Do You Have Any Bad Ideas?

Seth Godin has written a daily blog for a very long time and hasn’t missed a day in years. That’s thousands of ideas he’s come up with that are worth writing about.

As you might imagine he gets a lot of questions about how he is able to come up with so many good ideas. Whenever someone tells him they have trouble coming up with good ideas he always asks them if they have any bad ideas.

That’s because the key to having good ideas is having lots of ideas.

To put a slightly finer point on it, the key to having good ideas is also having lots of ideas that range from perfectly fine to really bad.

I have had a lot of good ideas over the years. But I have also had too many embarrassingly bad ideas to even count. And some of them even seemed like really good ideas at the time!

In the spring of 2010 I had some downtime while on tour in Brazil and decided to take my very first stab at a personal website. I knew I wanted it to primarily be a blog. I had a lot to say about teaching and performing music and that seemed like the best outlet for my thoughts.

My plan was for the URL of the website to be the name of the blog so I brainstormed some names. After a number of hours of coming up with ideas ranging from perfectly fine to not good at all I finally came up with one that I really liked: Andrew’s Hitz!

Obviously hits are a good thing to have in the music business and it was also a play on my last name which seemed good from a name recognition/branding standpoint. As soon as I came up with that idea I stopped brainstorming. I had found the name.

The only remaining question was whether the URL was available. If it was, I was in business! So I went to hover.com and before I even hit enter on the search I saw there was a problem.

andrewshitz

andrew shitz

Yeah that wasn’t going to work!

I then told my bandmate (and future Pedal Note Media partner Lance LaDuke) about my idea and he thought it was great. I told him there was a slight problem and showed him my phone with the URL typed out and he immediately smiled and said “Yeah, that’s not going to work!”

I found the entire thing pretty hilarious but it was also disappointing. It took me a while to come up with that idea and I thought it was perfect. Rather than get frustrated I realized that having bad ideas was a part of the process. So I just came up with some more ideas before finally settling on simply using andrewhitz.com as the URL.

(It’s worth noting that this ended up being a blessing in disguise since my website has grown to much more than just that blog.)

If you get into the habit of generating lots of ideas you will eventually end up with some really good ones. 

But it is important to bring a growth mindset to generating ideas. It’s just like learning to play the piano or songwriting. You will get better at it over time.

So embrace the bad ideas! And embrace the average ones! You will have an awful lot of them on your way to having great ideas.

It’s all a part of the process.

TEM Coaching Tip: What is tension and why you should seek it out

Anyone who has listened to even a handful of the 250+ episodes of The Entrepreneurial Musician knows that I am a huge fan of Seth Godin. Every once in a while he hits on something that has a profound impact on my life and career, like his thoughts on tension.

Seth defines tension as any act where you don’t know whether it will ultimately succeed or not. And because all growth comes from tension it must be actively sought out at all costs.

I know a number of people in the music business who, in spite of making a living, are quite unhappy and they all have one thing in common: They don’t regularly encounter tension.

I will never forget my first gig with The Dixie Devils, a dixieland band composed of students at Arizona State University. I was so incredibly nervous!

I had been fearless as a tuba player since I was nine years old. Put something on a stand in front of me and I would dive in head first with no hesitation. But suddenly, at age 22, I was looking at changes instead of notes and there were four different ways to end each song and the ending would sometimes not get decided until the song was almost over! I was completely out of my comfort zone.

For that first gig there were probably 10 people in the entire bar including the people who worked there. And half of them were friends who were there to see and support us! In retrospect, I’ve rarely played a less pressurized gig in my entire 20+ years as a professional musician.

But that night wreaked of tension for me. Would I miss the bridge and get lost in Bourbon Street Parade? Would I be the only one who missed the firehouse ending on Sunny Side of the Street? How the hell was this going to go?

I could use 10 pages to try to describe how much I grew that night and still wouldn’t come close to putting it into words. It was an important night in my career.

The problem is that for most of us, tension does a better job of finding us on its own when we are younger. There are so many things we have yet to encounter early in our careers. But as we get older the list of situations we’ve never encountered before gets smaller. This is why we have to intentionally create tension in our careers to grow and to stay happy and engaged.

I was filled with tension when I launched my first episode of The Entrepreneurial Musician. I had lots of tension when I announced my Kickstarter campaign for the Brass Recording Project. I will have lots of tension when I ship this book and announce to the world that it’s a thing that’s out there just waiting for opinions.

I could have chosen not to share any of those things with the world and simply avoided the tension. But without that tension there would not have been any growth and I know for a fact that I would be much less happy with my path through the music business today.

I am forever indebted to teachers who always encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone early in my life and for people like Seth Godin who inspire me to continue that practice to this day.

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Lean Into the Tension

Join the many musicians who have used TEM Coaching to lean into the tension and change the world with their music.

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Godin: The specific yes and the meandering no

Sometimes Seth Godin nails something on the head so concisely that I think about it for the rest of the day. Today is one of those days.

“While some people reject a new idea simply because it doesn’t work for them, often the people who are saying no are afraid. They’re afraid of what change may bring, and they’re not sure they trust the innovation and the system enough to go forward. But we’ve been conditioned to avoid saying, ‘I’m afraid,’ so if we’re uninformed and afraid, we make up objections instead. And even add angry bravado to our objections, simply as a way of hiding what’s really going on.”

Read the whole thing here: The specific yes and the meandering no

Godin: The thing about sunk costs

Don’t miss this powerful blog post from Seth Godin on sunk costs and knowing when to quit.

Godin: The thing about sunk costs

Master Class Monday: Seth Godin on being a linchpin

Here is the first (of many, I’m sure!) Master Class Monday’s featuring Seth Godin.

This is a talk that he gave at Catalyst 2010 that he recently featured on Akimbo. It is crazy how relevant all of it still is a full decade later!

Seth crams an awful lot of content into 51 minutes here.

One of my favorite parts is when he talks about competence no longer being a scarce commodity in the age of Google. That is only more true 10 years later.

Seth talks about creating a movement and that people will hate your movement.

He also talks about being a linchpin, about making yourself indispensable. The age of Google has done nothing to diminish the importance of being a linchpin and nothing ever will.

I’m anxious (but who isn’t??)

First of all, anyone who has listened to even one complete episode of the TEM Podcast knows that I am obsessed with Seth Godin. And you probably know that my wife, who is hilarious, refers to Seth as my spirit animal.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I discovered that he wrote a book that I didn’t even know about! And in the above clip, he actually reads the entire thing aloud! It is an ABC book for adults and it is exactly what I needed to hear this morning.

It starts with A is for Anxiety and he tells us that anxiety is just experiencing fear in advance. That really resonated with me this morning.

I am filled with anxiety right now. (Again, who the hell isn’t?)

• I’m anxious for the health of my elderly parents during this pandemic

• I’m anxious for what my career will look like on the other side of this

• I’m anxious about how long it will be until we are on the other side of this

• I’m anxious about the current state of my country and the path we continue to be on

• I’m anxious for my college students and all that they’ve had ripped from them

• I’m anxious for this part of my six-year-old’s childhood that he’ll never get back

• I’m anxious about my finances (and I am very fortunate right now in the grand scheme of both the world and the music business)

• I’m anxious about not feeling very creative musically right now (although I had a wonderful practice session yesterday for the first time in what felt like forever!)

As I said before, I’m filled with anxiety. These are remarkable times we are living in. But Seth’s comment about anxiety being fear we experience in advance really helped me with my perspective this morning.

Some items on the list above are things where I am able to take an action to help solve the problem. Some are things that are completely and totally out of my control.

By identifying which things are completely out of my control I can limit and sometimes eliminate entirely a lot of the anxiety. The added benefit of that is then being able to apply myself to the part of the list that I can control (or at least affect in some way.)

This applies to my career. This applies to how I navigate this pandemic. This goes applies to how I parent. This applies to literally everything.

Between my recent conversation with Dana Fonteneau for TEM210 and hearing Seth Godin read this book, I have been able to recalibrate my thinking about so much of life. And I have been so busy just trying to get through the day of late (and again, who hasn’t??) that I didn’t realize how badly I needed that to happen.

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TEM210 featuring Dana Fonteneau

The WholeHearted Musician’s Dana Fonteneau spoke to me about resilience, mindset, arts in the time of a pandemic and how to empower artists during crisis in TEM210.

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