This might be half a thought… but “spoonful” shouldn’t be a complete word, so I’m inspired to write the impossible.
Last night I had a dream that this candy company wanted me to figure out how to improve their sales. My strategy was to add some poison to it.
The idea was to create a split packaging where one half was the treat, the other half was the toxin. The poison would be not lethal, but it would maybe make you sick if you ate it.
This is a great idea… for a dream.
We animals have a high sensitivity to danger. We are attracted to learning more about it and will focus on it when present. The attention keeps us safe.
My dream marketing concept was that this candy would give a person a chance to come close to danger, then trash the poison part and eat the candy.
I don’t know what kind of legal risk this would cause and I wouldn’t want someone getting hurt because of the idea. I guess if people want to chose to eat poison, they could find it pretty easily anywhere.
Fugu Pufferfish is Poison
One pufferfish can kill 30 people! Folks eat it by removing the toxic parts. I don’t imagine it’s all that yummy, but it’s adjacent to danger.
We feel safer when we have control. For example many people feel safer in a car than in an airplane (although airplanes are safer) because they feel like the car safety is up to them.
We need our audience to feel safe with us to let us lead.
Giving our audience chances to check in and hand over control to us is what it’s all about. For live performers, this can look like moments of acknowledgment. For film creators, it can be chill out moments. For authors maybe it’s chapter breaks. They give us control, but we remind them that they gave it to us. If we aren’t willing to give up the reigns, they’ll take them back. If we’re not ready to take the reigns back (by offering something great) we forfeit our chance to lead and offer greatness.
Gatekeepers want to know that you will share their mission. Food packaging at Whole Foods are good examples of this.
When we hear that someone shares our interest, whether it’s the health of our family, or getting audiences laughing hysterically, we feel safer and we assume value. Here’s more on that…
As Seen On
Showing the shows / venues / media that have used our services is a great way to show some street cred.
Case Studies
We can tell a story of how we helped a client / customer. This is really good if we’re offering different solutions to different clients. It shows experience, but it also allows us to show how what we do offers transformation.
This can be used for showing value or clarity. Sometimes these are used for features of a product or service. They are vertically stacked sections that look like they go together in a set and are intended to be read together as a list. We can do a centered, aligned to one side, or zigzag.
When we’re making stuff, it’s gotta be for someone. This is a point I’ve missed before.
I made a cooking show on stage in San Francisco. It ran for a year total every week and it was really fun. It was originally Culinery Tuesdays. Then, I left town for a gig and came back to call it Crash Course.
It was chaotic and wild and fun and I cooked a different meal every week. I thought it was for people who wanted to see something fun. People who wanted a creative theater experience. Those people exist, but they didn’t know my show was the thing. I wasn’t clear about what it was for them.
My slogan eventually was “Cooking, Juggling, and Getting Hurt!” SF Chronicle called it “Emeril meets Johnny Knoxville!” People loved this, but not the people my age who were seeking entertainment. The people that came were women in their 40s. Fans of TV cooking shows. My show was accidentally for someone. I wouldn’t have had the success that I had without them finding it.
At the time, I thought maybe these women were attracted to a young creative man, but I think now they were attracted to the outside message. What they picked up was that, if you like cooking shows, and you want to see a twisted take on them, you can see one in person.
I got complaints a few times that it was not what they expected, but as I got better with making the show entertaining, those complaints started turning into “I did not know what to expect.”
If I knew then what I know now, I would have made the show even more for them.
We need what we create to be made for someone. We need that person to say, “This is for me!” Even if it’s one person… We need to know who they are and how to find them… or we can hope for luck and work way to hard making a cooking show for a year.
I talk to people who have been in showbiz for decades who say “I’m bad at business.” To be blunt, this is just victim mentality and victim mentality is shirking responsibility. I will tell you how to take responsibility.
According to Josh Kaufman, there are 5 parts to a business…
Value Creation – Discovering what people need or want, then creating it.
Marketing – Attracting attention and building demand for what you’ve created.
Sales – Turning prospective customers into paying customers.
Value Delivery – Giving your customers what you’ve promised and ensuring that they’re satisfied.
Finance – Bringing in enough money to keep going and make your effort worthwhile.
If we’re running a business that’s still operating (even as freelancers), we are adequate at this collection of tasks, but probably not great at all of them.
The way to take responsibility is to pick a major part and work on it. Someone’s better at sales than me isn’t smarter than me. They don’t have some sales gene. They have a skill. Skills can be developed. So, I look at sales, and I subdivide that. What part of the sales process needs work? Looking into a prospects eyes when I say the price? I can google that.
I know, this takes some of the magic out of being a creative person. Suddenly, it’s not a world of good and bad. It’s not a world of destiny. It’s a world of “Do I make the decision to putting in the work for the future of my business?”
Step 1, decide it’s a lacking skill. Step 2, figure out what skill it is. Step 3, divide that skill down into a manageable piece. Step 4 work on learning that skill.
Most skills can be learned via a youtube video. Getting accountability can help us follow through. Mentors / coaches can help us do both and can help us ask the right questions for google.
When we take responsibility for our missions, we get the great feeling of being the hero in the hero’s journey!
Daniel Packard, Chris Karney, and I were performing at comedy clubs in Seattle. We stayed together in a youth hostel. News spread through the hostel. People woke us up and we saw the second plane hit. So surreal. I don’t remember being extra displaced by visiting a strange city.
I do remember them shutting down the Space Needle in Seattle because they thought it would be another target. You know what wasn’t shut down? The Showboat Comedy Club. The owner said he wouldn’t pay us if we didn’t do the show.
There was one patron at the club… A white-haired veteran at the bar… In the other room. We could see him and his disapproval through a doorway.
Show business is weird. We did the whole show. We laughed and clapped for each other. We did our jobs. So grateful to have friends. So grateful to have something to do on that day of so much discombobulation.
I am going to put myself out there and say I don’t like terrorism. I feel like a lot of my life, I’ve felt a lot of instability, fear, danger, and confusion. Tomorrow, probably another 2000 Americans will die from Coronavirus. It’s a different nastiness and I booked a show for a small outdoor party. It makes me more grateful for my loved ones and my life-long relationship with entertainment. So consistently goofy and so consistently buoying.
Lynn Ruth Miller recently died. She was a friend. She was fun and old and a woman. I think those are the important things she’d like you to know.
I found out about her passing last night and I thought, “Here we go. Here comes the sadness…” but it didn’t come. I have good feelings. She was inspirational and she was on the same mission as me.
Lynn started doing standup at age 70, about 17 years ago. I met her about 17 years ago. She already had a standup set, was already funny, had a personality, and was already doing shows. Her comedy set was still not super. It was fun to watch her, but not packed with laughs. Well, she worked on that. It’s pretty cool that I got to see her develop — from working in standup, in theater, creating her own one-woman show. Then, she performed in Scot Nery’s Boobietrap last year and killed it. She really locked in to her persona, perspective, what the audience wanted from her, and her jokes were all so precise. She came to kill.
Off stage, Lynn was the way you’d expect except probably nicer. She was very sweet whereas on stage, she had much more attitude. The attitude was still there in real life. She was still dirty minded and still liked to get a rise out of people, but she was genuinely concerned with connecting with people that she liked. I was one of those people. We were mutual fans.
Although she was much older than me, I was more established as a performer when we met, so she would ask me for advice and feedback and we would talk shop.
Her position on the industry (although she obviously cared a lot about it) was “fuck ’em I’m almost dead.” It lead to a very playful pursuit of comedy but she never gave the finger to the medium. She was respectful of entertainers and played by the rules of comedy to make her act tight and to give the audience what they needed. I hadn’t seen that in many people and it was really motivating to me.
I can tend to toggle between rebellion and buckled down. Lynn taught me about creativity with lightness and ease. That’s why I have a positive feeling about her death. I hope that I bring the same legacy. Ease, creativity, and continuous progress. Can you imagine? Starting standup at 70! ugh! amazing!
Graphic design is not just a way of presenting communication. It’s a way of communicating in itself. The tricky thing; when people are looking for a graphic designer, they’re often looking for someone who can make things look good. Great graphic design is about function.
The left coupon is actually good
The coupon on the left looks cheap. If you’re looking for something cheap, you might not even look at the righthand coupon. The coupon on the left does the job. It gets cheap-seekers to see it, read it and clip it. Beauty may be a disservice to TacoXpress in this case. It may cost them customers.
When we work with a graphic designer, we’re looking for solutions. We’re looking for the college kid to clip our taco coupon, or the publisher to read our sample writing, or whatever. We want action. Even reading text or looking at a photo is action. Rad graphic design communicates and leads, just like rad entertainment.
Magicians are an example of entertainers who have it easy. A person can buy a trick at the magic shop and perform it within a few minutes. It’s basically show and tell. “Look at this thing I bought.” It works immediately. It gets applause right away.
What we get from great entertainment is human connection. We get a story and a tribal learning. We get heart.
Because magic works so well out of the box, it creates a false early reward that easily blocks that connection and rewards a performer not willing to pursue empathy. Other performing arts, like mime, are unwanted initially, so mimes need to fight to find out what the audience wants.
All performing arts are on this spectrum from immediate response to kinda hated. The magic to mime scale.
Here’s where I say the opposite
Like I said in the “Do what you hate” blog post, I am fascinated by the potential of magic. Great magicians have it hard. They have to get past the fake early validation. They also have to stand up boldly in a landscape of easy-adopters. They have to then, figure out how to do something that people haven’t seen. Then, they have to bring empathy.
Jugglers have to deal with some of this too, but magicians dedicated to greatness are really swimming salmonwise up the river of shallow performance. That’s why great magicians like Henning, Copperfield, Carbonaro, Blaine, Willman are such standouts. I’ve gotten to see and become friends with so many greats that are not as popular too! They battle it all and give us heart. That’s why they give us that good feeling.
Magicians suck. People are awesome. We want to connect deeply with people. Give us the good stuff. No matter how easy it is to get started we gotta keep striving to find the humanity in what we do.
When I moved to L.A. from San Francisco, a lot of people told me that L.A. was fake, that the people are fake, that the culture is fake. Well, first, there is no culture. It’s a huge city with a million things going on. Nobody’s decided that L.A. has one unifying culture, and there’s not really unity. That’s part of what’s attractive to me about it. That diversity, that division, that ability for people to be whoever they are and clash and coordinate with so many others… that’s what’s beautiful about the city experiment. That’s what’s so real about the people here.
Authenticity is not equilibrium
The imagined authenticity is some kind of purity of person. We who would be the same in a cabin in the woods as in a walmart. I believe authenticity in private life or on stage is automatic. It’s whatever is happening. If I’m guarded and showy in social situations, that’s authentically who I am.
I love to see when people are a little thrown off. I get to learn more about who they are, what are the boundaries of their character when they don’t have a game plan or when they’re transitioning from one mode to another.
L.A. is destabilizing
This town is so full of obstacles and stuff and surprises, it destabilizes everyone and gives everyone a chance to expose more colors. Some people are trying to present something without much understanding of what’s behind it. That’s okay. That exposes who they are with that.
The real fear is non-existence
I think when people see other people who put on an obvious mask, there’s a little bit of the uncanny valley. There’s a peek into the emptiness that is behind it. It doesn’t feel substantial, and so we fear the part of ourselves that might be lacking. If this person is not really there behind a mask, am I not really there? Do I not exist? The thoughts, attitudes, and feelings that I think give me life, are they not really there?
Quick interactions make empathy hard
Another thing about Los Angeles is that stuff is moving constantly. It might be hard to sit down with someone and hear their story. It might be hard to empathise and understand why they’re putting up the mask they’re wearing. I’m not saying I’m awesome, but there was something about my past that made it easier for me to see what was up with the actors and artists I met when I landed. I saw a lot of ambition and I loved it. I saw ambition that caused people to challenge all their values and their stories and see what was left. This left people raw and struggling and engaging and embracing new mindsets and opportunities.
Advice is usually bad
While a lot of people gave me warnings about L.A., my favorite was from Bob Mendelson who told me “L.A. has everything you could ever want whether you want it or not.”
People everywhere are real… including Tinsel Town.
Lots of entertainment companies are going with WordPress. It’s running a lot of the web. People also jump on Squarespace or Wix or Weebly or whatever and that’s great. I highly recommend 8b.com also if you want to do things fast and cheap. Sometimes a person just needs to get a site up and have it not look terrible and give people contact info or a signup form or something.
Now, all these folks are getting hired to create sites on these DIY platforms for clients. It’s pretty nuts because the solutions usually aren’t good and it leaves clients with a clunky, bloated, and non-bespoke site.
Most of the promises of WordPress and the like are true, but do we need these promises. The most beloved promise, but also the most useless promise is “You can update it any time.”
In most cases, a good site can stay stagnant for three to five years and keep performing well
Keeping the value
The purpose of a site is to give great value, reinforce the brand, and send no red flags. When we update our website, it is no light job. To be responsible with it, we are reevaluating these aspects every single time. We are thinking about how the entire website works together to do this heavy lifting. It’s a lot to empathise with the user, to remember our identity and to align with the market. If we have a plugin with our instagram feed, are we ready to standup for our latest post every time and make sure that it’s showing our best side? That puts more unnecessary friction in our social flow.
Keeping out cobwebs
Oh, we want to add a news section or a blog or a performance calendar to our site so that it looks fresh. Usually this is like adding a produce section to a furniture store. Oh, it’s great to be able to get a banana while looking at beds, sure but the staff isn’t ready to keep it good.
Not even celebrities have constantly good news. So, either we have that appearance on Comedy Central from two years ago and it looks like a “gap in the resume” or we have some news that makes us look amateurish or low achieving.
Same with a blog. There are a lot of sites out there with the latest blog post that says “this is my first of many blog posts” or it describes what will be on the blog in the future. Silly.
When blogging, do we want to write something interesting and at the same time on brand? If not, our visitors will probably not search carefully for the most flattering blog post. They will read the top ones. Those top ones either need ot make us look rad or the website is not doing its job.
I’m right
I’m blogging right now on wordpress. I blog every day, though. My website doesn’t promote my blog. It might be hard to find this blog actually. I use it to communicate ideas, backlink my knowledge and practice codifying principles so i can help my clients more. It’s not because I think i should have a blog on my site.
Keep it Static
It might seem counterintuitive, but most of the time, we want a site that just sits there and looks good. A site made with a clear brand and technical prowess. Yes I make websites for people. I do things that I think are useful to making entertainment better.
