When Jimmy Iovine retired from running a record label, Bruce Springsteen asked him why he’d retire.
He said:
“When you’re on stage, millions of people are yelling Bruce. No one’s yelling Jimmy. I talk to scumbags all day.”
“I have a vision for what it shouldn’t be and then I fall into what it should be.”
Jimmy Iovine
Make something cool. Give it to someone cool. Watch what happens.
LeBron James’ business partner Maverick Carter was in music executive Jimmy Iovine’s office. On his way out the door, Jimmy gave him a pair of the new Beats headphones he had just developed with Dr. Dre to give to LeBron. A few days later, LeBron asked for 15 more headphones - he wanted to give them as a gift to his teammates at the upcoming Olympics. Jimmy gave them to him and said, “Do me a favor - have the guys wear them when they get off the team bus.
This is NOT your last chance to read this
“Enrollment closes tonight” “Deadline” “Last chance” “Last call” “Last call (don’t miss out)” “Final call” “Last day” Those are the subject lines of 7 different emails I got from 7 different email lists I’m on TODAY. I know urgency works, but at a certain point they all sound the same and I tune them all out accordingly.
“A performer on stage doesn’t seek out new listeners during the show, they must focus on the people right there in front of them. If they do a good job, perhaps they’ll talk to a few people afterwards, and get them to join their email list.”
It's that time of year
“Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that’s thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.
Sell products based on problems you’ve solved, not problems you have.
Don’t ask people to hire you to get them clients if you struggle to get clients.
Don’t sell audience growth tips if you don’t have a large audience.
This should be obvious.
Apparently, it’s not.
Be careful what you track
If you track how much traffic your website gets, you’ll start optimizing to get traffic. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s not. If you track how many likes you get, you’ll start posting things that get more likes. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s not. If you track how consistently you publish, you’ll feel pressure to publish more often. Maybe that’s good, maybe it’s not. There are unintended consequences of everything you track.
A realization that seems obvious, but hasn’t been:
My main business goal isn’t to make as much money as possible.
It’s not even to be profitable.
It’s to have fun and enjoy what I do.
Because if I don’t do that, what’s the point?
I might as well get a job I don’t like if it’s just about the money.
The thin line between success and falling off a zip line
My daughter just rode a zip line at a playground for the first time. Her first ride started fine, then she fell off when she unwrapped her legs. I told her to keep her legs wrapped. The next time she did and had a great ride. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is someone telling you what to do.
How much cool stuff have I missed because I wasn’t patient enough to discover it?
Sometimes when I listen to a new album I’m quick to skip a song. If the first 30 seconds don’t grab me, I’ll skip to the next song because why waste my time? Other times I listen to all of every song - even the ones I don’t like at first. And when I do that, occasionally there’s a brilliant lyric or moment I discover 3 minutes into a song I don’t like.
I’m not the only one who misses the early days of blogging
“If you wanted people to read your blog, you had to make it compelling enough that they would visit it, directly, because they wanted to. And if they wanted to respond to you, they had to do it on their own blog, and link back. The effect of this was that there were few equivalents of the worst aspects of social media that broke through. If someone wanted to troll you, they’d have to do it on their own site and hope you took the bait because otherwise no one would see it.