I’m from the magic and juggling world. We are often seen as cheezy. That’s another word for shallow. Great jugglers and great magicians bring in their humanity. One thing humans have… emotions! Easy trick: include emotions in what we do. This applies to any entertainment. Audiences can not absorb anything without a story of a person or people – even if that person is an anthropomorphized cartoon bunny.

Instead of “Here’s a song written by Jed Smithers,” Say this is a song my “Mother used to sing to me and it still sometimes makes me cry” Instead of “here’s another thing I can do with my whip,” Say “this is my favorite whip trick in the world. It makes me happy. It’s gotten me through many stormy nights.”

See how easy that is? Please, I’m dying here. Add emotion!

We don’t know. Even the ones of us that seem most confident don’t know. We don’t know exactly what our brand is, we don’t know what people value in us, we don’t know what to do next.

We can get better at understanding our wheelhouse and who we are to others, but all work is experiments. The great thing about experiments is they never fail. Experiments give us information. The better formed the experiment with the bigger control group gives us more info. That’s it. We’re experimenting.

Here’s how we stay in the flow so we can get more information…

• Don’t treat our experiments like bets on the future. We’re not putting a bunch in hoping for a certain result except information.
• Enjoy the work of it and get compensated for the work.
• Get help
• Do one thing at a time
• Know that this experiment is not the end. The next one is coming up next.

If you can’t fail, you can’t succeed.

We are tempted to take safe routes. We’re tempted to do things we know will work okay instead of pursuing things that might work wonderfully. The story of entertainment is a story of risk. Everything that we love is created daringly.

Now, showbiz companies are trying to hedge their bets. People are making stuff based on algorithms. Netflix shows are being written based on stats. I love utilizing technology to examine what works and make something better, but it’s easy to get sidetracked and forget about the power of risk.

Let’s continue to put our necks out. It took us a long time to understand what works, but now let’s find out what works better, or what works better now. Let’s get wild and youthful and rebellious. Let’s bet on ourselves and see if we get in a mess. Being in a prom dress at the 7-Eleven is better than being in a snuggie and crocks anywhere. Nobody comes to us to see us comfortable. They come to us to see what happens when humans dare.

Let’s take risks in our process, in our outreach, and in our end result. It’s heroic to take risks and it’s compelling.

I know. I’ve been grossed out by people who try to sell it too much; people who boast; people who tell me their resume all the time; people who somehow plug every show without embarrassment.

I went to this comedy show (kinda) one time.

I was heading to a comedy show and was a little turned around, but I heard some audience noise coming from a venue, so went in the back entrance and there was a dude on stage playing keyboard and singing and he was really great and fun and alive and sounded awesome. He owned the room. He was Jacob Jeffries. Sat through two of his songs, then he got off stage and they introduced another act – a musical act. I was not at a comedy show. I was at the wrong place at a music show.

I went up to Jacob and complimented him and then, we noticed that we had seen each other the day before at a vegan restaurant on the other side of L.A. County. There weren’t many people in that restaurant and I remembered him because he was talking to the waiter about his music and giving her a flyer and really getting into it. I thought he was hitting on her.

I later learned that this is what he does. He loves making music for people and he wants everyone to know about it. Isn’t that innocent and lovely?

Jacob was only in town for the two days that I encountered him and I got him booked on a midnight show and stayed in touch. We became friends. He made me consider why I always attributed self promotion to some shallow pursuit? Why did I see it as a objectifying interaction?

We’re all creating something superior.

We in entertainment are all making something that’s better. It might not be better in every way than everything, but to us, we made it because it has something that needs sharing and something that gives people awesome. The more people we can give it to, the better. Let’s share. Let’s keep serving. People need to know. Even servers. Even people who are lost at music shows.

We waste most of the advice we receive. I give way too much advice and I see it wasted all the time, it’s still worth it to me to give it because of that little bit that takes effect. Here’s how I see it wasted and here’s how to prevent wasting what we receive.

Good advice that’s absorbed and used is rare. It has to have perfect timing, and a bunch of other factors to make it work. Here are some problems with good advice.

• It might be good for the speaker but not the recipient.
• It can be too big. Sometimes the advice that’s really most crucial to our change is something we can’t handle and that’s why we’re where we are. Not ready to make a huge change.
• The timing might be off
• We might not trust the speaker or think the speaker has not heard us
• The advice came unsolicited, so was taken as criticism
• We can’t even wrap our brains around the concept because we’re so far away from that mindset
• We don’t follow through
• The advice came as an answer to a different question than we asked because the speaker felt we asked the wrong question

Here are some symptoms we’re poorly receiving advice

• We’re annoyed
• We feel misunderstood
• The advice triggers a very low frequency emotional response. It sounds boring, or mundane, or a little weird — not awful, but not life changing like we want.
• We get really excited about it and think it’s life changing
• We forget it

Best trick for absorbing is following up.

If it’s appropriate, we can tell the advisor that we will follow up with them on it. We don’t have to say we’ll take the advice, but that maybe we’ll look into it and get back to them. Thank them. All this stuff is powerful. It adds accountability, it adds an expression of gratitude, it adds a commitment to remember the advice. If I have to follow up with a person later, I’m going to really take in the advice and it will mean something to me.

When we follow up, it has a side effect of motivating the advisor. People like giving advice that’s useful. If I give you advice that helps you achieve your goals, heck yes I’ll give you more advice in the future. That’s fun!

More tricks to being advice sticky

• write it down
• discuss it with someone we trust
• plan an action for it. If someone says “you need to talk to my accountant.” Get the phone number and schedule calling the accountant next week if it’s too scary to do tomorrow.
• ask someone else to be an accountability buddy on it
• sit with it. Imagine taking the advice. Feel what that feels like. Basically, visualize
• research it, but don’t let the research become an escape

Stage shows are good for people, but they’re even better for respiratory viruses. In person theater shows are…

1. best experienced with an audience close to each other
2. best inside a closed environment
3. best if there isn’t lots of air circulating
4. best if everyone’s having fun and laughing and breathing
5. best if we’re not nervous about dangers or being socially irresponsible

The questions I’ve been asking myself are … How do we do this? How do we make shows with the Delta surge? How do we make shows afterwards? I think the answer is that, in most cases, it’s still not time. We need more patience.

I’m currently on an island in the Caribbean doing shows. The case count here is really low. I’m vaccinated. The shows have been okay. They haven’t been riotous, and they haven’t felt communal and tribal, but they’re alright. When I get back to the states, I don’t know if I’ll be doing any gigs in the next months.

I’m very specific with my boundaries. I do believe that my greatest value is as a stage entertainer (in the correct circumstances) but right now, I don’t have that value accessible because of the sitch and my own boundaries and risk threshold. If I didn’t have an unvaccinateable child at home, maybe things would be a little different. This perspective that I have is interesting. I have a chance to take my time and wait until things are right. Right now, things feel very far from right.

I would love herd immunity to happen and for people to just bounce back to amazing live interactions, but I don’t think either of those things will happen. We are trying to keep each other safe, we are careful, and we’re a little scarred.

I’m a little excited to see how entertainment evolves thru all of this, but i’m also bored of not knowing.

There’s this site called record setter which became the largest database of world records quickly overwhelming Guinness by allowing anyone – mostly unmoderated – to post their own world record. It wasn’t that people were suddenly achieving more incredible things, it was that the categories got more specific. A person didn’t have to juggle the most balls, they had to juggle the most neon green balls, or juggle the most neon green balls with a hat on, or juggle the most neon green balls with a hat on while wet with german vodka.

It bummed me out that people would participate in this at first, but now I love the long tail of the internet. I love that there’s always someone out there doing something that noone requested. On the flip side, there are a lot of people that we can reach that are out there requesting something that doesn’t exist yet. They have a need that’s not being served that is so specific, no business has offered it to them yet.

We have the opportunity to be the best in the world, to be the leading expert, to break the world record for one of these groups of people. When people tell me they don’t see themselves changing careers or that what they do is worthless during the pandemic, I’m surprised. We can conquer a market tomorrow if we invent it. Or, we can learn the skills of an existing market and own a corner of it most likely in less than a year. We just gotta be driven, specific and ready to fail for a while.

The way I hear it, when we eat stuff, there are a bunch of little life forms (more bacteria cells in us than human cells) that eat our food and help us digest it. When we eat a bunch of sugar, the ones that like sugar thrive and reproduce while the ones that don’t like sugar die. Then, we get cravings for sugar because our microbiomes are like, “More please.”

Some people call it the law of attraction. We head toward the thing we’re already doing.

• I tell entertainment folks they need more empathy.
• They ask how to get more empathy.
• I tell them try.

Seek illegit validation, get illegit inventions

If we focus on the things that are most important to the process of great entertainment, we will make great entertainment. If we focus on some sugar; like youtube comments, getting compliments after a show, trying to impress other people in our field, or making something that’s just neat… we build momentum toward creations that are fueled by junk.

If we remind ourselves of our core mission, we can seek validation that means something — fanbase growth, audience response, income, or whatever.

It’s harder to eat a salad, but we didn’t get into this for easy. The stuff that’s inside of us is going to crave whatever we feed it. We need to feed it useful validation.

I don’t like to think of myself as an idiot. Not that I don’t make mistakes. I try to keep track of the type of words I use.

I make lots of mistakes. I think a way to improve the phrase “Everyone makes mistakes” would be “Everyone makes lots of mistakes all the time.” We do. The phrase “I’m only human” doesn’t completely give us the leeway we want, because humans do incredible things and they often look more flawless from the outside.

So, instead of the self-talk of calling myself a dumb dumb or saying that something I did was a stupid mistake… I call myself a dingle. I am not special. Everyone’s a dingle. I can call other people dingles too. Instead of an insult, or a method of shaming, this is a method of forgiveness. We need lots of forgiveness. We’re all flawed and vulnerable and most of the time not conscious of our actions. That’s okay. We’re dingles in a long line of dingles and we’ll be okay.

Why did that person cut me off? They’re a dingle. Why did I leave the faucet on? I’m a dingle. Why did my dentist forget my birthday? dingle.

I got really into productivity. I read so many blogs and books and tried so many systems that eventually, I had to admit I wasn’t making my life more efficient. I was making it less. Productivity study became my hobby.

My understanding of it helps me today. It’s not my hobby anymore. All that learning helps me help my clients to cut thru crap and get more to what they want.

All the productivity methods come down to two basic things

1. Feeling like things are completed
2. Getting things completed

Although most people just come in wanting to do #2, they are both really important to the process. The reason we’re accomplishing is to feel accomplished. The reason people look into productivity is because they feel like stuff isn’t getting done.

Getting things completed is actually not a problem for anyone. We can’t not do something at any given moment, so if we’re keeping a list of all the things we did today, it would be the same length every day — super long!

The thing that comes before productivity is prioritization

By prioritizing and tracking our goals, we feel productive and that helps us achieve the more important things and that helps us feel more productive.

No productivity system works perfectly because we’re all dingles, but the core of the system we choose needs to reinforce our flow (good feeling) and help us accomplish high-priority stuff.

Some things, especially the things we care most about are difficult. Starting is hard, but then following thru over a long period, is nearly impossible. That’s why so few people have great acts, that’s why so few bands create great albums. The follow thru is rough.

In addiction programs, the addiction is so linked to the addict’s identity and daily life, that changing feels like a destruction of self. There’s a lot of resistance there. Even after joining Alcoholics Anonymous, many drinkers keep on drinking until they get to a point called rock bottom. This is the end where nothing is worth another drink. Something happened that made sobriety more important than social circles, old patterns, identity, and maybe even a sense of survival.

It’s completely life changing to reach rock bottom… The addict is confronting issues that are not just from their whole life, but probably from generations before them. It might sound simple, but this is a matter of priorities. Solving the addiction becomes the number one priority over maybe everything else, and the addict becomes willing to make major changes, get help, and follow the guidance of others to get rid of their demons.

One interesting part of this to me is that rock bottom isn’t a specific thing. Everyone has their own. Even though it probably feels to them like they had no choice, they did. They chose that rock bottom. For some people it’s ending up in the ER with broken bones from a car crash that killed people. For some it’s having a fight at thanksgiving. Every rock bottom is legit.

I’m not trying to make light of the subject, but I think it’s a peek into how humans operate. We would like to be victims of the world. We’d like to get to a point of having no choice, because it takes the responsibility off us. Those people who recover from addiction might feel they have no choice, but they do and they chose to do something very scary.

If we think about this for more mundane creations and revolutions for ourselves, we can maybe channel the rock bottom mentality into our scary realms. We can decide, “I have not written that book because I need help and I need to give up a lot of beliefs, and habits, and some fun things maybe to get this thing done. This is the final day of not being a writer. This is my rock bottom.” Then, we can do the hard things that we know we can do to follow thru on creating something amazing for the world.

Audiences want themselves. Audiences want a story for themselves. They don’t care about the thing we care about until we bridge that gap and somehow communicate that “This is yours”

We, as audience members, are grateful when we know just how to react. Give us a reaction shot.

Movies and TV show the person listening more than the person talking. That’s how we make sense of the meaning of the interaction.

When we make online content, it can fall flat because we’re not including emotion, not making it clear what reaction we expect, and not bridging that gap.

This is the power behind David Blaine and Billy on the Street and Candid Camera.

Here are three examples of using audience reaction in live online stuff. Hopefully it will be inspiring.