Below are a few excerpts from an inspired talk given by John Mayer to students at Berklee College of Music.
In regards to practicing, he said,
“This time is a really important time for you guys because nobody knows who you are, and nobody should. This is not a time to promote yourself. It doesn’t matter. This is the time to get your stuff together. Promotion can be like that. You can have promotion in 30 seconds if your stuff is good. Good music is its own promotion.”
In regards to his former Twitter obsession, he said,
“The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still 4 minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still 4 minutes long…I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore. And I was a tweetaholic. I had four million twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. And I stopped using twitter as an outlet and I started using twitter as the instrument to riff on, and it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.”
I wrote the following to a friend after reading this, “Bottom line, we all just have to get off of our butts and go do something/make something/be something.” Publication will find you after you’ve worked your butt off and made something awesome. Mayer was specifically talking about music, but I think that the principle rings true in any creative endeavor. Spend less time trying to get people to notice you and spend more time investing in whatever it is that you’re creating.
I recommend that you hop over and read the whole thing. So good.