So Good They Can't Ignore You
In 2008, Grammy Award-winning alum, John Mayer returned to the Berklee College of Music to pour into some current students and aspiring musicians.
For nearly three hours, Mayer shared about the pitfalls of the music industry, songwriting, when and how to match rhyming patterns, and he even played a few songs live in the auditorium.
In a Q&A, a young musician asked John Mayer the following question:
“Besides all the obvious things, what have you found to be very helpful to market your music, get exposure and get it out there?”
Her question gets to the heart of the craving many in the pursuit of high performance can succumb to.
The desire to have work in the dark finally be seen.
To receive some sort of public breakthrough.
There’s also a business reality to her creative pursuit we can’t deny. She’s trying to make a career out of her music and John Mayer seems to have figured out the way to get to the top of the music industry.
Ultimately she has come to the conclusion that the major difference between where she is (first album recorded) and where John Mayer was (award-winning celebrity musician) simply comes down to nailing the marketing and exposure component of the business.
Is the Issue a Marketing Issue or a Mastery Issue?
As the young musician completed her question to John Mayer slowly lifted the microphone. He didn’t cut her off, but he seemed to have the answer well before she finished her question.
Her question: “Besides all the obvious things, what have you found to be very helpful to market your music, get exposure, and get it out there?”
His response was simple.
“Good songs.”
“Good songs?” she asked
“Good songs” he repeated.
“That’s it. Good songs.” He continued. “I promise. A good song. Not songs that have all the technical body parts. I mean good songs. It’s like asking me if you should get a tattoo. Well, is it a good tattoo? How good is the product? That’s all that matters.” A marketing campaign can be helpful, of course. But ultimately, things spread by word of mouth. And no one has ever spread the word going “The product isn’t very good, but the marketing campaign was really well done.”
We Have an Exposure Obsession
There’s an entire industry devoted to helping high school athletes get recruited to colleges. Be seen. Get recruited. Get exposure.
But what if the aspiring athlete isn’t talented enough to be recruited? What if their aspirations are to be an SEC player but they’re not at that caliber?
This exposure obsession doesn’t stop at high school. College athletes frustrated with their role or playing time often fall into it as well. They think, “I could be doing so much more, but here I am, stuck in this role.”
Eventually the thought becomes, “If I want to go pro, I need to go somewhere I can get more exposure.”
There is, of course, some truth to that reality. As was the case for the young artist talking to John Mayer, marketing and exposure are a part of the deal.
But are they as big of a deal as we make them out to be?
Is exposure really what’s holding us back?
Or do we simply need “better songs?”
We Need a Mastery Obsession
Back in 2013, future NFL all-pro wide receiver, Terry McLaurin was told by Ohio State head coach, Urban Meyer that his ball skills weren’t good enough to receive a scholarship offer from the Buckeyes. Coach Meyer told him to come back in two weeks and do workouts again.
What did he do?
“I went home and caught 200 passes a day.” McLaurin said. “200 a day from anyone who would throw them to me. High school teammates, my neighbors, my mom, 200 a day. I remember complaining early on. But I started focusing more and more, the finer details, the intricacies of catching a ball.”
For two weeks he caught 200 passes a day.
When he returned to Ohio State for another camp, Coach Meyer immediately saw the difference and offered Terry McLaurin a scholarship on the spot.
The problem with an obsession with exposure is that eventually our skills are going to get, well, exposed.
What if what is exposed is not good enough to meet the demands of what is in front of us?
This is where an obsession with mastery instead of exposure can begin to serve the life of a high-performing athlete, coach, and leader.
When exposed - it’s just another opportunity to learn and grow. But the real work comes, not from the exposure, but from the consistent, never ending work of mastery.
Become Undeniably Good at Something
Steve Martin writes in Born Standing Up about a time very similar to John Mayer at the Berklee talk. Someone in the audience asked him how to become successful.
“You have to become undeniably good at something.” He said. “Nobody ever likes this advice, because it’s not the answer they want to hear. What they want to hear is: here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this, here’s how you do that. But those things are tiny predictors. So I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”
Martin concluded, “If you are just always thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’ - people will come to you.”
Somewhere along the way, maybe it’s a modern thing, a Western thing, a commerce-driven thing, we lost the plot.
You get into an endeavor to get good, at your thing, at leading, at inspiring transformation around you.
Yet the forces in play have caused our attention to drift to something else, the exposure, the validation, the promotion, the achievement, the many other “tiny indicators” of what success looks like in your industry.
Maybe you’ve felt that kind of drift before.
So what’s the response to this issue?
We get back to pursuing mastery. We “catch 200 balls a day from whoever will throw them.”
A catcher of footballs needs to get really good at catching footballs.
A writer needs to write 1000 words a day.
A musician needs to write better songs.
A comedian needs to keep working on their set.
A leader needs to lead the group.
Where have you noticed your attention drifting away from mastery and toward something else?
What caused it to move?
How can you bring it back to the work today?
Stay The Course,
