Month: November 2019

Ten Races in 2019

My tenth race of the 2019, my most ever since starting to run in 2016.

This is my second time running the Turkey Trot in Bethlehem PA today. Today was faster (28:02 vs 29:05), and with less effort (155 vs 160 bpm).

I dealt with stomach issues most of the week, which threw me off. That messed with my sleep, and I didn’t get to run much the past few days, so I didn’t run as well as I wanted – I actually stopped at one point to stretch a bit because I had some pain in my shins. But, I still showed up and had fun and told all the puppers I saw that they were doing a very good job.

Oh, and I lost ONE glove this week, too, so my hands with frozen by the end of the run. All in a great day, and I’m definitely stoked and content with the progress I’ve made at racing this year – the logistics, the timing, the pre-race fueling. So many details, but learning so much in the process.

Make the Time, Take the Time

Schedule time to be around the things you enjoy, or else your schedule will get filled with everything else. That other stuff isn’t bad – it pays the bills, most likely! But you gotta put your own oxygen mask on first before you can help anyone else.

If I’m only in react mode, checking things off a to-do list all morning, into the afternoon, there’s no room for magic. No wonder. No dreaming.

The dreaming is the work. It’s where the great things bloom, and become bigger than ourselves.

Pushing Energy

I believe that Metal Bandcamp Gift Club has helped sell over 1,000 albums since 2016. That’s better than nothing, right?

Then today we sold our first email sponsorship. We do sponsorships a little different, because we don’t want your money. You have to give it to a local girls rock chapter, send us the receipt, and then you can sponsor our newsletter.

Seth Godin says before you get hired to do a big for-real job, make stuff on your own. One example he mentions is to design a direct-mailer campaign for a local charity and raise $10,000 for them. “Don’t worry,” he says, “they won’t mind.”

When I started Skull Toaster back in 2011, I did it as a “living resume piece,” to show potential employers, “hey, I can do this.”

In rebooting Metal Bandcamp Gift Club recently, I’m doing it again. Giving, building, pushing energy like this for a common good, and it’s something I enjoy doing.

Making Music Podcasts

My dude Sean Cannon laying it down, talking about music podcasts:

Four years ago, I started telling music industry friends and acquaintances that they should create high-end podcasts built around their artists/albums/labels. At the time, I got two main responses: “So you’re saying we should get our bands on Maron? Do you know him? Can you get us on there?” or “Oh yeah, (insert musician here) is really funny. I’ll have them talk to their buddies.”

I worked with Sean on my music blog from 2005-2008, where he was bascially my right hand man, and helped me really build and expand.

Then when I started Noise Creep at AOL Music, I was able to hire him as my deputy editor, which was both awesome and crazy at the same time (20+ posts a day was nuts).

But Sean went onto to work big time in radio and won a freaking Peabody award. He recently made the the Striped podcast, which is all about the White Stripes.

The thing is, there is so much more to be done with music using the medium of podcasting. Super glad Sean is one of the people leading the charge.

Stop Doing What You’re Good At

Title stolen from “7 leadership lessons over 2.5 years,” from the Signal Vs. Noise blog (wow, if you haven’t been reading that site, you should).

“Doing what you’re good at hurts the team.” Huh? He explained how when you’re the one always doing the thing that you’re good at, you create a dependency within your team. They can never be self-sustainable or perform at the highest level if you’re the one always doing the things you’re good at.

As I find myself gaining stabilty in my freelance work, I’m starting to see where I’m spending my time the most, as realizing the value of that time.

There are tasks I can do in my sleep, but that doesn’t mean I should be doing them. I use TextExpander to save time, and use a timer to make sure I’m staying productive.

But there are projects that I’ve launched that had no shortcuts. They required jumping into the void, with a spirit of “this might not work.” Or as my new favorite Star Wars characters have said, “I can do this, I can do this.”

Today I run a bit faster than I did three years ago.
I’m working on bigger projects. With bigger teams.
Getting there requires a bit of letting go of the things I’m good at.

Writing a Blog Again

I had no problem blogging, er… writing back in 2005. That was before Twitter!

Maybe you’re thinking about blogging again on the open web, and have difficulty in getting started.

My advice – instead of retweeting something on Twitter, write about it on your website.

Copy and paste a nice quote, provide a link, and offer your take. We all come from a different angle, show yours. Fill in the gaps with your unique experience, maybe it’ll resonate with someone else, and you never know where that could lead.

Blogging More

As I spend less time on social media networks, I find I’m reading more of the open web.

If you are frustrated with the state of social networks, I recommend blogging more.

Manton Reece

I miss the tiny updates from friends of course, because I’m not refreshing Twitter as much as I have in the past, but it’s why I’ve been saving my own tiny updates and forming them into blog posts here.

Instead of reaching for Twitter whenever I have a quick idea, I’ll throw it into WordPress, which then give me more space to stretch my legs. Before I know it, I’ve written a paragraph or two, and now that quick update has become something bigger.

Maybe not better, but it’s bigger. A little more heft. And maybe somebody gets something from that, or maybe I look back at it two years from now and wonder what the heck I was thinking.

I just know that two years from now I’m probably not going to remember that quick update on Twitter, and will definitely not ever find it, really.

How to Make a Podcast

Holy heck this video makes me want to start a podcast again, for the 100th time. Seriously, this looks so damn good.

I think I’m okay at building newsletters, because they’re very direct. I created the Skull Toaster email newsletter because it gave the answers to the metal trivia I posted everyday on Twitter and Instagram.

The Metal Bandcamp Gift Club newsletter gets sent out when someone has a birthday, and it links to their Bandcamp Wishlist.

Both of these newsletters serve a purpose. Want answers to metal trivia? Yes? Subscribe here. Want to help support music and labels? Yeah? Click here. Boom.

Podcasts, though, have eluded me. I did one called the Workbench Podcast with my pal Bill Meis for awhile, and Metal Minute (a sort of parody metal news show), but haven’t really done anything since.

Keep Moving

Objects in motion stay in motion:

The point here is just to do something, to get your body used to moving. I always say I want to “make movement a movement,” so that we can get people thinking about a workout as some simple body movement, not as blasting your pecs into oblivion.

Joe Holder

No one can give you fitness, or fulfillment. These things you have to take. You have to want them, and so you build them for yourself, one day at a time.

Arriving at fitness, or fulfillment, doesn’t happen. As I used to believe it was a goal, the goal is always moving. Run a 10 minute mile, then I want to run 9:45, 9:30, and so on.

Make a living? Well, I wanna make more of a living. Make more money. It’s never enough.

So placing my idea of fulfillment in a goal doesn’t work for me. Which is where movement takes hold.

Keep moving, keep breathing, keep striving, keep looking ahead.