Below Surface

I have a list of questions you should ask yourself and answer before you start recording and putting music out to a fan base. 

Obviously, you know that you have the talent i.e you can rap and you can deliver lines. Now before you start putting in a lot of time in the studio you need to ask yourself a few questions:

1. Am I good enough to take this up as a career?

It may take you a few years of battling and recording in your basement before you can answer this question truthfully. Regardless what your answer is, you definitely want to have a solid plan B, but if your answer is 'Yes' then you want to ask yourself another question:

    2.    Am I better off building a career here (wherever you are outside of Naija) or creating music strictly for naija crowd?

There is no in between, you need to answer 'Yes' or 'No'. If you don't decide at this point, you may have a harder time switching up after your style has been ingrained in people's minds especially with how fast the naija music industry is growing and forming. If your answer is 'yes I am better of making music for naija', continue reading, if not go to nahright for inspiration.

Don't confuse this with honing your skillz and competing with local acts (wherever you are outside naija) while coming up, it only improves your delivery and skill.

I have 2 more questions, but I will continue add them to another post.

Last Friday night I decided to stop by the Wing lab to order some wings. While I was ordering, I heard the door open behind me and the lady taking my order, Mya asked me a question with a very straight and curious look, but she asked the question so fast that I could not really make out what she was trying to ask me. So I replied with a “sorry, what?”, indicating that I needed her to repeat the question, but Mya kept her mouth shut and just swiped my credit card acting like she did not remember that she had just asked me a question 30 seconds ago.
 At first, I was confused, but then I brushed it off like it was no big deal. Suddenly, I looked back to see who had just walked in; there were four Mexican males behind me. Two grown men and two Mexican boys who were all short for their age brackets. As soon as I saw them it clicked and it was as if I heard Mya repeat the question clearly in my mind. The question she asked was “Have you ever seen a tall Mexican before?” … As soon as it registered I laughed for 2 reasons:

1. I have never met or seen a tall Mexican before
2. Mya was absolutely serious when she asked me that question and she was looking for a sincere answer, she was not even trying to be funny in any way

So I ask you the same question in all sincerity:

Everyone is different

and people do things for different reasons. I’ve listened to a lot of good self-development CDs and read tons of books about business, motivation, sales, human behavior, marketing, relationships and more. What I have concluded after years of reading and listening to experienced people’s advice is that if you are not self-motivated to DO, if someone is motivating you to perform without a deep desire or Will within you to perform or yield results, the advise you are listening to is just a waste of your time. You are just acquiring knowledge to regurgitate it to someone else. You will have knowledge but you may never see results from what you know. Do me a favor, take the poll below, I am interested in what motivates most people, there might be a common motivation.
 

All marketers are liars!

Most marketers, companies and organizations will initially tell the consumer what they want to hear because that is what the consumer buys. I was just reading a post from Seth's blog where he states that buyers only buy the CURE; anything other than the cure does not interest them. The buyer is not interested in buying a process to get to the cure, they are not interested in a solution that does not cure their need.

A consumer interested in learning French is not interested that your are offering Chinese lessons. A woman looking for a husband will not take you seriously when you tell her that you only want to kick it with her and then see where things go after 3 months. She will not buy it for too long. A crack head that needs a hit will look at you stupid when you offer him food to eat, he needs money to get high. A man of means who is primarily driven by brand names will not buy a Citizens watch, he will buy a Cartier one or better.

According to Seth, 'no one ever really has a cure for anything, but that is usually what gets sold'. The solution is to be honest with yourself; if you know that you have the process, treatment or best effort to get the cure (based on experience and proven facts), sell the cure upfront and the consumer will buy. Get Seth's book below, it explains more about the psychology of a buyer and what a marketer can do to cater to their worldview.

For some odd reason, whenever something is scarce, it tends to become more attractive. The principle  itself does not make logical sense to me, but that's just how the world operates. Basically, scarcity makes something (whatever it is) become more attractive or valuable and many people tend to want to possess that scarce position, commodity or be associated with that rare person.

On the other hand, when something is common and readily accessible to the masses for FREE or minimal investment, it somehow loses its value. People just take it for granted and see it as normal. Yes, I know its not fair, but suck it up and get used to it. If a commodity or even a human being is readily available at a single request, smallest effort or at the most affordable price consistently (except for Walmart) it is not quite that valuable to the consumer.

So just to re-iterate, whenever a person becomes scarce, they somehow become more valuable. A scarce commodity has more value than a readily available commodity (even basic economics will tell you this). A scarce opportunity is way more attractive than an opportunity that is easily accessible to the masses.

I'll contrast 2 situations. An individual has a choice between:

Read the rest of this entry »

Seth Godin sits with Sean Speaker(Facebook, Napster) and Jimmy Wales(Wikipedia)

The Video plays as soon as the browser loads, so hit the "Pause" button to stop the video.

Read the rest of this entry »

In life, you can set goals, visualize them and be passionate about them, but you can’t stop there. At this point the goals are just spoken words or written words on a piece of paper. There is a mis-conception that all you have to do is believe and magic will happen, that the goal or that which you wish for will magically appear from the heavens, nothing is further from the truth.

Read the rest of this entry »

About 3 or so years ago one of my peoples whom I have a lot of respect for asked me, "this guy where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?", but I had no real answer, because I had never thought about it. I asked him the same and he told me clearly what his were. Today, he is living the vision he had 3 years ago and I don’t think it was a co-incidence.

Where do you want to be in 5 years? What do you want to have,
accomplish, realize, experience, gain, see and feel in the next 10
years in every aspect of your life?
Sit down and write these
things down or continuously remind yourself everyday of where you are
going, believing that you will get there. Dream and have a Vision.

If Barrack did not have a vision or a dream, he would not be leading Hillary in the primaries right now. I remember when Oprah was hinting that she wants him to run in the race to be the President, in my mind I was thinking "yeah right, no one is going to vote for a black man or he is too thin to become the president of the United States", but I was wrong…  See it did not matter what I was thinking in my mind, it had everything to do with his expectations (among other things) and the number of people who supported him.
Have a Vision like Barrack people, you too can be somebody, just Visualize and dream it.

Enjoy your weekend people!

Passion

Action

Result

Self-Discipline

OR

Quit

I’ll break everything down before Monday the 11th.

I’m not going to go into any history here, but I was just thinking about what African Americans have gone through as a whole. They were forcefully taken to a foreign land, forced to change their native names (From Kunta to Tobe), change their native language, identity and forced to  lose their identity and embrace a foreign culture. They went through a lot, a whole lot and they are still standing thanks to people like MLK.
Martin Luther King Jr was God sent to lead the African Americans out of the Injustice and oppression of the past, just like Moses was chosen to lead the people out of Egypt into Israel…