kind of neuron furnace in the wee hours… and when I get going, I can usually more or less keep up with it in a kind of frenzied chicken-scratch shorthand I used to use when taking notes in university. It takes some time to decode later, but it’s effective.
I have divided my results into Personal and Professional categories; only the Professional set will be included here, as I don’t really think personal ‘resolutions’ are particularly relevant to others. In fact, I don’t spend a lot of time on them, for various reasons; I may try to install a few new habits this year, but I won’t bore you with the details here. I’m actually pretty happy with my personal life, so I’m not looking for major changes there. One or two long-term goals that are better kept private.
Having said that, by its very nature this kind of thing is ‘all about me’… all I can do is try to keep the focus, as always, on aspects of my own experience that seem likely to be more universal; hopefully readers will connect to those. If so, please leave a comment and tell me what you think! Read the rest of this entry »
As mentioned previously, I am participating in a ‘blogging contest’ sponsored by Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR. The objective is to write 9 blog posts, one for each of the 9 chapters of Ariel’s book, ‘Music Success in Nine Weeks’. This is my first ‘official’ blog entry.
Chapter 1 of the MSNW coursebook is all about setting goals. This is, of course, a good time of year for such things – year-end reviews, New Year’s resolutions and whatnot – and perhaps the timing of Ariel’s contest is not accidental. In any case, being a good student, I dutifully set out to work through the process…
It seems like a fairly simple concept – in order to succeed in any meaningful sense, in order to achieve your career goals and aims, you should know what they are, right? Be clear about where you’re going, so that the steps you take are leading in that direction? And yet, this simple exercise has been – well, let’s just say, full of surprises for me.
As a kind of follow-up to the last post… and again, before I begin the official contest blogs (I have to work with the first chapter a bit first)… I should mention, by way of related news but not directly as a part of this process, that I seem to be doing something a bit radical.
It’s something I’ve toyed with for a while but never quite had the nerve to pull the trigger on, but for various reasons this seems like the right time to do it. I am throwing my entire musical catalog open to a pay-what-you-want pricing model.
Greetings fearless friends… and hopefully some new ones: this blog is now a Contest Entry, so apparently being read and judged by a panel of experts… (welcome, experts! Enjoy your stay! Don’t jump off of anything I wouldn’t jump off of!)
For other readers, I’ll explain – as part of my ongoing attempt to redesign myself as someone with an ounce of business and marketing savvy, I have bought a book called ‘Music Success In Nine Weeks‘ by one Ariel Hyatt, who runs a prominent music PR firm and is generally regarded as a person from whom one can learn a lot about such things. I have high hopes for this book (rather, for what it can help me accomplish if I put as much of it into practice as I can).
Ariel is now running a contest wherein my fellow entrants and I will blog about our progress through the book, our experiences implementing some of the advice it contains, and so on. Nine blog entries, for the nine major chapters of the book, in nine weeks… Tolkien would be proud.
So here we go. Before I launch into the project, as kind of a Prologue to the main event, let me introduce myself. Since in fact I’ve never done this in these pages before, it probably makes sense to give a bit of background to my quest for Music Success. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not sure if there’s any way to back this up, but my impression is that most people seem to think about balance as a state – either a person or thing is in a state of balance, or not.
I’d like to propose that balance is better thought of as a process.
I am not a tightrope walker by any stretch, but I’ve always been able to balance quite well on railings and so on. It has often struck me that in doing so, when it’s going well at least, I have the feeling of being constantly but slightly off-balance to one side or the other – but never too much so.
