Transcription
Today we're going to talk about what really gets it done. A key method for getting things to actually happen on a large scale for your music project. The biggest management companies who work with some of the largest artists in the music world use this exact method, and they are masters at it.
If you want to grow your profile as a music artist, you're going to need to understand mapping and creating action-inducing events. And by mapping, this isn't a typical to-do list. There's a deep psychology to this method that gets you and your brain to do exactly what you're trying to achieve. These techniques have played a major role in my own life, and we utilize them with every client we work with with our agency, The Cult Creatives. We've been lucky enough to work with some of the most well-known artists in the world, and very often applying these tools and techniques are would really start to move the needle for the artists we work with.
There's a saying that goes, "Beyoncé has the same 24 hours in a day as you do." But how come she's accomplishing all that she's doing? Naysayers will say it's because she has money, a team, and resources that most don't have. And while that's true, it wasn't always this way for her. She had to start somewhere. And if you look back at most successful artists in music, many of them didn't come from wealth or an abundance of resources, but they were able to create their art and slowly build their audience and the awareness around their project over time.
If you're listening to this, you probably want the same thing: to design a life filled with creative expression, travel, performance, and financial freedom. So today, I'm going to be offering three techniques and tools to have in your toolkit that that may help you get things to move faster and get you to accomplish at a higher level. Each of these tools center around one concept: the action-inducing event.
What is an action-inducing event? What this means is setting up something that will happen in the future that forces you into a position to begin creating and coordinating for that event at a high level. This may be a simple concept to understand, but setting the rules of the game is really where the magic happens. So let's get into it.
Tool number one: Set a date for the action-inducing event. So I'll start this section with a story. Back in the day, I was lucky enough to be a go-to remixer for major record labels. They would sign pop artists, the label and their lead singles would often need club remixes. They would go to various electronic dance producers and get remixes in different genres. I did this a lot in those days, and big shout out to Skrillex, who introduced me to Dave Rene, who later became Zedd's manager. And at the time, he was doing the dance remixes for Interscope, and this is where I got my start doing this kind of thing.
Typically, when the remix commissions would come in, they would have super tight turnarounds. A single of one of these artists had started to gain traction, and they wanted to get club versions out immediately to give the song a broader reach. Sometimes the deadlines on these would be a week, sometimes they would be 48 hours. So when I would take on these remixes, I didn't have a lot of time. And in retrospect, it was a really great exercise for me. With those kind of deadlines, you don't have time to overthink things. You make fast decisions and you go with your gut. And not for every thing, but for much of art, your first instinct can be the thing to go with.
These remixes performed really well for me, and they changed my life and my career path. And after cutting my teeth on these kinds of remixes, we started releasing original music with some of my favorite dance labels, labels like Steve Aoki's Dim Mak Records or Diplo's Mad Decent Records. There was a moment where I started to write an EP that I hoped would be released through Mad Decent. But with the EP, we didn't have a formal deal in place, and there was no real deadline for it.
Now, at this point in my life, Mad Decent is one of my favorite record labels, and I had so much respect for the other artists on the label and the people that were curating it. So going into the studio, I really wanted to nail the EP. But that mindset and the overwhelming respect for the label unfortunately was my demise. I'd make a series of records, get towards the end of having a cohesive EP, and then towards the end, I would think, "This isn't good enough." And then I would throw it all away. I would burn it down, and I would start over again. I did this a bunch of times, over and over. And spoiler alert, the EP never came out because it was open-ended with no hard deadline. I took way too much time on it all. I overthought everything, and the warmth we had with the label started to cool.
By having a real deadline for something, even if it's made up, as long as there's somebody who actually holds you accountable, it completely changes the game. And back when I was releasing music a bunch, I used to play this game on social media when I had somewhat of a following that I would feel like I hadn't released anything in a bit, and I should probably put something out soon. So I would do these quick turnaround bootleg remixes. I would go on social and I would put out a post that said, "New remix coming this Friday." Now, I had no remix started, and I had no idea what I was going to be remixing. But it gave me a deadline.
To this day, those bootlegs and remixes had the most awareness around them versus anything else I ever did. Tens of millions of plays, support from artists I truly respected, and international show bookings all came from just giving myself deadlines and creating a game for my creative mind to play. On the same topic, I read that rapper Doja Cat gave herself 30 days to write all the songs for her album to avoid overthinking it. She won a Grammy for Best Rap Album for this. So this can work.
But something I mentioned before was having someone or something holding you accountable, and that's what we're going to talk about next. And this next part might surprise you. Ever wonder how to truly cut through the noise and get your music to a broader audience? The Cult Creatives is a niche agency servicing the communities and brands surrounding the spaces of music and fashion. Our unique backgrounds of being highly involved with some of the largest music and fashion brands in the world gives us a unique perspective on how to connect creatives with their audiences. We offer a variety of services including creative direction, design, photography, videography, and strategy. Head to thecultcreatives.com to learn more. The Cult Creatives, not to be replicated, but if you try, we wouldn't blame you.
Tool number two: Define the stakes. So now you have the event set, but what if you don't actually do it? Who actually cares? Well, you do, but is that enough to carry you? For some artists, it is, and for some artists, it's not. To really get yourself to follow through, you're going to need real stakes in the game, something you truly care about.
For some artists, this is money. Set up a game where if you don't accomplish it, you'll lose a lot of money. I think this is partially why our success rate with Colt is as good as it is. Working with us at Colt is an investment, and the investment component of it is usually only for people who are more serious and they want to get to the next level. Even hiring us or engaging something like Colt, you're setting up a new game for yourself.
Another idea for stakes is time. Many of our clients greatly value their time. There's a great book called "4,000 Weeks" that basically says that the general time we have as mortals, if we live the full length of our lives, is about 4,000 weeks. So by spending a bunch of time on something for it not to happen, you're wasting weeks of your precious life. And for artists, that time is the most valuable thing to them. This can be a great stake to have in the game.
For some artists, embarrassment can be a key driver for them. If they created an action-inducing event and and they didn't make good on it, it would be embarrassing for them, and that's what drives them. Tony Robbins has a great example of creating stakes where he says, if you were trying to lose weight, take a picture of yourself nude, give it to a friend who will actually do this, and tell them that if you don't lose X amount of pounds by this date, to post the photo to social media. You'll lose the weight. You see, that game is the same game as a person that casually tells their friend that they want to lose 15 lbs by Christmas. But the difference is in the stakes of the game. One creates real urgency to commit, and one doesn't.
Michael Jordan famously made up stories in his mind to give him more drive and hunger to beat his opponents. There were certain nights where it seemed like he was just going after a specific player. His overall goal of winning was the same, but he created new stakes and new stories inside of himself to get more from his mind and mindset. And having the right kind of motivation and incentives is the secret sauce to accomplishing bigger things. But the next tool is crucial to actually making it happen.
Tool number three: Create the work back. This part, surprisingly, very often gets overlooked or missed by ambitious artists. So you had your vision of what you wanted to accomplish, you set up your action-inducing event, you created the stakes of the game and why it matters, and you found a vehicle to hold you accountable. Great. But now you need the plan and the time to execute.
For those that don't know, a work back is a term used for creating the schedule and organizing the plan, but doing it in reverse order. So you start with the end, and then you work backwards from there. You place dates with strict deadlines on things that need to be accomplished and by when. This way, you can look at milestones of the project and check the boxes as you move towards the finish line. Everything big I've ever accomplished in my own life had a work back. Neighborhood Art Supply, what you're listening to right now, had a four-month work back on it. It actually ended up taking us five months to launch. We were behind, but without a work back, it probably would have taken eight or nine months.
And I can quickly explain the process and work back for something like Neighborhood Art Supply to help it make more sense. So we wanted to launch in August, and we wanted to have 12 weeks worth of videos shot and edited, so we'd have a runway for posting. We're super busy with our agency, so we wouldn't have time to make and create videos each week in real time. So we needed to get ahead of it to launch. But before posting any videos, we needed to secure and set up all the social handles and distribution methods, so that had a hard deadline of when we need to accomplish that by. Working back, we need to edit and finalize the launch videos and get those ready. That had a date before that. We would need to shoot the videos and interview the artists. This has an accomplished by date. Before shooting, we would need to coordinate getting the artists to the studio to shoot. And in order for that to happen, we would need a pitch deck that explains the idea to the artists and their managers of what the Neighborhood Art Supply show was going to be. And for the pitch deck, this would need to be branded. So we need to create the Neighborhood Art Supply brand ahead of creating the pitch deck. And in order to create the Neighborhood Art Supply brand, we would need to build out mood boards and have some ideation sessions around what the visual language would be.
So on our work back, we had finalized Neighborhood Art Supply branding. And in order to finalize the branding, we would need to get mood boards and know what we were trying to do overall with the visual language. And in order to do this, we would need the big picture vision of where we were trying to go with the Neighborhood Art Supply brand as a whole. So this is where we started, just getting meetings around what was the vision and what were you trying to create. This was step one. So you're starting at the end, and then you're making your way to the beginning.
The work back, and doing it in reverse, gives us a great high-level view on how to actually accomplish the idea of launching a YouTube podcast offering with Colt. The work back is almost like setting up an instruction manual of the game you're about to play. Things may move, shift, and evolve, but you have a general idea of the game. Anytime I want to create almost anything, I use these tools: a piece of art, a music video, a client project, a product offering, a business concept. I start with the endgame first, and then I go backwards.
Now, it's important to note that I do believe in the "just start" method of not overthinking too much about the future and simply creating, making, and experimenting in the beginning phases of things. This is a great way to get into something, to see if there's real interest there. But once you become serious about something and want to bring it to a professional level, this method is key. And for creatives, setting up these games is an ongoing endeavor. You make your creative choices by where you want to grow, what you may experience, and how could you develop. By playing this game, you'll think, "What's the next stair step from here? Where could I become better? How could I grow?"
If you're in this for only the financial gain or the fame game, these games eventually will probably get boring to you. You'll run out of stairs to climb. But the awesome thing for most creative people is they love the game. The game of making, sharing, getting better, and growing. And that game is never ending.
So I hope this inspires you to go and create a bunch of action-inducing events for your project. I have a bunch of other videos on the Neighborhood Art Supply channel that go more in-depth around growing your profile as a music artist. So if you want more info on that, you can go watch those. But I hope this helps. Good hanging. See you next time. Peace.