Episode 15
Keep Your Focus
Keeping your focus is an easy thing to say and can be the hardest thing to do. For whatever the reason, this is especially true for many musicians. Like when you walk into a target just to grab Kleenex and leave with 20 items. And not even useful things like cleaners, but a random sign that says “home” burned in old looking wood from their magnolia home collection. I like that show. Do you like that show?
0:00:00.9 S1: I walk in to the show that explores the methods and strategies on rock and the financial side of your music business with over 40 years combined experience. Here are your host, Chris Webb and Dave came. Well, I come to musicians tip jar where we talk about musicians and money.
0:00:22.0 S2: We are here to create action, not distractions, we push you to focus on the outcome by helping steer clear of the obstacles. I'm your host Crewe, joined by my co-host, and the guy always blowing up my phone while I'm driving, Dave. Damn, you need to stop answering... It's your fault. If you would just stop answering, I'd stop calling... It's that simple. And you're always driving. So statistically, it's hard to call you when you're not driving... Fair enough. Steve Jobs, One said, Focus does not mean saying Yes, it means saying no. We'll talk more about that. I have one, I brought one to the table, Chris, I was going through the book, The ONE Thing by Gary color, and I just folded page on this quote by George Bernard Shaw, life isn't about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself, and I think that it's appropriately for what we're about to talk about, keeping your focus is an easy thing to say, and give me the hardest thing to do, for whatever the reason, this is especially true for musicians, like when you walk into a Target just to grab some clean X, NYIT 20 items, and not even usually leaving with the cleaners or the other stuff, you get the random things, like the sign that says home that's burned into an old looking piece of wood from their Magnolia home collection is the only section too, but next time I come over and you see shit on my wall, I don't bring it up in the podcast.
0:01:52.5 S2: And you went with me that day. How do you not know that that was my goal was to get that home sign fixture with Chip and Joanna Gaines. I'm excited for the new upset, are you? I am, yes. They started their own channel. Now, I don't know if you saw that I did millionaires. I need to check with my cable company to see if I can get that channel like I want all my channels to be on the cart... Now, you don't wanna pay for anything I use. No, that's like it... Applets exactly. Helps me from getting distracted by too many pointless shows that make it harder for me to keep my focus focus. Let's take a quick break to hear from our wonderful sponsor, and then we'll come back and focus on focus, looking for a way to elevate your music, grow your brand and establish credibility within the industry, public relations company, pressed PR powers, independent creatives do just that with a fresh personal and intentional approach to promotional and branding services, working with clients all over the world, press PR, execute strategies that have landed their clients and the pages of billboard, a 15 post squire American songwriter and no depression among many others, more than just placing clients in the media press PR also works to how creatives elevate their brand through content and copy creation, collaborations, experimental events and communicating with their target audience through various platforms, if you have a release coming up or simply wanna develop a long-term strategy to help your brand grow visit pressed fresh, PR dot com for more information.
0:03:34.5 S2: Welcome back, everybody. This week's non-profit is Music Maker, they're fighting to presenter of American musical traditions. The music make-a-Relief Foundation was timed to preserve the musical traditions of the South by directly supporting the musicians who make it, ensuring their voices will not be silenced by poverty and time, music maker will give the future generations access to their heritage through documentation and performance programs, the bill knowledge and appreciation of America's musical traditions. You can learn more at Music Maker dot org, and make sure you rate subscribe to this podcast, leave us a comment and go to our website to sign up for our free weekly newsletter where I will deep dive into the week's topics even further. We'll also connect you to the other related articles and provide other helpful resources for your music business, try to focus on positive comments, everybody, that's what this podcast is about to say, positive focus, highly successful people all have developed methods to keep themselves focused. Let's discuss a few ways and see what might resonate with you and your approach to staying focused, focus means saying no, in order to constrain on one thing, you must by default ignore many other things, focuses the key to productivity because saying no to every other option unlocks your ability to accomplish the one thing that you're left with, most people don't have trouble with focusing, they have trouble with deciding, they can't decide on which thing to focus on...
0:05:09.4 S2: You understand what I'm saying that you do. I hear you, I hear you. I should have waited in my sentence before I interrupted you, I guess I wasn't focusing a study published in the International Journal of Information Management back... This was back in 2003, in that the typical person checks emails once every five minutes, they put your phone down, and on the average of that average, it takes 64 seconds to resume the previous task after checking your email, and that means because of email alone, we typically waste one out of every six minutes, that is the reason I don't work out of my email, like each company or a client that I have has a designated time within my day, I respond to emails accordingly and even ask that if I receive any texts that they please send an email and I'll get right back to them and helps with documentation of everything that's coming in, as well as execution, because I'm not worrying about another client or another company while I'm focused working out of that email, otherwise, they're just popping in every three, four five minutes and you're turning every direction, so something to think about.
0:06:16.8 S2: I don't know how I have actually senior email box, and it is the cleanest email box I've ever seen were all... I have like 15000 emails. You have zero because you've organized them. Put them in the right folder. It's pretty impressive. Well, it just helps me stay focused than... It's also about eliminating distractions, right. So as we said, focus means saying no, so try not checking your email to lunch, you can do that, or put your phone on silent mode and only does need a certain amount of time, perhaps every hour to take a look and make sure you're not missing something urgent, it's a game you can play to your phone, amount tells you how active you are and what you're wasting your time on, so just like everything else you've said about targets and goals, see if you can just make that number go down and down it... I feel like that's sort of like a bottle of whisky telling you that you're drinking it too much while you drink it, you know, having your phone tell you that you're using itself too much... In that scenario, I'm smiling the entire time. So the myth about multi-tasking, even when you are doing more than one thing at a time, you are still actually focused on one given thing at a time, and I know you and I have been pretty much kicking out on the book the one thing, and I loved how he represented multi-tasking where it was...
0:07:44.0 S2: The word was invented for computers, and they would explain that the computer would actually be able to do multiple tasks, but really it would have to finish one task before doing another in a sequence. So even like juggling is illusion of being in control of three balls at one time, it's... In reality, the jugglers brain is reaching to one movement at a time and the sequence... So I think even the word multi-tasking when it was invented, they really didn't even understand what they were talking about because the computer wasn't doing that, how do you decide what is important... With the different companies that I have, I start my day with profit, What task am I closest to my goal and that when I pick up music, it's practice before I even start writing songs, it's warming up my hands... Am I gonna learn something new today? Try to focus on that before I go backwards. And I think the same thing can be said for family and relationships, you're gonna focus on work while you're at work, and when you're playing music, you're focused on that, and then when you have time to hang out with friends and family to change your focus and focus and be present with them.
0:08:58.6 S2: The one thing for the big win, again, what's the one thing that I can do such that by doing so, everything else will become easier or unnecessary, that is a great question to ask yourself almost every single time you switch gears into a new project, I also tend to ask that or some version of that question in the morning, even before I get out of bed, because I wanna know what I'm gonna do for each of my few categories... What's the one thing I'm gonna do for each of those categories that gives me the opportunity to move forward such that other things will become easier or unnecessary, this focusing question is not an existential one... That's the drink already. He's not an existential one, it's about helping us find the first domino to knock over so that all other following actions go down easier and our core motivation needs to be clear, so try asking yourself what your motivation is for the task three times over... This one works for me sometimes because each time I kinda answer it a little bit better, giving a different answer each time will help you and your one thing become clear and it's practice, like I was saying early in the different aspects of your life, it just...
0:10:23.9 S2: It's gonna take time. To get good at it. Yeah, focus needs attention. Focus needs... You think focus comes in a all-in-one, like a 2 and 1 emplaced, toning head and focus is a yous often fades because of lack of feedback, your brain is a natural desire to know whether or not you are making progress towards your goals. It is impossible to know that without getting feedback, do you feel like there's a huge difference when you're teaching adults compared to children as far as your feedback is concerned, and whether they're making progress like... Well, how you approach it, I felt when I was teaching adult hat and adult had so much experience and Suman relationships through the history of learning the song and having the memories and know what that song sounds like, it was easier for them to judge themself and not be as focused, where I think young kids don't have all that baggage that they come to the table with and they can focus a little bit differently because they don't have all that noise... I don't know, it was just something that I had to get around a lot and learn how to give feedback differently.
0:11:45.4 S2: Yeah, I think kids can focus in on really whatever they... They are gonna decide what they're gonna focus on, and they definitely have a shorter attention span, that's the question, although some of my adult students have rivet challenge, sometimes it's one of the tension, but again, it comes back to the feedback, if they are seeing big progress, they tend to stay more focused, and that's the whole concept of the feedback, but when I track my work as specific reps and wait, I actually get stronger faster because I'm getting better feedback, which motivates me to work and focus harder when I track my scales and rhythms and my tempo and my practicing from my playing, they tend to get tighter quicker, finding a way to measure your progress helps you keep your focus and you do that with everything you want to improve on, I believe it was in maybe absolute three or four, we talked about you can't hit the bulls eye if you don't know where the dark board is, easy explanation for not achieving our goals if you're blindly moving forward with tasks not knowing what you have in store on the other side, so focus on the process, not on the event, an example of focusing on the process will be, if you were saying to yourself that that last five pounds is all you need, and then you'll be in shape, or if you could just get signed, then you'll finally have made it...
0:13:12.1 S2: That focusing on the event, that's not focusing on the process, the process needs to be focused on getting the five pounds of on the workout and the actual process focus on getting good enough that you could be signed to buy a label. That's one thing about music and working out, my friend Brian and I would talk about it, that you can see the change in the progress so much faster while working out, then you can actually practice in... Because you have to put in the time, it's not something that you can just do in two or three days, let's talk after two or three weeks, and you must love their process in order to stick with it, you have to fall in love with the process to be great at song writing, you must love writing songs, you can't just sit down and say, I'm gonna write the greatest song in the world, right. That would be the event focused... What we want is the process focused on becoming a great song writer, when are we talking about that with the... I bought a book and different tips and tricks and just improving and sign writing, and you and I were talking about how right away they're like, Well, you need to write songs every day with the hominins spot for them, I could do it.
0:14:24.2 S2: Campanella. You doing this every day. No, that's why I'm reading this book, but I'm done with the book. It's a Bey, great drummer. You must love practicing drums to be great at anything, you really must love the fundamentals of what that thing is, manage your energy about your time and schedule tasks accordingly, that was a huge part of the book that changed my perspective on how... I know when I hit a low at 11 AM after doing work for X amount of hours, or am I more likely to practice the afternoon than I am at night when I'm probably more brain fatigue, but also it's your whole ecosystem, your eyes, your fingers, your past, your legs, your lungs, you tend to hold your breath longer when you're looking at a screen, you're almost going to like a coma, a work comp. So instead of time, it's almost pay attention to your energy and you go with the flow of what your body is already telling you to do... Yeah, and that's another thing that can take some time, you first have to kinda look at what your mornings look like and are you using that most amount of your energy, which most people have the most about out of energy in the morning.
0:15:38.7 S2: Please, I or not, even though everyone says they're not a morning person, you have to kinda analyze how you're spending that time, right, are you using that time to its best capabilities? I like to do a lot of my most brain-taxing activities in morning, being creative is also easier for me in the morning, I tend to be more inspired, highly the more managing emails and other issues for the afternoon, we're gonna have to change to the podcast time from 8 PM to 80 am, that would be the new challenge for the next 15 episodes, when I was just scheduling one of our guests to come on show, I was like, Well, how do we usually record our podcast at APM on Wednesdays? How does that work for you? And he paused, guesswork. Yeah, I get it. So let's talk about what to take away from this, focusing is a big topic, and focusing is something that we work our way into, but we wanna give you three things that you can use to help make your focus more effective. One, focus means saying no to... I would say, Remember, multi-tasking is a myth. So choose one thing, have that visualization of a juggler, he's not juggling three balls, he's Julio part and three, find your love for the process, not the result, and your focus will soar...
0:17:07.9 S2: We know how valuable your time is. We so appreciate you spending this time with us, being a part of this community, that you feel the sense of community here in the musician stipe care, and they're willing to get involved and contribute or ask for what you might need. We have a forum that everyone could check out on our website, will, if you wanna get a hold of us, check us out, musicians chip dot com and look you a form link where people can ask questions to our community and other musicians could give feedback... Wow, if you wanna send us an email, musicians, tiara Gmail, and as always, thank you for joining us and remember, there's already enough for everyone... You just need to know how to get it. Until next time, I'm beat to Dave. Taken myself. Chris web, please stay safe. Stay healthy and take care of each other. You get what you focus on. So focus on what you want.
0:18:02.3 S1: This is mansion Stitcher. Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice, please consult an appropriate tax legal business or financial professional for individualized advice. Individual results are not guaranteed, and oldest strategies have the potential for profit or loss, those they are operating on behalf of musicians, tip jar LLC exclusively caramel. There makes me wanna just give a... All the lobes dangerous beings in your calling home, Sarasota shot, we just can't see in the five days, but we were in a... Opiates... How does it say we sponsor by dozens were both Connors and nourishing on a... About, I just can resume or not, to wanna take the risk and it... Saguenay know they're so... Listening, when I Onondaga and knowes on Andersons. I can name... Come and go. Serangoon aeration tangentially in reanimate.