Currently cars are used as a tool for:

• commuting/work
• shopping
• recreation (vacation, Sunday drive, visiting friends)

These are some factors (you can add some of your own) that determine our enjoyment of the time spent in the automobile:

• Beauty of scenery (city, suburban multi-lanes, rural, highway)
• Time stuck in traffic (waiting at lights or in slow/congested traffic)
• Joy brought by the final destination/activity

Using the above scale, try assigning each factor a scale of -3 to 3, where positive 3 is the best score and negative 3 is the worst.  For each journey in your vehicle you can assign a score to these three areas.

Examples:

• Driving into the city for a concert/baseball game through thick traffic is usually worth it.
  • (destination: 3, traffic: -2, scenery: 1)
• For one year of my life I commuted an hour (each way) through San Francisco traffic across the Bay Bridge to get to work.  I vowed to never again commute in this way.  Given the equation this one was a negative for me every day, so I needed to change it.
  • (destination: 0, traffic: -2, scenery: 1)
• I go hiking in my spare time, almost always a positive driving experience.
  • (destination: 3, traffic: 3, scenery: 3).

A journey in an automobile should be an overall positive or zero sum experience.  Road rage comes from journeys that are clearly in the negative territory.  If you have consistent trips that dip into the negative territory, consider changing one of the three factors.  It may save your life.

An ideal world is one where humans live in peace and harmony with each other and the earth.
This will never be achieved from the top down.
The only way this will happen is if each person comes to peace within themselves first.

Peace within comes through each individual being self-aware,
observing their ego, and practicing mindfulness.

This practice yields self-confidence, in the truest form.
I’m not talking about arrogance or cockiness which is typically
just plate armor over a soft and self-conscious interior.
I’m talking about true self-confidence.
The kind where you recognize the ego as something separate from your being.
The kind that when someone tries to put your idea down,
you realize they are talking about an idea, not you.
The kind that when you get angry,
when your head spins out of control with wild scenarios and fears,
you take a deep breath and cease the thought.
An ideal world comes about from each individual being at peace.

These ideas are not new, they have been written about in ancient books.

In my business and life I explore and use self-awareness and mindfulness to do the best work I can and to empower and awaken my co-workers as best I can.
In writing I hope to explore and convey this same message.

Becoming mindful won’t pay the bills.
But it will make you realize that life is so much deeper than the surface trappings of society.
From this comes confidence and peace, and with it the fear associated with money melts away.

Living this way isn’t about proselytizing.
I’ve learned that you can’t “tell” anyone anything if they aren’t ready to hear it.
The best you can do is put it into the world by living it.

The journey is about leading a balanced and peaceful life.
The journey is about how to build up our every day lives from the deepest truest source in ourselves,
using mindfulness and self-awareness to guide us along the way.

I am interested in seeing and learning what enterprises are created out of this deep living.
I am interested in knowing the people who create them.
I am interested in helping to connect and celebrate people who embody this.
I am interested in teaching, inspiring, and guiding people to build these practices into their businesses, lives, and organizations.

I am not perfect… we are not perfect.
What unites us is the commitment to observing ego, being mindful and self-aware and becoming truly confident in our own lives.
Living from this place unites us with all humanity and nature.

This is our time to redefine society, business, and life -
living from this place, deep within.

What will this world look like?

It’s already here.
I look around and see it every day.

You can do this.  This is hard not because some big outside force/company/organization is opposing you or isn’t embracing your idea.  Some big outside force has no control over you nor can it help you.  The force that is opposing you, that isn’t embracing you… that’s you.  You are beating yourself.  If you want to succeed (in any realm, by any definition) you need to figure out how to do it with what you’ve got, in the way that works for you.  That’s complicated I realize- there are lots of factors that define your version of success.  The point is that you are in control of every single one of them.

If you’ve got a moment, take a deep, slow breath… and exhale slowly.  Then read that again deeply.

Thank you.

You know this.  I know you know this.  But I’m going to say it anyway.  Names matter.  They matter a good deal.

Last week I was driving down the highway behind a big RV.  On the back was the name of the vehicle in big, bold letters: INTRUDER.  I thought maybe it was a joke, maybe I was missing something.  I checked the dictionary.  I thought of all possible scenarios where an RV might be used, thinking that the name “Intruder” might make sense in at least one of these scenarios.  Nope.  This is just an awful name.  When you go camping you do so for the peace and quiet it offers.  You don’t want an intruder of any sort to ruin that peace.  I researched the company today and found that it wised up and is no longer making this line of RVs.

There are a lot of bad business names out there, including plenty of terrible band names.  When thinking of a name, in addition to the legals checks, I’d recommend the following:

• Check it over with people who’s opinion you trust and who will cut it straight with you.
• Look it up in the dictionary to see if it makes sense for your application.
• Brainstorm a list of possibilities, keep this list and look at it occasionally, allow the best to show itself.
• Think long term.  Be sure the name will fit various forms of your business in the future.

Idea: One creative naming solution friends and I have used is a tournament bracket.  Anytime we came up with a name we liked, we added it to a tournament bracket (like this).  We ended up with hundreds of names.  Each week we would go through the brackets and compare two names at a time against each other (as if they were competing in a game).  The winning name would advance to the next round.  This continued to the final four and then the championship where the final winner emerged.  In each round there would be a few of us voting on our favorite name so it insured that the final winner only got there through team effort.  It was a fun way to go about creating a name.  We ultimately used 4 of these names for various musical projects or businesses.

Whatever method you use, don’t rush the decision and ultimately try to find the name that you love.  Then use it.

I am looking for the inspiration in life
The spark to ignite the vein of coal
Show it to me live, loud, and large
Beautiful and boastful
Triumphant and glorious
Arrogant and aromatic
Gleaming and gold
Proud as the day it was born
Poetry of the subconscious

–

There are all sorts of fears holding us back.  Find at least one way that you can let it all go.  It could be on paper with pen, with a paintbrush, in the woods, in your kitchen, on the dance floor.  Wherever it may be, just let it all go.  This is a feeling worth feeling.

Web 2.0 platform businesses are the best at making it easy for people to contribute content.  There is a lesson to be learned here for non-digital life, businesses, and organizations.

The major platform based internet sites have millions of content contributions.  It is clear that people love to create and contribute.  However, people do not contribute if the act is overly complicated or discouraged.   The job of the platform business is to make it easy for them to contribute.  This happens in three main ways:

1. Easy upload process
2. Non-judgmental approach to contributions.  All content (within legal restrictions) is permitted and not judged immediately.
3. A clear path for content to gain/grow in popularity.  This happens through a system of peer input (reviews, forwards, links) which allows attractive and interesting content to float to the top.

The beauty is that great ideas and content can come from anyone, anywhere.

If you consider your business in the same way, your contributors are your employees and your customers.  As a  non-profit you have donors and employees.  Governments have constituents and employees.  Looking to the web-based businesses as a model, are you making it easy for these people to contribute content, without immediate judgment, and providing a system to allow the great content to float to the top?  People all around you are ready to contribute, to be involved, to be part of making something great.   Their potential is just waiting for your platform.

The most interesting component of Web 2.0 in my opinion is that many companies formed around the idea of being a platform – we’ll call them Platform Businesses.  Content for the platform was contributed by the users.  The sites that have succeeded thus far have been the best at creating and marketing those platforms.  Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Yelp are all examples of this idea.  They create and hone the platform and users provide the content.

What is happening next, in what may be called Web 3.0 is that there are still the platform-based companies but now the platforms are opening up an API so that other companies can create applications for the platform.  In this way applications are a hybrid between content and platforms.  The base platform still exists and the users still exist but now there is an added layer in the middle.  Facebook is a great example of this – it provides the platform, users provide the content but applications provide additional tools through which users can interact.

The looming question as I see it, is who will be the great platform provider at the bottom of the pile in any given market segment and is it a desired position?

I’d like to read your thoughts on this (especially if it affects your industry) so please comment below.

Great businesses tend to have great systems at work, many times as the foundation of the business.  Having a system as a foundation provides an economic engine and allows for more time to innovate on the higher levels of the business.  Of course, a system can always go through improvement and innovation in its own right.

In the music business we have been going through a significant shift.  One of the biggest changes is that the primary revenue stream for most artists is now the live show (touring).  For all of the income made in touring there isn’t a shared understanding of how to make a show great (from the business side).  Feeling the need to have a system that incorporated best marketing practices and a timeline for how to carry out these tasks, The Artist Farm created a tour marketing system.  The results (in current form) took several years of testing to hone.  I wrote a book on this system called “Squeezing The Show” which we are selling now on our publications page .  The cost is $87 which includes my 3 years of work at real management companies compiling this system and creating the spreadsheet and email templates included in the Tool Kit.  Though I’m not the best at selling things, I can assure you that you will make your $87 back within a couple of shows if you apply all of the techniques I teach.

This book is written for artists and managers but I think the following people will find it useful:

Anyone in the music business

• Managers (use it as a manual to train your new hires, learn some tricks yourself)
• Self-Managed artists (learn how to market your shows and get more people)
• Agents (use it for your self-managed artists, pick up some ideas of how managers work)
• Record Labels (doing 360 deals and want to know how to service touring?)

Anyone who has an event based business (the timeline tasklist idea is universal for event businesses)

• Photographer, Craft makers, Painters who participate in art shows
• Caterers
• Speakers/Lecturers

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It turns out that rules, laws, and standards are made up by other humans just like you and me.  What appears on the surface as fixed didn’t start that way.  These rules, laws, and standards come about from people pushing the boundaries of what is possible.  From this pushing and exploration come ideas and creations.  As these ideas/creations gain acceptance, rules and laws come about as a way to integrate them into society.  It happens in this way:

Innovators (also called Pioneers and Visionaries) are the people who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in any given aspect of life and work.

Pushers are the people directly behind the innovators “cheering them on” or providing inspiration to break new ground.  They are ready to consume, digest, and integrate new insights or discoveries and are often innovators in their own right using this to propel their ideas further.  Pushers can come in the form of competitors, employees, or contemporaries.

Authority (or Experts) are the people who command the deepest awareness of a subject.  They can be the same as the Innovator but not always.  This role implies some interest in broadcasting knowledge to others.

Informal Enforcement is what happens when an Innovators ideas are widely adopted beyond the Pushers.  The idea/discovery is enforced through its use in the general population.

Formal Enforcement is the process whereby the new idea/discovery is strapped with laws, degrees, awards systems, or other structures built around it to provide safety and rules of interaction for others.

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Innovators are explorers setting stakes for those coming behind them.  A big part of learning is absorbing what has already been uncovered by these people and which now lives in the world of Formal Enforcement.  At some point though you may find yourself peaking out of this safety and into the unknown.  In this case, if you want to create a new way of doing something then look for your community of Pushers and start to innovate.

You have probably heard the saying “life is a journey.”  The definition of journey is “the act of traveling from one place to another.”  We often consider this a metaphor since our normal use of the word “journey” implies covering a distance.   But it’s not a metaphor at all.  Life really is a journey, a journey that we travel in time, not distance.  In life the paths aren’t on the ground but instead exist only in our minds.

In life, we don’t have road signs and often times the paths aren’t clearly marked.

In hiking (and in life) you know the feeling of finding a long flat, clear, grassy stretch where you can see the path unfold in front of you.  The sun is high overhead and it is so obvious where the path is headed that you can pick up some momentum.  But no matter how great you are at navigating the trails you will inevitably come to places where the path splits off into 10 different directions or the path seems to disappear all together.  In life there aren’t usually obvious road signs to guide you.  You need to use your intuition to find the way.  These moments can seem scary.  They can seem daunting.  You can feel lost.  I’d propose that instead of freaking out at these junctures,  just sit down and enjoy where you are.  Take in the sunshine, take in your surroundings… maybe enjoy some lunch.  Let go of everything and just be in this place.  If you wait patiently and enjoy the moment your path will eventually show itself.