Keep Grinding
The perfect combination of philosophy and technology
On a nice, warm evening in Barcelona, Mike Cernovich once gave me two of the most important pieces of advice I’ve ever received. They made a major difference in how I approached projects and how I finished them.
Stop being such an upper middle-class pussy.
Scratch and claw.
I’ll go into the details of what those two things mean some other time, but these statistics explain the necessity of the latter:
Frank Sinatra: 1,200 songs, 209 hits, 17 percent success rate
Elvis Presley: 710 songs, 40 hits, 5.6 percent success rate
Babe Ruth: 8,399 at-bats, 714 home runs, 8.5 percent success rate
Pablo Picasso: 147,800 pieces, 30 masterpieces, 0.02 percent success rate
That’s why I don’t worry about never having written a mainstream bestseller. I’ve only written around 20 books so far, although if we’re successful in developing the Byron AI, I anticipate that I’ll write 100 or more by the time I’m done.
Suno has already permitted me to increase the number of songs I’ve written from 20 to over 100, and it has pretty obviously improved the quality of them as well. And my newly developed ability to add visuals has now led to two much-more skilled musicians asking me to collaborate with them and help them bring their musical visions to life.
FLOAT DOWN THE RIVER by Soulsigma
This is a widescreen version of my fourth attempt at a video, and I learned a lot from making it, chief among those lessons being don’t start with a vertical orientation and convert to horizontal unless you want a lot of extreme close-ups, do it the other way around and then drop in an occasional new shot when necessary. And this isn’t even the best version of the song; it’s actually a Soulsigma cover of a Vibe Patrol original which will, eventually, get its own video.
The point isn’t whether it works or not, and it isn’t whether you win any approval or not, the point is that you keep moving forward, you keep improving, and you keep creating the new possibilities for future success. That applies to everything, from people to projects.
The song, of course, is more about patience than persistence, but then, patience is a necessary element of persistence.
Keep grinding.
"The more I practice, the luckier I get" - Gary Player
I realized a few years ago that I was letting the perfect be the enemy of the good too often, and was consequently becoming less productive.
Better to leave a good poem written, or a decent song finished than to leave 1,000 unfinished pieces of detritus floating out to the horizon because they weren't perfect.