Residual Awesomeness

Some of us know fellow artists who don’t find much beauty in any prospective project until they know how much they will be paid to work on it. On one level, that makes total sense — it is our living, after all. What brings in the monthly nut is often what makes or breaks a career. But it’s also a fairly dismal way to enjoy any longevity as a flourishing creative entity. If the concentration is solely a financial one, there is a long hard road ahead to leaving a semblance of an inspired creative legacy. We definitely all know a jaded insider or two who has traded recognizing the values of the process for the mere rewards any managed output may have provided.

The “Ferris” Wheel of the Creator

A wise and industrious school-ditching teenager once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and take a look around every once in a while, you could miss it.” Call it what you want — stopping to smell the roses, enjoying the ride, or relishing the moment — part of the fill-tilt joy and satisfaction of creating something are the byproducts produced during the process.

Roughly forty years ago, candy makers at Wonka® found that they were throwing away hundreds of pounds of the coating that ran off the assembly line from making Gobstoppers™. A discussion arose concerning how they could reintroduce the extra coating into the manufacturing process so as to not let it fall to waste. A few nights later, one of the executives’ daughters confessed to her dad that while she waited every night for him to finish work and take her home, she often scooped up some of the little coating “droppings” from under the Gobstoppers™ machinery and ate them by the handfuls. Shortly thereafter, Wonka® turned those little droppings into cold hard cash by introduced Nerds™ to the world, a product which has become their most valuable and hottest-selling to date.

Right after Henry Ford’s little company really started kicking ass in the 1920′s, a factory waste report revealed that the Ford Motor Co. was producing a metric shit-ton of wood scrap as a result of their automobile manufacturing process. The frugal and shrewd business person he was, Ford began searching for a way to make money from the scrap instead of just tossing it into the incinerator. Realizing he could partially burn it into raw charcoal which could then be sold for multiple uses, Ford started the Ford Charcoal Company. When his land-developer cousin helped him broker a deal for the acreage that the company factory would sit on, Henry renamed the business after his cousin as a reward for his hard work on the project. Today, Kingsford Charcoal is the 2nd largest charcoal manufacturer in world and claims 80% marketshare in the United States alone.

The Byproducts of Risking Your Creative Mojo

As illustrated by the examples above, when you make something you also always make something else. The first time someone said that to me, it was one of my brain trustees and he was referring to all the unused music he saw enslaved in hard drives and sitting on the shelves of my studio; years and years of musical thoughts, sketches, rejected cues, rough mixes, and half-cocked ideas that could have worked for me in the form of a television library. He suggested that if I put in an hour a day on that batch of tunes, within a month I’d have the start of what could become a fairly potent secondary income source. He was right. That was almost four years ago, and I just expanded that library into Asia with a studio space in Singapore. I’m glad I listened. Up until then, all I thought about when I looked at all those hard drives were the “hundreds of pieces of my music that nobody wanted.”

But it’s not always failure that births new life and sweeping adventure. Sometimes, the best things that go right lead to better things that go “righter”. In 2011, I took a big risk, left Los Angeles for six months and went to work in Indonesia on a multi-dimensional theater show called Jabang Tetuko. The show was a huge success in its own right, but it was nowhere as big and amazing as the things I’m involved in now as a result of my getting on that plane to Jakarta, not the least of which was meeting my future wife and getting married last month. My first video game in Japan, my new television deal with AXN/Asia, and writing what I consider to be the most rewarding project of my lifetime, Eastern Chronicle, are all offshoots of that crazy and insane decision I made when I threw caution to the wind in January 2011 and boarded a plane for a place I’d never been to for something that was creatively new, weird, unproven and scary.

The point is that if you are throwing all your eggs in the one basket of your main focus, you could be missing the boat on several other opportunities for creative growth. I’m not saying you are, I’m just saying you could be. What if, along with what you are 100% focused on now, there are 10 smaller things that would be just as creatively rewarding (and possibly lucrative) waiting for you to take notice? It can happen. It happened to me.

Frankie Says “RELAX”

Your creative career doesn’t always have to be about all the big ideas. It doesn’t need to be so carefully and delicately planned-out that you leave zero room for the bigger things that might come of it. Are you feeling like you are just on the treadmill to hell? Do something crazy. Try something new and different that everyone else thinks is stupid and useless. Get out of the routine you’ve created and start a side project that has been on your mind or travel to a new place and write some music from there…. it really doesn’t matter what it is, just as long as it’s something that YOU want to do and will get you doing something that isn’t expected. You’ll be amazed at what happens in the offshoot. You’ll be blown away by how much amazing stuff you can create when you aren’t really trying so hard to create something amazing.

I’m still learning this and it’s almost a “hindsight is 20/20″ type of thing for me. But I’m happy I’m finally coming to the realization. This just doesn’t have to be so hard.

It certainly doesn’t always have to be so damned much work.

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EASTERN CHRONICLE is my new album that is available worldwide on T-ABC Records. You can download it here on the website in any uncompressed format you can think of. You can also get it in AAC format from iTunes, on MP3 from Amazon.com and in various formats on just about every digital carrier that is out there including Spotify and MOG. If a physical copy is more your speed, the CD is available at retailers throughout Asia and North America.


Comments

  1. Terry Jones says:
    June 5, 2012 at 10:41 am

    You're right of course Deane. Sometimes you just have to take a "crazy risk" with your life because you just don't know where it might lead you, or what good things might come of it. For me it was deciding in late 2009 to fly half-way around the world to meet a girl I'd only ever talked to on webcam for about six months before, we're still together almost three years later and I don't regret one minute of it.

    Now I feel I need to take more risks… with my music, as who knows where it might lead too? By the way I'm loving the 80's pop reference here, it makes me want to dig out the album again. ;)

  2. Terry Jones says:
    June 5, 2012 at 10:41 am

    You're right of course Deane. Sometimes you just have to take a "crazy risk" with your life because you just don't know where it might lead you, or what good things might come of it. For me it was deciding in late 2009 to fly half-way around the world to meet a girl I'd only ever talked to on webcam for about six months before, we're still together almost three years later and I don't regret one minute of it.

    Now I feel I need to take more risks… with my music, as who knows where it might lead too? By the way I'm loving the 80's pop reference here, it makes me want to dig out the album again. ;)