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One of the more enjoyable reasons for opening my email box in the morning is to read my daily Napoleon Hill Foundation quote. If you don’t know Napoleon Hill, you should check out the book many successful business people point to as the one that changed their lives, and helped place them firmly on the track toward completing their life’s goals. Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” is a simple and direct motivational book filled with all sorts of gem’s that can help you get your rear-end off the couch, away from your PlayStation or XBox and on the phone to generate entertainment industry career prospects. I would highly recommend it.
These Napoleon Hill daily emails help me start my day off on the right foot, and today’s message I thought might be interesting to share with you for two reasons. One is that I believe it serves as an excellent reminder of one way to make yourself worthy in any job environment worthy of your creative input (they’re not always one-in-the-same!), and secondly, because of the recent entry of Topspin into a sector of the marketplace not necessarily familiar to the majority of indie bands out there.
Below is the quote I was greeted with this morning, courtesy of The Napoleon Hill Foundation:
FIND OUT HOW TO GET PRODUCTION UP, AND IT WILL DRAG YOU AND A BIGGER PAYCHECK ALONG WITH IT.
It’s common knowledge that the person who knows the most about how to improve the productivity of any job is the person who holds that job. Why is it, then, that we are often reluctant to offer suggestions for improvement? Perhaps we’ve seen too many layoffs and reorganizations to trust the cracker-barrel wisdom that our goal should be to work ourselves out of a job-so that we can move on to a bigger and better position. Nevertheless, the old wisdom is still sound. If you find a way to do things better, faster, or cheaper, you increase your value to your employer. You will be asked to participate in planning sessions and quality circles because you’ve demonstrated that you know how to make things work more efficiently. It’s inevitable that you will be promoted, because you will become one of those exceptional employees who are too valuable to lose.
The quote of course assumes that you’re in a business that values your input, and doesn’t just pay lip-service to the idea of innovation. Unfortunately, I find lip-service is often easier than placing oneself in the eye of unforeseen obstacles. Call it human nature, or whatever you will, but I have always found the attitude to merely be representative of one characteristic: fear. The good thing is, I believe that unlike many other fields, the entertainment industry is a wee bit more open to creative input than you’ll find elsewhere.
That’s not to say that every “great” idea you have will be put into place, or that you won’t clash against people with grand egos steadfast in the belief that their creative solution is better than yours, but I do believe you’ll find more creative people willing to listen to your ideas, then toss fear aside in favor of finding what the solution to the problem at hand.
And that’s where Topspin comes in.Topspin has been working on a solution that enables indie bands to better manage and communicate with their fan bases in ways not commonly available today. The way I’m reading it at the moment, it’s a way for bands to leverage the power of enterprise-level CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solutions combined with technology-driven indie-distribution to better stay on top of their fan base, their sales and their marketing.
While Topspin is in limited release at the moment, I look forward to seeing how the product offerings from the company enable indie bands and other artists to take advantage of what the types of software tools available to other businesses, so as to craft a solution that works with the changing music industry landscape.
Topspin’s founders are helping to create a solution that aims to widen current industry bottlenecks, and while they kept it under their hat for awhile to ensure the time was right, they’re taking steps in the right direction to help create a new business, and help you and your band run your own business. You should always aim to do the same.
Napoleon Hill would be proud, eh?
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