Steve Jobs Danced To My Song

https://medium.com/where-you-lead-i-will-follow-indeed/9e805c0f482d

by shawndumas • 13 years ago

240 29 13 years ago

medium.com

speakme• 13 years ago

Great example of resourcefulness and creating a path to success where no path existed before!

davidgerard• 13 years ago

The key bit? Those songs were number two-hundred-and-something and number four-hundred-and-something.

There's a lot of value to doing one of something every day.

I'm busy working on terrible music. If I do a few hundred, I might suck less too.

gdubs• 13 years ago

Holds true for many things. Our photography teacher told us on the first day that the secret of good photographers is that they take a ton of photos, every day.

ddoolin• 13 years ago

That's why I try to write some code (or at least read about it) every day, even if just for a little bit. I'm not sure where I'd be, skill-wise, without it.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

That sounds like the lead in to a joke, "Every day I write some code ... if I'm feeling lucky I try to compile it."

I agree though that it is insanely amazing what happens if you do a bit each day.

brandall103• 13 years ago

I just listened to the song and it is quite remarkable he put that together so quickly.

Rivers Cuomo from Weezer has claimed to have a very prolific songwriting approach as well, apparently at least for periods of time doing a song per day.

Apparently during the first couple years of The Beatles' songwriting career John and Paul would knock out songs very fast, within hours - they actually 'scheduled' time to work together in a time-boxed fashion, so they could fit in songwriting time around their otherwise hectic schedule. Now they didn't produce that many throwaways, but in a period prior to this over several years they learned ~500 songs by ear. They learned these songs well enough live and used them as tools to figure out how to light up a crowd, and more or less had a foundational vocabulary from which they moved forward with.

baddox• 13 years ago

In songwriting circles, the two most common pieces of advice are "write tons of songs even if they're not great" and "finish all your songs, even the ones that aren't great." It's very similar to common advice in computer programming circles, and presumably any creative discipline.

drifkin• 13 years ago

Rivers also methodically analyzed many songs, including all of Nirvana's songs to help him with his songwriting. He writes about his songwriting process in the liner notes for "Alone II", an album of his home recordings. The liner notes are amazing. He goes through each song on the album and explains the back story, often mentioning what kind of methods he used to write that particular song.

I dug up an old Rolling Stone article where he talks about his "Encyclopedia of Pop". They also mention him writing several hundred songs in 1999:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080228012507/http://www.rollin...

The names he gives some of his methods are pretty excellent. Some examples:

* Intellectually acquired emotionally volatile concept: http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Intellectual...

* Incipit-Melody-Guitar-Develop-Tea : http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Incipit-Melo...

* Arbitrary-Progression-Distortion-open-Strum-Intro-Melody-Arrange: http://www.weezerpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Arbitrary-Pr...

easy_rider2• 13 years ago

Not so hard if you have your (digital) equipment setup right. A lot of bands used to do almost everything in one recording. And now that is before the digital age.

pellias• 13 years ago

Stephen King gave the same advice as well "Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer." (quote from wiki)

pseudometa• 13 years ago

The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKIcaejkpD4

Gravityloss• 13 years ago

That's quite good I must say.

Buetol• 13 years ago

Video of the conference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8tXyfjfnB0

Really nice presentation, as always!

scott_karana• 13 years ago

Thanks! I wasn't sure why he missed including that in his post.

tootie• 13 years ago

It's funny because I saw a queue of people outside the AT&T this morning waiting to bring back iPhones they'd gotten for christmas.

antr• 13 years ago

Great story.

Watching the Jobs / Antenna Gate presentation again just reminded how well Apple manages crisis. Other companies/startups could take note.

VishalRJoshi• 13 years ago

If you break up the presentation into sections: - Hook with related humor (great song by Jonathan!!) - Acknowledge the issue at hand briefly - Show the positive side first, back up with hard data, show the bigger picture - Trivialize the negative side, back up with hard data - Ensure that people know that you take even trivial problems too seriously and act for your users - Still uplevel the game and offer generous solutions to what you deemed were trivial problems - Sandwich the problem with good news at the end again and promise a brighter future

There is a good wisdom in there about the way to handle big corporate crisis. Clearly Steve had not left half of his family back in Hawaii for a trivial issue !!

Thanks Shawn & Jonathan for reminding us of this great lesson in history!

wellboy2• 13 years ago

It's funny that artist have to go through the exact same experience as entrepreneurs.

No one believes in you, everybody tells you to get a job. But no, you believe in your ideas and just knowww that one of them will be a hit.

So you publish the next app and the next, some of them completely fail, but some get a bit of traction. Then you improve and you improve and bam, after several years of hustling you're the "overnight" success. ::)

Exchange apps with songs for musicians, paintings for painters, novels for writers.

normloman• 13 years ago

Yeah but they are telling you to get a job for a reason. Because chances are, you'll never make it big as a writer, painter, or entrepreneur. And te ones that do make it are so dedicated that nobody can change their mind anyway.

JeremyMorgan• 13 years ago

Yes, but how many people with loads of potential give up too early? Something to think about. I generally encourage people to shoot for the stars. You may never make it big but at least you gave it a shot.

kirk21• 13 years ago

He was so inspiring! Got a bust for christmas; my mom finally got the hint ;) http://www.scscale.com

rexreed• 13 years ago

Jonathan Mann is great -- he was actually inspiration for a business I've been working on. The idea is to keep working on things steadily and continuously. As he says, 70% of what you do will be mediocre, 20% will be crap, but that 10% will be golden. Work the numbers and do something every day. I like that philosophy.

I think Jonathan Mann's spirit is very positive. I do think his skills have plateaued tho -- I'm hoping he can make a breakthrough soon. He once did some work with a bunch of other artists in a collaboration and that stuff was really awesome. Check out that work at http://jonathanmann.bandcamp.com/album/song-a-day-the-album

alixaxel• 13 years ago

Awesome story, and what a cool guy. =)

easy_rider2• 13 years ago

Wow, when I clicked on the link and the overly pixelated 4 second animation filled my screen, I actually laughed out loud and thought "Well done! Nice parody on all the "Steve Jobs once gleamed at me " or "I spent 2 years in college with the neighbor of Steve Jobs" articles.

Then it was for real. And I cried a little bit inside.

Steve Jobs Danced To My Song

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