Back in 2001 Jim Collins wrote an excellent article called “Good To Great” that covers a plethora of topics of interest to you entrepreneurs and business people. One small section focused on how change does and doesn’t happen, and I feel it relates strongly to the process of ‘breaking’ an artist and achieving success. Here’s an excerpt:
Picture an egg. Day after day, it sits there. No one pays attention to it. No one notices it. Certainly no one takes a picture of it or puts it on the cover of a celebrity-focused business magazine. Then one day, the shell cracks and out jumps a chicken. All of a sudden, the major magazines and newspapers jump on the story: “Stunning Turnaround at Egg!” and “The Chick Who Led the Breakthrough at Egg!” From the outside, the story always reads like an overnight sensation—as if the egg had suddenly and radically altered itself into a chicken.
Music Business Translation: The general audience tends to believe successful musicians come out of nowhere to hit the top 10 of the Billboard charts. That’s how the Clive Davis/Tommy Mottola’s paradigm advertised the machinations of the music industry, but it’s simply not true. Artists put in years of work, even decades, grinding it out, writing and improving, performing, putting in their 10,000 hours. Hatching inside of their egg until they’re strong enough to burst through the shell and seemingly enter the public eye fully formed. Even artists themselves can get caught up in this phenomenon, getting discouraged at times when they see other artists pass them by, or when they see younger artists reach success.
It can be easy to forget why you started on your journey, to continue to believe in your talent, and to realize what it’s really all about. To keep progress going, or in other words to make change happen, your perspective needs to be long-term and focused on organic healthy growth. Change/Success doesn’t happen immediately, it doesn’t even happen in a logical smooth upward motion. The first part of your path to success is the hardest part by far. Below is an excellent metaphor for illustration.
Picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It’s about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum—mass times velocity—is what will generate superior economic results over time.
Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then—at some point, you can’’t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren’t pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.
Single-minded focus, others call it being stubborn, is a positive personality trait when it comes to being an artist or manager in this crazy industry. The ability to deal with anxiety and the unsure nature of the biz is pretty vital too. It can be a very stressful business, but on all but my worst days I feel motivated, excited, fortunate, and filled with passion and faith in the four amazing strong eggs that I’m co-hatching. I even get to assist others in hatching their own too.