Derek Sivers

Check out this writeup on 13 Rule-Breaking Films.

How can you NOT be inspired to write a rule-breaking song after reading that?

I guess it’s not as big of a deal to write a rule-breaking song, since a song can be written and recorded in mere hours for no money, whereas a movie involves hundreds of people and millions of dollars.

But that being said… what are your favorite rule-breaking songs?

Feel free to include a link to your own rule-breaking song, here, in comments.

One of my favorite artists of all time is Fela Kuti from Nigeria.

At Berklee, I was in an Afropop ensemble that would play a lot of Fela Kuti arrangements.

The teacher/bandleader explained that what we know as the “1” - the downbeat, the start of a phrase - in West African music is considered the end of a phrase.

Instead of “How you get to main street?”, it’s “You get to main street, how?”

Instead of “ONE two three four, ONE two three four”, it’s “two three four ONE, two three four ONE”.

Later I found out that Fela Kuti never performed songs after he had already recorded them.

I couldn’t help but notice the similarity. As if to him, the recording was the end of the life of a song, instead of the beginning. Makes just as much sense if you think about it that way.

Which of course makes me wonder about all the other beginnings and endings and things we just take for granted as fact, but make just as much sense in their opposite.

Hannah from Kite Club sent me this great email:

I am an artist/musician/educator/mother and all the rest.

I was living in Chicago and raising my kids, teaching art, and playing out with my beloved band. And I just couldn’t stand our situation any further. The gunshots, the schools, the crumbling infrastructure, the leased SUVs, G. Bush, and on and on.

Don’t get me wrong - Chicago is filled with ethical, educated, creative movers and shakers. But I was visualizing something else for me and my family.

I found online teaching jobs, my husband got our house shored up and entirely rentable, and in 2005 we four moved to a little stone house on the banks of the Seine just 40 minutes south of Paris, France.

Where we live is 360 degrees beautiful. The schools are excellent. Guns are banned. The culture is not propped up by credit. Our kids are fluent in French. We have learned so much.

I miss my band and the Chicago scene, but have had to switch gears and my songwriting has taken off, and now I am working on guitar technique and singing, and recording at home. And along the way I have found people around here to play with, and we’ve played out at a few parties. This is not what I was up to in Chicago, but I am grateful just to stay in motion.

I was just hired to teach design at Parson’s Paris, which is a top art school, and a major feather in my cap. Last year we bought a house here. My husband and I are both painting a lot and exhibiting our work here.

Who knew? It worked.

Moving to France is a small thing, but it was a leap for us. The details have one by one settled into place. The quality of our life as a family is so much higher than what we had crafted for ourselves in Chicago. Our creative and professional lives are on track and thriving. And we work less, and spend much more time together. I am grateful daily.

First thing I thought is, “You can just DO that? Just up and move from Chicago to France, family and all?” Maybe this is more of an American mindset I’m stuck in, where moving out of the country feels like such a big deal. (Versus the European mindset where it’s probably no big deal to move from Sweden to Germany.)

Moving to a new place is such a great way to force good change.

I had been thinking about moving to London for a while, then one day just went online and booked a flight, 2 months in advance, with a return date 7 months later. I didn’t know the details yet, but forcing this action just got me over the hurdle of doing it. Same with India. Just booked it, impulsively. It can be that easy. (Frequent flyer miles help.)

My friend Nikki was a promoter in Las Vegas, then just used some frequent flyer miles to book a trip to China to study karate. She loved it and now lives there, working in Xi’an. My friend Karla, a journalist, moved to Argentina and now does her freelance journalist work online. Since the cost of living in Argentina is so much less, she only has to work part-time, and can spend the rest of her time writing a book.

Any other stories of a big move being the best thing you ever did? Please leave a reply in comments. I love these stories.

An amazing shift has happened in the last 10 years, as an artist.

You now have a better chance of being successful by being remarkably unusual, than by being normal and mainstream.

Songwriters constantly search for that universal theme, aiming to write the next “Yesterday” that will resonate with millions of people for decades to come.

But what good is the next “Yesterday” if nobody hears it because your music is too normal?

(See my article called “Well-Rounded Doesn’t Cut”.)

You already know we’re moving to a niche-driven culture, probably permanently. In 1948, Milton Berle’s TV show had 80% of all viewers, because it was one of only three choices! When the Beatles played on Ed Sullivan, they had 60% of all viewers. The biggest American Idol episode gets 30% now. There won’t be another Michael Jackson Thriller or Fleetwood Mac Rumours.

With unlimited options online, music fans don’t wait for mainstream media to tell them what to do - they explore, click, follow links, and can immediately listen to absolutely anything they’ve heard people talk about. Because of this, tastes are more spread-out than ever.

Your goal should be to attract and excite the people who have headed to the edges. They’re the ones who are looking for something new, and more likely to rave about it if you impress them.

I think of this like an archery range metaphor:

In the old music business (before 1997) it felt like hit-single-or-nothing. The only way you could be successful was to hit a tiny 1-inch target on the other side of a field. If you missed by an inch, you get nothing.

Now it’s like the target is huge, and you can aim for the edges, and hit something pretty easily - BUT - there’s a catch : someone cut out the middle.

If you’re still aiming for the middle of the target, there’s nothing there. They’re all out exploring niches.

Aim for the edges.

Some things I’ve learned this year that turned my world upside-down and I’m still trying to wrap my head around:

Unlimited servers with unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth : for 10 cents an hour - only when you need it, and not when you don’t.

It used to be, when I decided that I wanted to do a whole new project that needed a new server, that I would…

• Buy all the parts online (1 hour + $3000)
• Assemble it when it arrives (1-2 hours)
• Install Linux on it (1 hour)
• Install it in our server rack, assign an IP address, and make sure it’s live. (1 hour)

… then that server would be there forever, until I decided to repurpose it, upgrade it, or abandon it. If it got overloaded, I would need to spend another $3000 and another 4 hours to set up a 2nd server.

But now, thanks to Amazon EC2 and S3, I type a few commands on my laptop, and somewhere in Seattle a powerful server jumps to life one minute later, just for me. I can play with it for as long as I’d like, then shut it down or replace it with something else anytime I want.

This changes everything! I’ll never need to buy or set up another webserver again. The first time I saw it work, my mouth hung open, and I couldn’t stop laughing for a couple minutes.

It’s a total base philosophy switch from needing to own something to just having it appear when you need it, and not when you don’t.

(Imagine if any guitar you ever wanted could appear in your hands, in your home studio, for just the few hours you needed it to record, for 10 cents an hour.)

Letting Google be the mailserver for my own domain, for free.

I’ve spent so many hours setting up Qmail, tweaking it, upgrading spam filters, and all that fun stuff. But Google lets you use their mailservers for free, even for your own domain. (No “@gmail.com” needed. No need to use their webmail. Just set them as your POP and SMTP server in your mail program.) Their spam filters are amazing. The only downside is you can only send 1000 emails a day through their server, so it wouldn’t work for CD Baby, but the huge upside is their permanent archive of incoming and outgoing email.

A business doesn’t need employees.

Own your own small business? Read The Obsolete Employee (but only after you read E-Myth Revisited).

Currently providing a service to an employer? Read some Tom Peters, who suggests you think of yourself as a 1-person company (“Me, Inc.”), whose current biggest client is your employer, but hone your service so that it can be hired by other clients as well.

Put these two together, and you have a world of service-providers and clients, with everyone as their own boss. The whole concept of employee mainly came from the factory age, but there are less reasons these days for the traditional employee-employer relationship.

From a small business point of view, I’m better off hiring independent specialists to do what needs to be done, and not need someone to be doing that in my office, 40 hours a week, from 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday, etc.

(Note how similar this is to using Amazon’s servers instead of needing to own your own.)

Diverse independent groups of people are smarter than any one person.

The Wisdom of Crowds and Wikinomics blow apart the notion of experts, proving that a diverse collection of independent outside opinions will almost always be smarter than any expert. And no matter what your organization (whether you’re Google or Sony), the brains and labor outside your organization is always better than anything you’ve got in-house. So learn to open up your organization to outside contributions.

I could talk for hours about how this changed everything for me, and I’m looking forward to trying some hands-on examples of this myself over the next few years.

The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read applies this same truism to investing, showing that active financial managers (aka “experts”) on average perform worse than the market average. (In November 2000, Fortune magazine released the “top picks” from its panelists of “top” stock analysts. Those picks ended up under-performing the market average by 400%! He gives many of these examples, and encourages you to ignore ALL experts, and only invest in broad indexes of the entire market. In other words : trust the wisdom of crowds.)

Music subscription service devices

The Sansa Connect changed the way I think about music. (More recent recommendation: the Ibiza Rhapsody).

No computer needed. It connects by wifi directly to Rhapsody, which has almost everything you’d ever want to hear, available any time you want to hear it, without needing to buy.

Go to Pitchfork, look at their top-rated albums, and download them all from Rhapsody to your device to listen to any time over the next few weeks. Doesn’t cost you anything, so there’s no risk.

Tell it to play you a radio station. Hear something you like? Click [GET THIS SONG] or [GET THIS ALBUM] or [MAKE A MIX LIKE THIS SONG].

I got turned on to more music from my little Sansa Connect than I have by any other means in years. I have a massive music collection but I haven’t accessed it in months, since anything I want to hear is available instantly any time I want to hear it. Why maintain my huge collection anymore?

The 4-Hour Workweek

Let go of 80% of your actions, to concentrate on the most effective 20%. Shorten the deadlines for getting all actions done. Go on a low-information diet, realizing you don’t need to know all that stuff you spend hours a day ingesting. Have remote assistants take care of everything that can be done by anyone else. And voila : you have the 4-Hour Workweek. Again : I could talk for hours about how this changed everything for me, so I’ll stop here and talk about that stuff in future posts.

We are happier with restrictions, and trusting others’ experiences.

A combination of Stumbling on Happiness and Paradox of Choice. We’re bad at predicting how we’ll feel about something in the future, so we’re better off trusting other people’s experiences.

People are surprisingly similar in much of their experiences, even though they think they’re more unique. (90% of motorists consider themselves to be better-than-average drivers.)

With more choices, we may make better decisions, but we feel worse about them. (Note how this ties into the Wisdom of Crowds, above : others, collectively, know better than you do.)

I’ve started trusting the collective reviews from Amazon and Rotten Tomatoes. And I’ve intentionally decided to limit my options in other ways I’ll describe soon, trusting (from others’ experience) that will make me happier.

Each one of these things probably deserves its own longer article here, but I just wanted to list them in one place, because it’s amazing how differently I see the world now than I did even one year ago.

I’m sure there are more I’ll think of after posting this, but in the meantime, I’d love to hear any of yours:

Any things you’ve learned recently that “change everything” for you?

Check out twistori.com. Click one of the big words on the left, then sit and watch it for a while.

It’s monitoring the public feed of thoughts people post to their twitter account, searching for occurences of “I love”, “I hate”, “I think”, “I feel”, “I wish”, etc.

Anonymous and candid, and really inspiring for lyric writing!

A great book called The Listening Book had this wonderful quote:

Restrictions will set you free

Example:

Someone says, “Write me a piece of music. Anything. No restrictions. Go!”

You’re stumped. The blank page syndrome.

Instead, someone says, “Write me a piece of music using only a flute, saw, and this broken toy piano. You can only use the notes D, E, and B - but never all 3 at the same time. It has to be in 3/4 time, start quiet, get loud, then get quiet by the end. Go!”

Aha! Now you’re cookin’!

One of the most common things I hear my musician friends say is, “We’re looking for a booking agent.” (or manager, label, promoter)

I reply, “Who?”

They say, “Uh… what?”

“Which booking agent are you looking for? What’s their name?”

“But… we don’t know!”

“How do you expect to find someone if you don’t even know their name!”

It’s not hard to find the answer to anything.

What venue do you want to play? Contact them and ask which booking agents they use.

What band do you want to emulate? Contact them and ask who their booking agent is.

Once you find the person’s name, voila - you’re no longer looking for a booking agent. You found them, and it only took a few minutes.

Yes I’m being a smart-ass, but trying to help.

Whenever you find you’re aiming for something you haven’t defined - GET SPECIFIC.

It’s amazing how that one step turns goals from impossible into easy.

EXAMPLES:

“We’re looking for a manager / agent / promoter / person”

Who? Do 10 minutes of research, and turn it into a name. Even one name to start, just to convert it from vague to specific.

“How can I get my music out there?”

Where? Where should it be? Radio? What station? Contact them to ask their favorite promoters. A TV show? Which one? Check the site to find out who chooses the music for that show.

“I need someone to help me.”

Do what? Start by naming just one thing you need help with, and, as if you were hiring an assistant to do it, describe exactly what they would need to do.

This applies to many things. I was working with a programming teacher to be a great Ruby programmer. When I first contacted him he said, “What does great mean to you? How will you know you’re great?” He made me get really specific. (For me it was “I will go through these 4 Ruby books and be able to write programs like the examples. I’ll know how to do anything I need to do off the top of my head, without looking it up first. I’ll be able to code in Ruby as effortlessly as I can in PHP.”) He then made me get even more specific about each of those 3 things, breaking them down into bits (how many chapters in those 4 books? how many per day will you do?).

Once I had named exactly what I wanted, THEN he could help me.

Sound familiar?

I admire people that experiment with their own life.

I got SO inspired after reading this article about marathon runner Dean Karnazes. Some key quotes:

He had pushed himself to the point of death to find out whether he was strong enough to survive. He was.

“Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.”

“The human body is capable of extraordinary feats.”

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: Wow!! What a ride!”

Yesterday, I beamed with excitement after reading this article about memory fanatic Piotr Wozniak. Key quotes:

He pursues extreme anonymity because he wants to avoid random interruptions to a long-running experiment he’s conducting on himself. He’s exploring what it’s like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happiest people I’ve ever met.

With SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. “There were 80 phone calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programming, no time for sleep,” he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leaving no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. Each year, he has increased his time away. He doesn’t own a phone. He ignores his email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in academic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings.

His days are blocked into distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period, an exercise period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a second creative period. He doesn’t get up at a regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks.

A checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improved intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every convention of social life.

Then there’s my hero, Tim Ferriss, of the 4-Hour Workweek book, who tried radical experiments with work-time, outsourcing everything possible, only doing email once a week, keeping all phone calls to one minute or less, and firing 90% of his clients to focus on the most profitable few.

In my own life, for the last two years, I’ve been on an experiment to take all of the “someday I’d like to…” and “I wonder if I could…” things, and start doing them.

• got divorced (it was mutual and happy)
• moved to London for most of 2007
• started lessons in Spanish, Mandarin, surfing, and Rails
• went to India for a month with nothing but a tiny backpack
• restructured my company so that they don’t need me at all
• starting a new company based in Hong Kong

In short, I’ve been following the rule of “whatever you’re thinking, go do it”. Turning thought into action. (Also called “see what happens” - which makes everything more fun, less serious.)

What’s amazing is realizing how many things you’re considering doing, but not doing!

It feels great to fanatically eliminate the time between thinking something and doing it. (Hmm… kinda like an improvisational musician, right?)

If I had a record label, would you be signed to it?

I never liked the idea of having a record label, because you’re too deeply invested into something you don’t control.

So if I were to have a label, my decision on who to sign wouldn’t be decided just by the quality of the music. There are plenty of people with great music but destructive work-habits or an unsustainable approach to their career.

To confidently invest in an artist (as a label), I’d want to see:

• every song has been absolutely improved repeatedly - every note/syllable crafted to be the best it can be
• vocal performance is not just perfect but head-turning, striking
• arrangement is everything it can be to bring out song/vocal
• arrangement offers a new idea to the world, and not just the usual paint-by-numbers
• photos/image are striking and amazing, and capture the essense of the music
• live show is so entertaining that even a deaf person would enjoy it
• band has been around, recording and gigging, for at least 2 years
• artist has done this for a few years and still believes that this is their real calling in life, regardless of external rewards (or total lack of)
• band members don’t need unreasonable amounts of money to perform (can perform profitably)
• band can entertain a crowd without props or big sound system (in-store appearances)
• off-stage persona is sustainable (stamina, dealing with fans well, etc)
• no addicts - to anything
• an unflappably healthy attitude to the immense amount of work it really takes to be successful at anything

And so you see why I’ll never have a label. Who could possibly fit this list? Garth Brooks? Dave Grohl?

I haven’t talked to any labels about this yet, but I wonder what their perspective would be. I’m friends with Jac Holzman who discovered the Doors and obviously didn’t regret it, despite Jim Morrison being the opposite of everything on my list. I should ask him. (Jac, not Jim.)

Anything you’d add to the list? (I’m assuming there are many things you’d subtract.)