The Importance of Failure

Hey, what's up gigging pros! It's Jared Judge, welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Today, I want to talk about failure. Because every musician in the history of music has experienced failure. I have, I'm sure you have, I'm sure every musician you've ever played with, has experienced failure at some point. And it's painful. But failure is not a bad thing. Failure is a good thing. In fact, failure is what causes us to learn, and to grow. And to try out new things. And, you know, I always heard this quote, I think it was Albert Einstein or something. But he said, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result. And so that kind of goes hand in hand with failure, because, you know, if the result that you've gotten from trying, what you've been trying, is just constant failure, which failure comes at many levels, by the way, it might just be slightly uncomfortable moment, or you didn't make as much money on that show, as you expected. Or when you reached out to that booking agent, they said, No, or even if you take a dump on the stage, not literally, but like you're playing the show, and it doesn't go great. failure comes at various levels, and they're all painful. But if you try the same thing that caused you to fail, and you expect it to work differently, and you do this over and over again, then that is what Albert Einstein would call insanity. And so that's kind of the idea behind failures, we should learn something from every failure. For example, if a show was a complete train wreck, we got to learn from it. Why was it a train wreck? Did the PA system crap out? Did to the sound engineer get drunk? And didn't mix any of your levels didn't give you anything? In the monitors? If, you know, for example, if you get rejected by a booking agent, why did they reject you? You know, many times you won't get that direct feedback. However, you're certainly welcome to ask a follow up question. You know, what, what kind of things were you looking for? What could we do better next time. So once you fail, then you have to learn from that experience, really analyze it, dig deep, talk to other people about it, and get some some serious feedback, so that you can pivot and shift your strategy. Right, that's what comes next is if you try something different, you might get a different result. So what kind of things can you shift, if you go back to the train wreck performance example, if the sound engineer got drunk on the job, then it literally would be insane to hire that sound engineer again, if you know you were playing your guitar solo, and you couldn't keep up with what was in your mind, well, gotta change something, got to learn that solo better gotta get better at technique, or that solo might just be a bit beyond you, and try something else. That would either be a suitable replacement, that would still energize and excite the crowd. And try it, try it again, in the booking agent strategy, if you're trying to work with a booking agent, if you get that feedback that, hey, your videos aren't professional? Well, it might be time to invest in some better, better quality videos. And so the point of this is like, failure is not the end of the road. Failure is actually kind of the beginning of the road, because failure opens up a ton of possibilities. I actually recently finished this book, it was a very quick book, called go for know. And it is about it's like kind of inspirational, but also about sales. Because I believe that everything we do as musicians, is either in marketing or sales. We're always trying to get people to make a decision, whether that's a booking agent saying yes to putting us on their roster, or is that an audience member saying? Yes, this is an exciting performance. And I'm going to stick around and become a fan of this to this band. And so this book, go for know, has this really interesting philosophy around failure, in that you should actually set your goals to be how many times have I failed? How many times have I gotten the word no. And they say you should go for it go for no literally go for no. So for example, if you're trying to reach out to booking agents, and you want to get on some rosters, instead of saying I want to get on the roster of two booking agents, you might set that goal as I want to get rejected by 20 booking agents, which is crazy to think about like, the goal should be rejection. So if your goal is failure, that really shifts it from failures, a bad thing to failure is a stepping stone in my overall journey. And, you know, when you're reaching out to those booking agents, then the conversation is a lot easier. Because you go in expecting rejection, you know, I know that I'm gonna get rejected by this booking agent, but I'm gonna send this email anyway. Because by getting rejected, I'm one step closer to my goal. And they, one of the interesting things about, like, what this book said, was like, if your goal is to make, you know, let's say it was to get on to booking agents, rosters, but we flipped that goal to be able to get rejected by 20 booking agents. In the first couple of emails, you know, say you send 10 emails, or you call 10 people? And eight of them say no, so you're eight out of 20 knows. And but then the next two that you call, say, yes. Then what happens? Have you met your goal? And actually, the truth of that situation is no, you have not met your goal of 20 nose. So even if you've gotten your tangible goal of I want to get on two rosters. And they said, Yes, you've only gotten eight noes. So you have to keep going. You got to get rejected in ninth time, a 10th time all the way through the 20th time. And what happens, then is you probably will get a couple yeses in there, too. So instead of me just meeting your goal for two yeses, maybe you get four yeses, you get five yeses. And you've doubled what your expected output was, because your actual goal was to get 20 nose, which is really cool to think about, and something that I have yet to fully implement in my music career. But I really think I should. And I think you should try it too. Because that totally changes the mindset, it says, Yes, I'm going to get no a lot. It provides you with that opportunity to fail. And to learn from those failures. And to try some different strategies. Because, you know, if you're trying the same strategy over and over again, it might not work. That's, that's the Albert Einstein insanity thing. So you got to tweak things, tweak the subject line of your email, tweak the the text of your email, to get feedback, you don't have videos, change, like change that, go get some videos, and then try. So go for No, set your goal of I want to get X number of nodes in this time period, and then work towards that goal of failure to totally shift failure into a good thing, which I believe it is a good thing. And I hope that you do too. Because let's face it, if nobody failed, this would be a pretty boring world. If there were no stakes in this game, then what would we be playing for like, if he couldn't fail, life would just be so boring to go get it, I believe in you. And if you failed in the past, don't worry, you will fail again, in the future, I will too. But you're smart enough to try different things, tweak things, and actually make failure, a part of your goal, set your go for no goals, and seek out failure, because that's the only way to grow. And that is a way to grow very fast. By the way, one of the strategies in when in Fulltime Music Academy, one of the things that we do that booking agents do speaking of booking agents, that's kind of the secret agent, booking agent strategy is to get on the preferred vendor lists, at venues. And booking agents have been doing this ever since the inception of booking agents. You know, they partner with the private event venues and the event planners, they say, yeah, if you need any live musicians, we will happily provide you with them. And because they're one of the only people who does that, then the it's just so easy for these private event venues and event planners to say yes to them, and say use them. Because then the venue owner or the planner, they don't have to do any of the work. Which to me, is a shame for independent musicians like you and me. Where, you know, how do we get these opportunities if booking agents have been doing this for decades? Well, what do we do? Well, the answer comes from what we were talking about earlier, which is to go for know find a list of these venue and event planners and set yourself a no goal. I want to reach out to them I want to get on preferred vendor list. So you want to get on a dozen preferred vendor lists in your area. Obviously not everybody will say yes to you. So your goal should actually be, instead of saying, I want to get on 12 preferred vendor list, I want to get 50 noes from people and then set that goal, start to reach out to these people. And you'll get responses. Some of them will say no, and congrats, you are working towards your 50 No goals. But the cool part is, some of them will say yes. And then you get on preferred vendor lists, then the venues and event planners start recommending you to their clients, and say somebody needs a jazz trio for their next corporate event, you are the first person to come to mind, just like one of our Fulltime Music Academy members know, he just got recommended by his first ever preferred vendor, list appearance. And then they pass a gig to you. And he didn't really have to do any selling, because they were pre sold by the venue that they were recommended by. So pretty cool stuff. So go for now, I want to make your job as easy as possible, which is why I'm gonna give you a list of people to reach out to, it's called the gig vault. It's got over 24,665 of these people to reach out names, emails, phone numbers, sorted by city, across the entire US. And that gets you a free trial of Fulltime Music Academy, which actually has email templates that we have put in a lot of failure to figure out what email templates work. So these secret weapon booking templates are amazing. They will you can send those out. And they have the highest percentage of Yes, responses that we've seen out of everything we've tried. So we've gotten a lot of nose to get to these yeses. And I want to give them to you for free as part of your free trial to Fulltime Music Academy. So go ahead and grab your copy of the gig vault. It is at FulltimeMusicAcademy.com/venues And that comes with a free 30 day trial of Fulltime Music Academy. So you literally get everything that you need. So go for no thanks for tuning in for another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Remember, "You are just one know away!".