Do Things, Tell People

The strawberries taste like strawberries. The snozberries taste like snozberries. Snozzberries? Why the hell of a snozzberry? We are the music makers, and we are the dream of such new laws.

This is the Music Makers podcast where I read things out loud to you and then offer my unqualified opinions on them. For the very first episode, we're gonna look at one of my favorite articles, Do Things, Tell People by Carl Lang. Do things, tell people. These are the only things you need to be successful. You can get away with just doing one of them, but that's rare, and usually someone else is doing the other part for you.

If you don't have any marketable skills, learn some. It's the future. We have Khan Academy and Wikipedia and Codecademy and almost the entire world's collective knowledge at your fingertips. Use it. Then make something you can talk about.

Make something cool, something interesting. Spend time on it. Go crazy. Even if it's the least useful thing you've ever made, if you can talk about it, make it. This part's easy because you're doing something you think is cool and interesting, and if it's useless, great, because you won't need to support it much either.

Next, find events where the people you want to work with are. Then get a drink into you or don't and talk to them about it. Relax. It is probably interesting to them too. Even if it is not, because you have made it, you sound like you know what the hell you are talking about.

That's the important part. This is easy too because you're talking about something you've made that you think is cool and interesting. As an added bonus, many people go to these events just to talk about cool and interesting things, so you'll fit right in. You would not believe how much opportunity is out there for those who do things and tell people. It's how you travel the entrepreneurial landscape.

You do something interesting and you tell everyone about it. Then you get contacts, business cards, email addresses. Then you get contracts, job offers, investors, whatever. You make friends who think what you do is cool. You make a name for yourself as the person that did that cool thing.

Then next time someone wants you to do something in any way related to the cool thing, they come to you first. Ciaran McCann and I, mostly him, started working on an HTML 5 game engine and blog when we were in our 1st year of college. We never even finished it. But because of Flax, we landed internships at Ericsson in the summer of our 2nd year. Now I'm on my way to game closure and Sierra is going to demon Ware.

We just

did things and told people.

The reason I chose this article to be the first article that I read to you on the Musicmakers podcast is because that's exactly what I'm doing here today. I'm doing things and I'm telling people. I'm recording a podcast. Why? Because I wanted to.

Because I have all these great articles that I've read for the past, I think it's 4 or 5 years stored in my Evernote under articles. And I've got them all highlighted and I've got them all tagged. And I've shared the notebook with a few people, but I thought, you know what I really wanna do? I wanna talk about why I like these articles or blog posts or, song lyrics or anything really. I've got 100 of them stored in my Evernote.

All this great material just sitting there. And I'm wholly unqualified to talk about these blog posts or these articles or whatever they are. But who's to say that they were qualified to write them? They just wrote them. And so I've always been of the mindset that I would start something big if I just didn't have to tell my friends and family about it.

If I could just promote something on the Internet to strangers without putting any of my self esteem on the line or any of my ego on the line, everything would be easy. Oh, yeah. I can start something and promote the heck out of it. But if my close friends find out and then ask me about it, then I'm gonna be embarrassed because what if it's not going well? I have to talk about this podcast that 12 people listen to.

And I don't wanna promote it to my friends or my family either. I just wanna wait until it's super successful and then just tell them, oh, yeah. I've got this thing that's going that's really great. But somewhere along the way, I just decided to get over it. One of my big inspirations is this show called the 5 Minute Geek Show.

It's run by this awesome dude called Matt Stauffer, and he just turns on his microphone and talks for 5 minutes about something. If it's geeky, it fits. And I've listened to his show from the very beginning, and he's got 50 episodes now. And he just talks about whatever he wants to talk about. And as I was listening to it, I was thinking, you know what?

He's got friends. He's got co workers. He's got family. And they may poke fun at him for doing a show called the 5 Minute Geek Show, where he talks about the best way to make coffee. But I'll tell you this much, it's totally awesome.

And I have no idea how many people listen to it, but I listen to it, and I love it. And it's way easier to criticize someone for doing something or to poke fun at them for doing something than it is to actually do that thing yourself. And so here I am. I'm making a podcast. I'm reading articles and telling you what I think about them.

And so that's why I picked this article to start. Do things tell people. And so I'm doing something. I'm tired of being the guy who thinks I could do that. I should do that.

I've got this great idea for this. And I wanna be the guy that says, yeah. Here's what I do. I do this. Let me tell you about it.

So on this podcast, you're gonna hear a wide range of topics. I am a software developer, but it's not gonna just be technical mumbo jumbo. More than that, I hope that the collection of material that I've chosen is thought provoking and inspirational and action inspiring. I want you to do something and tell people. I want you to stop saying, yeah.

I could do that. Yeah. I could do that. Well, I would have done that better. Oh, look at this guy.

And start saying, here's what I am doing. I'm working towards this. I want you to do things and to tell people. So that's what this is all about. I chose the name The Music Makers because it comes from an old poem that I absolutely love and also that's featured in Willy Wonka.

It was written in 18/74, and it's called Ode. And it goes like this. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. Wandering by the lone Sea Breakers and sitting by desolate streams, world losers and world forsakers, on whom the pale moon gleams. Yet we are the movers and shakers of the world forever, it seems.

Man, how can you not love that? We are the music makers. We are the dreamers of dreams. We're the ones doing it. We're the movers and shakers.

So what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do and who are you gonna tell? Check out the website atmusicmakers.fm. And please, do me a favor, leave me a 5 star review on iTunes. You can go to musicmakers.fm/review.

That would be a huge, huge help in getting the word out. Now go do something.