As I commented on in a previous post, I’m participating in a contest to get 3 months of dedicated publicity. To win, I must post 9 blog entries taking readers through my experience with the book and blogging about how it is helping, where I’ve learned the most, and where I’m are getting stuck.
The book is “Music Success in Nice Weeks” by Ariel Hyatt. It’s a “step-by-step guide on how to use social media & online tactics to supercharge your PR, build your fan base, and earn money.” Sounds pretty good, eh? 
Week 1: Getting mentally prepared. This chapter wasn’t really about music or social media, but rather to put perspective into the next 8 chapters and help the reader decide on the goals that they want to achieve. I love the way the universe works with this kinda stuff… just a week prior to reading this chapter, I had a conversation with my friend Marilyn Schwader who runs a business and website called, Clarity of Vision. Her business is teaching writers how to market themselves, and she has a free download on her site that outlines the in-depth process if envisioning your long-term goals for your career as a writer, much as Ariel’s book leads you thru exercises to define your goals as a musician. Marilyn’s approach is to create mission objectives, and to define your dream, your purpose, and your values, which in many ways requires you to look at things from a more “spiritual” perspective. Kind of like, “Why are you here in on Earth in the first place and how does that define who you are and why you’re writing?” Ariel’s approach is more practical and calculated. Determine your goals, both short and long-term, not just for your music, but for your money, your family, and your long-term goals for life, and do those in both 12 month and in your lifetime.
I found Ariel’s approach to be a little more complicated because I don’t like thinking about things in terms of goals. For me, my goal is to make it to tomorrow. My goal is to make the right decisions for myself so that I perform well at work, so that I can sing well the next time I perform, so that I remember to to remember my friends so that remain my friends, so that I don’t go too long without calling my mother. In other words, my goals are very practical and rarely extend beyond tomorrow. This is all well and good, but it’s really not the philosophie du jour. Back in the day, Ram Dass was saying “Be Here Now.” Well damn, it took all this effort to learn to pull my head out of the clouds and actually commit to doing the things I was dreaming about, and I’m here, now what? Now I have to make goals? Isn’t this just like putting my head back into the clouds? Well, I’m trying not to think so.
Ariel’s and Marilyns approaches both touch on something a little more woo woo, that is, a little less accepted and sometimes hard to fathom, but never-the-less proven by quantum physics and by modern psychology. It’s around manifesting your reality by defining it. This is so critical to this whole procedure that Ariel put it in chapter one of her book. Marylin would rather you not move forward with her program until you go thru her exercises. These principles are the same that the movie “The Secret” tries to teach it’s audience: Form follows thought. Simple to say, much more difficult grasp. Ariel’s book engages this principle by asking the reader to first adopt of perspective of positive thinking and let go of self criticism and gives some ideas on how to do it. I’m all for that! By insisting that you create goals, she assures you that this it the first step to achieving them. I’m for that too!
I’m not going to tell you what my goals are. By following Ariel’s approach, I expect that over the coming months, you’ll see the results and they’ll speak for themselves. I am pumped because I’m gonna focus on nothing else until I see this plan executed. I expect it’ll be like going to school. You know when the semester’s going to end so it puts a nice frame around things. And this contest is another motivator to get this accomplished in the specified time frame. Actually, I’ve already leaped ahead in the book, that’s why I have this blog in the first place, because chapter 5 made me do it. In the coming weeks, I’ll recap some of the technical things I’ve done to get things up and running for myself, and being that I’m a web professional, I’ll try and do it for both the nubes and the geeks.
Ciao now brown cow.
