I used to be a church organist…
At my last full-time church job, my salary topped out at about $31,000 per year. Not much in the way of material compensation for going to one of the best music schools in the country and winning a major organ competition when I was 19.
I could have kept going and working my “way to the top.”
Except I got a bit disillusioned by the music business. Not by music, just by the business of music. At the time it seemed like the same thing, but now I can see things a bit more clearly.
Back then, I didn’t have the balls to stand up and make a choice to change the music business, so instead, I left.
I got into marketing for two reasons:
1. I was really good at it.
2. It’s like music, except you get paid much better.
To me marketing IS music.
In music, there are two kinds of communication happening. The predetermined communication you hard wire into a performance. Those are the ideas that you work on in your practice, the ideas you deliberately choose to communicate through the way you interpret each phrase.
Your audience can hear some of those ideas. But they’re mainly for you. Since no one can truly see inside your head to get a clear picture about what you’re trying to convey.
The other type of communication that happens in music is the spontaneous kind. Where your ideas and intentions combine with the moment and impact a listener in a way that is completely unique to them.
It’s a type of collaboration that is special and completely effortless.
You couldn’t plan it if you tried. But that is the communication that makes music worth doing. It’s what keeps you going during the hard work and frustration (which can be quite often).
It makes everything worth it.
I call it magic.
To me, marketing can have that same magic. And the process of creating it is very similar to the one you use when you’re making music.
Take a listen to this.
It’s a recording of my wife and me with a group we put together back in NYC.
My wife is playing the oboe and I’m in the background on the harpsichord. Our friend Tanja is playing the violin.
We played this back in 2001 in NYC when we lived there.
It might sound weird to say out loud, but the feeling I get listening to this recording, is the same feeling I get when I generate traffic for a website, the same feeling I get when I write a promotion that sells a lot of products and makes a lot of money.
It is the feeling of seeing my creation out in the world.
I have to admit, it’s completely self-centered.
Here’s another story that hopefully illustrates what I’m trying to get at.
Some of the details are a bit fuzzy, but it’s the main idea that counts.
I played a recital once that included an organ piece by a composer named Max Reger. At the end of the recital, an old man approached my mother who was sitting in the audience. He told her that the performance had brought him to tears.
Now I was the performer, but the miracle of making an emotional impact wasn’t because of me. It was simply the magic that happens when people interact with your art and it speaks to them.
THAT is why I’m in this marketing business. I get paid to create beautiful things that change people. I can be a “musician,” but in the marketing world.
To me, there’s nothing better I could be doing.
I work hard at bringing the core of who I am to what I create. And that affects people.
And that’s the reason that the current state of marketing online gives me such trouble. There’s something deep inside me that doesn’t want to “play the game.” Something inside me that can’t settle for not being real in everything I’m doing.
I think a LOT of people are feeling the same thing.
It’s just that enough of those people haven’t yet stood up and decided to change it.
And that’s why, as I get more and more experience in marketing, I use less and less of the old marketing tricks. The ones that you read about in the books.
As my own voice becomes stronger and my style becomes more defined, my marketing becomes more AUTHENTIC. It becomes more me. It becomes one of a kind. That’s because I’m not following a rule book.
And it’s because I only have one goal: to connect with the human being on the other end of my message in a way that prompts them to DO something. Or THINK something… or BE something.
It’s truly a win win. As time goes by, my approach becomes more unique, more valuable and more effective.
Everyone has a voice like this. For some, it’s easy to find. For others, it’s buried under years of thinking you have nothing important to share.
Find your voice. It’s worth the work. And it will change your life.
Thank you, Seth Godin, for making this post possible. You changed someone.
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