 So each week I talk to a lot of you on consultation calls. Then I go out and drink with some of my friends who've had success in music. And in the past few weeks, it's become very obvious there's a difference in the attitude of those who get to the point of being successful and those who haven't gotten there yet. And while I love that music has become so democratized and we really are in an unprecedented era of fans choosing who gets popular instead of gatekeeper dweebs, the one downside is that when musicians are DIY, they don't get some of the mentorship and that leads to them to being unnecessarily miserable and disappointed and hiding their art even when it's great, when they really shouldn't be like that. So this video, I wanna discuss the number one difference between successful and unsuccessful musicians. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fan base from zero to 10,000 fans. And this is Muse Formation. So this weekend I was watching the new documentary George Carlin's American Dream on HBO Max that Judd Apatow made. It's on my favorite comedian of all time, George Carlin. And in it, right at the very end of the first part, it pinpointed an attitude difference between those who succeed compared to those who never get anywhere. At one point in George's career, Cheech Marin, you know, a comic mostly known for making stoner jokes. Well, he called Carlin obsolete since he was making really heady thinking type of comedy and the tide had changed and people just wanted to have fun, man. And another place career because he made relevant comedy for five decades continually while he reinvented himself all the time. Well, he hit another low. He saw the standup Sam Kinnison and instead of being insulted like he was when a clown like Cheech was insulting him, when he saw Kinnison doing standup, he was really impressed. But in both instances, what he did was challenge himself to get better and go deeper within his work and hone his craft to be so great no one could ignore him. Instead of going negative, giving up, fury rejection or hiding from people, he instead kept working, putting himself out there. But when he would go home at night, he'd consciously work to take his work up to a whole new level to surpass other people. And when you watch this documentary, you see every one of the biggest comedians of the eras he did comedy in say it again and again, that no one, and I mean no one reinvented themselves and became the best over and over and over again. It was that attitude of challenging himself to always be better than everyone else and going harder that enabled him to do that each time. And while I don't really like to hold someone up as an example, that's as clearly in need of mental help as Kanye West is today, when you watch the Netflix documentary on him called Genius, you see the same attitude in the era where he was truly making some of the most challenging music of recent times. He was looking around at the musical landscape and challenging himself to be the best each and every time. But I could already hear so many of you thinking, that's great Jesse, but they were already successful. You don't know how tough it is when no one appreciates you. But here's the thing, before you've gotten a ton of fans, that's the time this attitude is most important. In Stephen King's amazing book on writing where he talks about his creative process, he talks about his time before he got his first novel published. He would send his novels out to publishers and every time he got a rejection letter, he would hang it on a nail since he would read their criticism and learn from it. And he saw this as the path to learning how to get to be a great writer. And well, obviously we know what happened from there. One of the most unprecedented success stories in book publishing history. But his attitude was that he knew getting used to rejection was the only way you got through all the disappointment that's gonna come his way throughout his career. So he turned it around. And instead of looking at it as rejection, he saw all those letters as awards on his way to winning the biggest award of all time. Well, actual awards and praise of his work. He got so many of those rejection letters, he had to buy another nail because the first one started to sag at his wall. And he was so proud of that. But these attitudes are what my friends who've had success in music have as well. And here's the thing, when I talk to a lot of you on these consulting calls or even in the comments of these videos since I answer every question you all leave, there tends to be two different symptoms you some of you have. The first is fear of you even putting yourself out there. So that means you don't send your music to people, you fear putting it out or even worse, both. You're paralyzed by the idea of getting rejected but you're ignoring that everyone in music gets rejected all the time. I've mentioned this before but if you get three out of the five opportunities presented to you, you're killing the game like no one else. And even one out of five opportunities coming through is pretty decent in batting average. There's so many times musicians don't even understand what success is. The other week I made a video where we analyzed some of the new data Spotify put out into the world. And when so many of you learned that if you have more than 5,000 streams of your song you're the top 20% of songs on Spotify. Well, they all of a sudden felt really good about themselves instead of down in the dumps. And since there's a lack of mentorship in DIY music so many things can be so disappointing. A musician will tell me that only 25% of their fans open their email list blast. I have to tell them that's not just good, that's great. They tell me they pitch Spotify playlist and are getting on two out of 10 of them and they're so depressed about it. But when I tell them that's basically hitting a grand slam well, they're tuned changes. And it goes all the way up to the top. I've been in a room with a band with countless platinum records as they get rejected as the openers for you too. And yeah, they were bummed for a second. Then they kept on challenging themselves to get better. And you know what? The next record, they got that U2 tour. And if this is helping, well, you should be subscribed and get notified since this is what we talk about here. But the second type of personality is one I have a lot less sympathy for. So many of you, particularly a type of know-it-all keyboard warrior incel that resides all day on TikTok comment sections, loves to talk about how they are just as good as any of the biggest artists in the world. But yet when I click play on their music, their off-time attitude and their performance is about as nuanced as the arguments of your high school friends post about how cool Elon Musk is on Facebook. But here's the lesson. It's great to be confident, but even Kanye, a guy who, if anyone put his picture on the Wikipedia for the word arrogant, it may take some time before anyone scrolled there and questioned why his picture was there. Well, Kanye still has this attitude where he believes in himself, but he knows the competition is stiff and his greatness partially came because his attitude was always to look around, challenge himself to make the most compelling work that he finds emotionally powerful that he can make. And while I could say many bad things about his current era of music, the man truly had an unprecedented run at being successful with this attitude. And I can say this very confidently because I'm lucky enough that I get to be around so many of the great creators in music. If you think you are just as good as the professional musicians, odds are you haven't done enough of what creativity science calls trained noticing, which is when we study a craft as we keep going down that 10,000 hours of expertise that everyone likes to talk about, we learn to see more and more of the nuance of how to consistently achieve greatness. The great artists have learned to notice tons of subtleties in songwriting performance or general artistry. And as they accumulate those subtleties, they stack up like a haystack into greatness. And that is the key. You can get lucky with a great performance early on in your career, but the trained noticing allows you to replicate it so you're not a one hit wonder who is only able to pull it off a few times. One of my favorite quotes comes from Arthur Schopenhauer when he said, greatness hits the mark, but genius, it's a target no one else can see. And that's what I'm saying here. So many of you think you're as good as the pros, but haven't yet learned to see and hear all those tiny subtleties that go into performances that really make them great. So you can't notice that you're not as good as them. And for most of you, once you stop being a teenage or even worse, a 20-something know-it-all, you'll start to see what a fool you are and how little you knew then. There's a reason that all the smartest people in any field say they know nothing because they keep seeing how they notice more and more and know that they're gonna keep doing that as the years go on. And they can see what they don't understand and wish they could understand, but don't yet have the words to explain it. Yet all these fools with this affliction think they know everything and really should Google Dunning Kruger effect and really think about where they fall in that study. But all this is to say, confidence and belief in yourself is good. In fact, necessary. Or else you're gonna give up with all the disappointment in this business, but you need to acknowledge disappointment and rejection is something every one of your favorite creators experienced, but they learn this attitude in order to push through and get to the great work that you admire them for. You always need to be looking for how you can challenge yourself to do your best work and when someone rejects you, take that as more motivation to get there and continue the work of being the best artist you can be who makes the songs that are most powerful to you and visuals that align with that in your vision and that's the way you get through this and become a great artist. Okay, on the screen now is a video I think you will love if you love this one. Click on that and keep learning. Thanks for watching.