Get it Together (Part One)

This is a series I’m working on with Garett Heaney, editor of Wishtank magazine and a friend of mine.  We’re having a cycling discussion about organization, motivation and focus.  I hope it’s useful, and please feel free to contribute advice of your own.  I would appreciate the added value, and so would anyone who reads this.

--thirtyseven

A few days ago I got a note from Justin Boland (Wishtank’s Director of Research) telling me that he is planning a nationwide music tour with Wombaticus Rex, which will be leaving Vermont and heading down the East Coast very soon. For those of you who read our sister publication Brainsturbator, and you really should, you may have noticed an article on Ben Mack, a couple days ago. Mack is a marketing genius with a proven record of success. I’ll leave it to the Brainsturbator article to shed light on the value of Mack’s work, but I wanted to publish a conversation I recently had with Boland about his own productivity as a musician, author and marketing entrepreneur. It turned out that Justin had some questions of his own for me, so we’ll publish that segment of the conversation in part two of this Q&A. Please feel free to join our conversation and send any questions to editor@wishtank.org. We’ll address these in a future mail column.

Meet Justin Boland:

WT: You’ve told us on many occasions that you have multiple personalities, and, as of six months ago, that you lacked a CEO within yourself to manage your employ. In our daily communication over the past weeks, I have noticed the development of this executive officer. Are you conscious of this side of your personality, and do you consciously put him/her on the clock in order to fulfill your tasks today?

Boland: Well, I woke up to the fact that having a dozen outlets makes me twelve times less effective.  The biggest push of my past few months has been integrating myself into something leaner.  My name is Justin Boland at the end of the day, and I wake up in the same body I went to sleep in.  A lot of the old pranks I was doing, like DJ Multiple Sex Partners, are going to get tossed over my shoulder as I march into 2008.

I am the CEO.  Nobody else could be, it’s not something I could “install” inside my head—I’m either being it, or I’m dicking around and being lazy.  I really have come to see that all the different sides of my personality were mostly just me being self-indulgent.  All the personas were experiments.  I don’t regret any of this, but I’m not going to keep doing it, either.  My focus right now is live performance, which is the best form of testing and feedback I’ve ever found.  In the past year I’ve gotten digital promotion down pretty well, but it’s only ever a supplement to actual communication with actual people.

I’m also very aware of the fact I’ve shouldered responsibility for the careers of my friends.  Starting World Around Records has forced me to get my shit together because the only excuse for not doing so would be “I allowed myself to fail.” As someone who recently changed my life says, “I would rather chew glass for 18 years.”

WT: How do you bring your ideas, products and services to other people? What are the critical lessons you’ve learned about marketing and what does your production:marketing ratio look like?

Boland: I’d say the production to marketing ratio is probably one to five.  A major reason for that is just where I’m at in the process—I know how to focus myself and write articles, I know where I need to be in order to write good songs, but I’m still doing the trial and error shuffle with marketing.  I’m also a firm believer in maintaining authentic human contact with anyone and everyone who appreciates what I’m doing, and that does eat up a lot of time.  I don’t see that as a waste, though, that’s just an investment.  And the best one I can make, at that.

WT: You are an emotional human, this is transparent in the art that you produce. As an entrepreneur, how do your emotions factor into your productivity? Do you find your feelings become a hindrance to your professional work, or have you managed to harness them in a way that benefits output?

Boland: Actually, my emotions have never been the problem.  My hindrance was my ego, and through deliberate ritual and external circumstances, my ego has been beaten into a coma over the past 12 months.  Is that an arrogant thing to say?  I find myself more settled than ever, because instead of being cocky, I’m just aware of my current power and future potential.  No amount of whiskey or cocaine can compare to being settled like that.

Working in the music business, it took me awhile to really wake up to the fact it’s a business.  It’s not a talent show, there are no objective judges.  You need to learn to work with anyone and everyone, regardless of how you feel about their music.  There really are gatekeepers, and even if they’re less than rational human beings, you need to be kind and polite to them.

Basically, no amount of talent exempts you from being nice.  Axl Rose learned that the hard way, I was lucky enough to figure it out locally before I took my act nationwide.

WT: How does meditation figure into your routine as an artist, author and entrepreneur? How do you exercise your mind when you are separated from books, pens, computers, musical instruments and human beings?



Boland: I still don’t meditate enough.  Basically, these days I travel.  I left my laptop behind for my summer vacation to Ireland and it was great, ever since then I try to stay away from computers as much as I can.  Booking a nationwide tour that lasts all of 2008 should be a highly effective way to get out of the house.

I got way too into being a hermit scholar in the past year, which was inevitable since I was running around 10 websites and I’m an endlessly curious primate.  I’m fighting my way back into my body these days.  Actually, more than meditation, I achieve equilibrium and inner peace by working out. I started doing that during a very dark time a couple months ago, and I’ve stuck with it ever since because I’m probably addicted to the endorphin high.  It’s cheaper than weed, and it also has me back in police-evading shape.

WT: What is the most important lesson you have learned about directing your energy in the past year?

Boland: The flood of information we exist within is not your friend.  In fact, it’s your worst enemy.  It hates you and it does not want you to succeed in life.  In China, they control the flow of information like stubborn dinosaurs.  Here in the free world, they take the opposite approach and flood the channels with bullshit.

What I’ve learned is that the bullshit isn’t even the bad part.  The bad part is what I call the Merely Interesting.  I have a very expansive and curious brain and I have a lot of background knowledge in way too many subjects.  So in the course of any given hour online I can find fifty articles that are very interesting to me, but every single one of them is completely useless, just hollow distractions and data junk food.

I’ve learned to keep a firm focus on the projects that will make me money.  I say that without qualifications or apologies, because as I write this, I’ve got $3 cash and three months of tours planned out.  I’m not going to be an effective or useful human being until I get my shit together and that’s what this interview is all about.