Over on his blog, Seth Godin just made this post about the perils of spending all your time looking for a magic lottery ticket. More than most people, Seth has the ability to really distill things down to the essence. He had a post a while back called Barry Bonds. It’s a favorite of mine, and I’ve shared it many times with various people I know trying to make something happen in the music business. His magic lottery post is kind of like the sequel, and well worth reading.
You can spend so much time looking for that powerful person who is going to change your life that there’s not much time left to do the work that might actually get you somewhere someday. In my lexicon, the search for a magic lottery ticket is a particularly deluded and futile airpower strategy.
It’s not that powerful people don’t swoop in and help make low profile people better known. That does seem to happen pretty regularly. It’s just that most of these low profile people are a lot less low profile than you realize. That whole overnight sensation 10 years in the making thing is almost always true.
When “unknown” bands get elevated after a music conference like SXSW, they’re rarely really “unknown” to music biz insiders. Probably, they have been busily working on the ground for years to connect all the dots that lead up to more powerful people taking 15 minutes to see their band play in Austin. In Seth’s lexicon, they’ve been building their tribe. To use my lexicon, they’ve built a good ground game.
From the outside looking in, it looks like they just found a Magic Lottery Ticket. But that’s an illusion. For the project was actually built to grow even if Oprah never showed.
This is a test