Artists are truly innovators. This might sound strange, but I see the tech founder mindset and an artist somewhere in the same category. Innovation is the key.

Music, by the way, works in exactly the same way as design.

If you treat music purely as a key tool for focus, while forgetting the message that should be embedded in every one of its aspects, you’ll keep ending up in the same place: needing “inspiration” from music itself as a thing, in and of itself.

It’s like a designer who’s desperately trying to reproduce someone else’s vision without understanding how the business owner’s audience thinks and then, to his surprise, he watches that same inexperienced owner, with absolutely no design skill, create the exact product he wanted.
The same goes for an artist: if he looks for inspiration in music rather than in interaction with his audience segment, he’ll live with constant dissatisfaction and a sense of unfairness when he sees the results of those who did build that interaction.

An 808 that hits the already overcharged nerves of a cocky, ambitious bully, and a bass guitar that creates a feeling of floating for a melancholic person who’s partially figured life out these things aren’t that far apart. But in reality, “genius” in using one sample or another depends less on pure technical skill (which seems to have no limit) and more on the ability to live the path of that tense bully, or to temporarily seek the flight of an experienced melancholic surrounding yourself with that same segment and being able to understand them 100%.

What does this guy has to do with it

Before marketing, the first industry I was introduced to was show business. Mainly because my mother was organizing events, selling songs, and producing artists. When I learned about the variety of songs out there, I learned how to play guitar and piano, and after that I mastered sound production skills to produce songs the way I see them, from scratch. Because I had an opportunity to see different perspectives of artists, sell them songs, and produce their brands, I was able to truly feel the innovation process—when you are making something from nothing.

I don’t think about steps for creating a song. I don’t think about a strategy for promoting it yet. I’m simply inside a process that can’t be predicted, but can be felt.
In no other area of my life have I ever felt so deeply “in the process” at that time, the way I did with music.
Later in marketing, I was taught to spot every action, every word, every behavioral pattern. Learn about their desires and fears. Predict things in advance. But in music, there’s only an unpredictable process that depends on my ability to forget what comes after. So why not implement it in marketing or building companies?

So if you don’t get that feeling in whatever you are working on something you’re doing might not be so innovative. This is what I have learned and implemented as a tactic in everything I work on, what I think will influence the world.

So yeah, fulfill your life with rich experiences to innovate, and… See ya!