I’ve been weird. Undependable.

In recent years, I’ve realized that I’ve been driven through many things in life by my fear of criticism. 

I didn’t think of myself as being worried about criticism because I was weird. I had weird interests, a weird career, weird social behaviors, weird ways of living, weird friends. I didn’t want to be normal or boring. It seemed to me if I was so weird, I must be impervious to criticism. I must be brave. I must not GAF about the judgement of others.

While many people try to avoid criticism by complying with society and or being high achievers, my strategy ( kinda unbeknownst to me ) was to be confusing. If other people didn’t know my goals, they couldn’t tell if I was succeeding. If I wasn’t trying to do what others were doing, they couldn’t compare myself to them. If was doing stuff that other people hadn’t heard of before, they couldn’t tell me I was doing it wrong. I didn’t play the sports my dad was interested in. I studied magic instead of getting good grades. I flipped a pancake.

The good of this is drive to avoid criticism is I created a lot. I explored a lot. I learned a lot. I built a career and a personality on it that gave joy to a lot of people. I made entertainment that was very much about being bulletproof in society. I motivated and inspired people who felt weird but didn’t know if they were safe to express it. I became a vicarious avatar for people — even if just for a few minutes on stage.

The bad side of this drive is that rebellion is not the opposite of compliance. If I was a rebel, I didn’t have a chance to go with the flow when it would be helpful to me. A die-hard rebel is just as controlled by the status quo as a total sheep – we must rebel no matter what. I was constantly reinventing the wheel. I was constantly swimming upstream. I pursued confusion in my relationships. 

I ACTIVELY TRIED TO PROVE THAT I WAS UNDEPENDABLE.

When I felt that I was facing criticism in my life I would get very defensive and defensive actions are not good for people around me. It prevented me from listening to others and responding with my highest intention. When people looked to me and wanted to depend on me, I wasn’t there to do it. That wasn’t who I was.

In my career, I was impacted by not trying to outwardly build a fanbase (because that success could be measured by others) or trying to be financially successful (because that would have been another clear metric of my failure). It held me back a lot.

As I’ve realized that this criticism-avoidance was a major power in my life, I started to change. I started to listen to people and realize that most of the stuff they say is not criticism. I started to see how much I judged others and saw the world thru a lens of everyone being non-stop judgmental. I started trying to determine what I actually wanted in life – not just what I wanted to fight against.

I started being more of who I wanted to be in relationships. I started taking on more responsibility and standing behind that responsibility. Then, I started seeing what I could do with responsibility! If I took responsibility for entertaining an audience, I could take them to another level. I could say, I’m going to be your leader. I’m going to guide you through a good time. Then, I could deliver on that.

Now, I’m taking responsibility for earning a living for my family. I’m taking responsibility to deliver to the performers who hire me to make websites for them. I’m not flaking. I’m not making it weird. I’m not defensive. 

I’m still a recovering rebel. I’m not quitting being weird, but I wanna do it when I wanna do it. I’m still getting better at aligning with my intention. Being a husband and father has escalated my fear of public failure and my drive to be more responsible at the same time. I am not driven by the fear 24/7 anymore. I’m driven by love and generosity. 

It’s not that I’m a totally transformed man, but it is an exciting new chapter in my life. I’m okay with being seen as a failure sometimes. I’m okay with being seen as normal sometimes. I’m way better than okay with my life. Life is so good!

Here I am, publicly stating that if you are in my life, I will try to stick to my commitments to you and give to you from my heart. I prefer if you don’t criticize me when I fail, but I’d rather fail at that than succeed at pushing away responsibility.

A lot of times in entertainment is about selling drinks (that’s why a bar has a show. that’s why the nba has halftime shows). For a seated show like Scot Nery’s Boobietrap, this can be challenging. Here are some ideas to consider.

People don’t drink as much during the week. People don’t drink much at a seated show.

So you can raise prices on drinks, force people to buy drinks(like a comedy club), sell something else, change the environment, or promote to drinkers

Some ideas…

• Encourage everyone to Uber to the show
• Make special must try cocktails
• Add an intermission
• Presell drinks with tickets like a Hertz presells gasoline – it’s cheaper to buy drink tickets in advance
• Make the bar more fun
• Get a cocktail waiter
• Do something pre show
• Sell double sized drinks so people can sit thru the show
• Sell mocktails that you can’t get anywhere else
• Tell ticket buyers the drinks are great after they buy a ticket. Get them excited to drink but also ensure they don’t go to another spot before the show to pregame

My friend called me and asked what to do with his event. It wasn’t working right. The audience wasn’t happy and the night wasn’t flowing. He wanted to know what to do. Instead we shifted our focus to what we wanted the crowd to do.

With performance, art, creating, we are doing something. With entertainment, we are getting the audience to do something.

Entertainers often think…

• What will I do for the audience?
• What will it look like?
• What will it sound like?
• What format will it take?

The thing with entertainment is that it’s a craft. Crafts have goals. The goal is the audience reaction. Even if the goal is to have the audience remember what happened, that’s a goal. Even when an audience is sitting and watching a movie in silence, they are doing a lot in their heads. They are taking an adventure. Doing.

So, if we ask the question, “What do we want the audience to do?” it makes an easy problem for us.

My son is fascinated with basketball, so we paused on our walk at the school nearby to see some kids shooting hoops. They each had a ball and they were terrible.

Every single shot was out of their skill level. They were trying to shoot from far away and do tricky dribbling and ball handling and one-handed shots. I was counting. They got one out of 15 shots in the basket. They were going for heroic shots and missing almost every one.

I have a very performance-based mindset, so to me this was silly. To me, it looked like they were either trying to be cool, or trying to get better at basketball. To me, they chose the wrong path to do either. I could be wrong. Maybe they liked flinging the ball at the hoop and watching to see if they’re lucky. Maybe they had some other drive.

It made be contemplate three things.

It’s easier to fail at the ridiculous than practice the practical

If we practice and incrementally improve what we’re doing with a high rate of success, we will progress to the heroic level we want. We will practice succeeding, we will be able to analyze the work that we’re doing and improve on it based on straightforward measurements.

This is rough in the experience because we are not escaping to a fantasy – we’re staying present and aware that we are not there yet (for possibly a long time).

As I’m building my business, I constantly want to think of what it can be. I constantly want to look at parts that don’t matter, but are exciting. I want to escape to an under-the-leg three point shot instead of shooting layups for a week.

We’re affected by our peers

Even without explicit peer pressure, we are gonna do what they do. We can pick our peers, and also state our intentions to our peers so that together we work for improvement. If one kid wanted to work on easy shots to improve his accuracy, he might say “let’s see how many layups we can get in a row.” If the other kids wanted to improve their skills, or they see the game in it, they might want to jump on this opportunity too.

An example of this in entertainment is we so often focus on the wrong things when we’re around our peers. A show host might say to another show host “You look so good up there. You’re so funny” instead of “You changed the room. You took them to another level with that second thing you said!” It’s a simple change, but it reframes what we’re trying to do completely.

Success is only determined by one’s self

I don’t know what these boys were trying to do on the court. I could be totally wrong. I chuckled at them thinking I knew, but maybe they were hoping to throw balls randomly and watch to see how lucky they would get. Maybe they were succeeding.

People talk about multi-millionaires who are unhappy. They are not meeting their goals, even though some outside people might think that the goal is money. We don’t know whether other people are succeeding, and we have the opportunity to reframe our own success to be succeeding right now!

Wouldn’t it be great if people had the appropriate budget for things and they just told us how much it was and we told them, “Yes!”

Regular readers of my blog may notice that I don’t believe in entertainment budgets for most things.

For example, I want to buy shoes to run a marathon. There are several running shoes that cost $50, so I set my budget for shoes at $50. Then, I realize I need arch support. I research it and it’s complicated. Some shoes say they have good arch support, but don’t actually. I’ll need to spend at least $75 to get dependable arch support. Then, my running coach tells me I need a certain responsiveness in my sole or I will mess up my hips in a long race. So, I’ll need to spend at least $130 to get the ones recommended by my coach. What do I do? I change my budget because…

1. My budget was just a guess in the first place
2. I looked at the market and determined my budget was wrong
3. I had an expert I trusted tell me that the budget was wrong
4. I realized sticking to my budget would cost me more in the “long run.”

The budget doesn’t have to go up only. If we are trying to serve our clients, we might be able to save them money when they guess wrong about their budgets.

Like I wrote about yesterday, we often don’t want to build a relationship with a customer or a fan. We want to do that thing that makes fandom automatic. We want to send out one email, release one single, make one video, do one gig that gets us an endless avalanche of money and love.

It doesn’t work like that.

Instead of being bummed that we can’t get the magic pill, we can look at that impulse in everyone. Our prospects and fans want that too. How can we be a magic pill for them? How can we solve multiple issues in the lives of those we serve? This is a great way to look at service in our worlds. It helps us empathize and figure out better ways to be us for them. The people the love what we do love the impact that we have. Let’s promise more and provide more.

When sending out a cold email to someone, we often want a total solution. It would be great to have one complete message that sums everything up and gets the recipient to send us some money and become a fan for life.

We can’t avoid trust

We need people to trust us / our service. We can’t get around it. Trust is often hard-earned.

If we’re trying to get a big commitment from our emailee (money, audience, activity) we need big trust. Likely, we’re not going to get that from a single email. Sorry. We will get it from a long conversation, multiple interactions, and a positive exposure.

Start small and active

Don’t start out with a big long email that tries to tell a whole story. It doesn’t work. You don’t want to receive that from a stranger. You’re not gonna read that crap. Why would anyone? Also, trying to compose that perfect email is a lot of time.

Gift

So, give a gift (don’t offer a gift) to the recipient. “I noticed some lint on your shirt in your linked in profile pic. I retouched the picture for you and brightened it up.”

Get interaction

The most effective call to action is “reply and tell me…” We don’t want more than one call to action in an email. “Go look at my website and social media” is a big ask. Don’t even add links to the email.

We want to make it easy as possible for the next interaction. The next interaction is a commitment to more.

The trouble is it’s more work

When we do this, we’re asking our cold emailee to do work, and we have to be willing to do more work than them upfront. Unfortunately, we can’t send out one email and be done if we want to get real results. We have to spend time. We have to deal with people who aren’t actual leads. We have to build lots of relationships, and we have to keep showing up consistently.

Once we build trust with people and get into actual conversations, the sky’s the limit, but it starts with simplicity. Quick, positive, and engaging.

I believe if a company can offer a service at a lower price than a competitor, it is in the customer’s best interest that they do.

If you can prove that you offer something better for your client than a part-time pro then you will get the gig. If not, wouldn’t you want that customer to have the service they need at the lowest price possible?

 I love connecting people who don’t need what I offer to performers who can satisfy them for a low price.

Our challenge is not defeating other performers or making them all do business the same way. Our challenge is elevating what we do, offering more, and communicating that offering to potential clients.

I see performers posting things about how other performers need to match their rates. This blog post is in response to that.

There are certain jobs that are great for the fiverr or 99designs type of job. They are cheap little gigs with a very limited scope. I use fiverr all the time for removing the backgrounds from photos. People can do them fast and cheap. I trust them thoroughly to be able to do this job.

This is the important thing with freelancers – trust. If we try to hire someone we don’t trust, we end up doing all the hard parts of the job. We hire a graphic designer we don’t trust, we end up doing all the important parts of the graphic design.

I’ve seen a bunch of people try to use 99 Designs to get themselves a new logo. They get images from designers, then they ask their friends which ones they like. The goal of a design is not picking something that you or your friends like. The goal is solving important communication problems. This approach is like choosing a doctor based on which one will be the most fun.

There are a lot of dishes I can cook well. When my friend invited me to bring some food to a party, the dish I brought was some complex thing I had never cooked before.

This is a drive I find myself having often. I have the opportunity to share something that’s easy for me and valuable to others, but I get more excited about doing something new. I get twisted up thinking that the new & difficult thing is going to be worth more. It’s great that I want to learn more, but there’s always something new to learn in the familiar, too.

I see this in the people I hire for things and the people who I consult. Our greatest force becomes invisible to us. Once something gets easy, we stop noticing that it’s awesome.

Part of this comes from identifying as a grower or an underdog. As we’re coming up in our careers, we have a lot of learning and growth, but when we become experts, we hav e the opportunity to start a new chapter of using all that learning. If we made growth part of our identity, it can be hard to look for opportunities to share because we might not realize what we have is worth something.

Part of this is a negativity bias. Evolutionarily, we pay attention to danger or lack more than abundance. It’s tough to bring attention to the good things in our life like our skills. We’re looking for our inadequacies in order to stay safe.

What our fans want from us is not innovation of self. They want the greatness of us in our power.

Comedians like to talk about destroying a heckler. I don’t really think they can be destroyed, but that would be interesting. I have silenced many. I’ve also amplified them and I’ve befriended them and I’ve utilized them.

Hecklers usually think they’re being helpful to the show. People in general want to make the world a better place. Either the interruptor thinks the performer is great for the audience and wants to give them some gold, or thinks that the audience is better off without the performer and wants to give the audience some gold.

Understanding this benevolence is important if we want this audience member to shut up. It’s unlikely that a heckler is going to provide a way to make the show that I’ve been doing for 20 years better, so usually, I’ve gotta get them to chill.

I can’t chill them in a way that turns the audience against me, so if I’m going to be mean to the heckler, I have to turn the audience against them first.

If a heckle isn’t loud enough for the audience to hear, I’ll say “what?” This…

1. Includes the audience in the dialog
2. Makes the heckler an even more obvious interruption in the show
3. Gives me extra time to think of a response

If the heckle is unwarrantedly mean or rude, I’m clear for take-off. I can let ’em have it.

If the heckle is non-sensical or benign, I can point out how it’s an interruption and bait a response.

Then, they may just be quiet, or they might come back with more. The audience sides with me, and I dig in with a lot. Make it wild and funny and make the audience feel they got to see something special. The heckler did help. We did it together!

Another trick for filling up our gas tanks when we’re feeling slow to make stuff… Look at the good things we’ve done for others. Our mission is generous. Our motivation is to give something.

If someone does something for us, often all we have to do is thank them and let them know how much it helped — especially with a followup. So much of life is journeys with no end, that when we see the results of something we do, it can be super exciting.

We can look thru

• ‘thank you’ notes
• evidence of past projects
• yelp reviews of ourselves
• photos of work / moments
• emails of happy clients
• whatever

Stuff that reminds us that we have done good work. It doesn’t even hafta be repeatable work or related to what we’ll do next. The idea is to brighten us up, reconnect us with the unburdened feeling of forward momentum.

There’s a part of me that feels like looking at the good things people have said about me is feeding my ego, but really it’s not. It’s a chance to feed the fire that keeps me giving more. It’s a connection, rather than an isolation. Let’s do it!