Our lives are frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify. – Henry David Thoreau I am an admirer of Henry David Thoreau, an American writer during the 1800’s. Thoreau was a philosopher who is most famous for his ideas about simplicity. He is known as the guy who went and lived in the woods for a […]
If you missed yesterday’s post, I started talking about the turnaround. A turnaround is a sequence of chords that are used at the end of a section that fill up space and naturally lead to the start of the next section. As a simple example, if you end a section on a I chord and […]
There is a foundational principle in harmony and it goes something like this: the path between two chords can be altered in many ways as long as the end points are preserved. That may sound confusing but let’s take an example. Let’s say you are in church and you end a verse of a hymn […]
Thirteen years ago, I did something big. I was working for Delta Airlines at the time as a software guy and on my two year anniversary with the company (the first day I could legally quit), I walked away to work full-time on my small business which at the time consisted mainly of big dreams […]
I am going to give you a very powerful tip today and it will not take me very much time to explain it. It is very important though. Here is a bit of background first. I grew up playing classical music. I am thankful for the teachers I had but they were all very much […]
This is a followup to this article I wrote a month or so ago about productivity. For better or worse, we have a central vacuum in our house. From my perspective, it is just a normal vacuum cleaner except that it requires a lot of maintenance and costs a lot of money when it something […]
Yesterday, we finished the first year of Online Music School. We had two 16-week semesters and I calculate that I talked in front of the camera for somewhere close to 200 hours. Roughly 150 students participated. Registrations were about equal for both semesters even though I only taught 5 classes in the second semester compared to […]
The other day, we attended a Karate belt ceremony for my youngest son Zachary. I don’t put a high priority on my children playing sports but I sort of like Karate. It might come in useful some day and I like a lot of the philosophy behind Karate or at least the philosophy of the […]
Recording music is a huge investment of time and money and very often, it is an investment that ends badly for musicians. Less than 5% of all CDs produced sell at least 1,000 copies so that means that more than 95% of all CDs produced ending up losing money. Many people want to record because […]
I saw this image floating around the internet today and it made me pause. Then I started asking myself if this witty saying is really true? Is entrepreneurship really like jumping off a cliff and building a plane on the way down? The answer is no. Don’t get me wrong. That may be the way […]
We all know people that seem unbelievably productive and we know people who just don’t ever seem to get much done at all. Have you ever wondered what the difference is? I don’t have all the answers and I am pretty convinced that there is no one secret formula. Some people are ultra-productive because they […]