Longing for the day ...

Great advice, Brian

Just got Brian Austin Whitney's latest e-newsletter, and it's a beaut! Personally, I've gone through some pretty life-changing stuff lately and it can be very intimidating at times so it's great to get some sage advice from a guy who's been there before.

Brian is the founder of Just Plain Folks, which is one of the best indie music communities on the web. in 2001 he was listed as one of the "15 people you should know in the biz" by Indie-Musician.com. He works his butt off for indie musos and is highly respected by others in the industry. Strangely, his response to my request for help was ... unsatisfactory ... but that might be explained by the "health issues" he refers to in his most recent e-newsletter.

Anyway, I won't paste all of his e-newsletter here, but in it he gives 11 tips from his personal experience for getting a new project off the ground:

1. Think about things on a grand scale, treat them like a small thing.

2. The more things slow down, the more you should speed up.

3. Well meaning clueless people will divert you, don't let them.

4. Do what's right and it won't fail (even if it does).

5. It's better to get beat up along the way than to simply rot in one place.

6. Planning too much is as bad as not planning enough.

7. Pleasant surprises usually come when you do something unplanned that could turn out to be unpleasant.

8. When you ask others for their opinion, it usually means you don't like the truth you already know.

9. The most important person in the room is rarely the most obvious.

10. Make sure you get you pleasure from the doing, not the recognition.

11. Accept that no matter what you do, the world will insert obstacles and tragedies along the way that you can't anticipate or avoid.

He expands on these in the full text, and I commend it to anyone who's ever tried to get something like my Genre Benders or MusoWiki projects off the ground. His advice is spot on and I take great inspiration from his example.