An artist has a lifetime to write and prepare for their first record. There are very few expectations. There is no “mold” to break. The canvas is blank.

But the follow-up record? The sophomore album? That’s a completely different story —

I haven’t posted in a while, and I know I need to catch up on a few things. I wanted to add a quick post on something I found while preparing for an interview.

I love unintentional humor, and discovered a gem when I read this sentence from All Music’s bio on the band, Trout Fishing In America:

In the early part of the 2010 season, the Boston Red Sox found themselves off to their worst start in the past 10+ years. Every aspect of the game was a struggle for them through the first 13 contests. On April 20th, G.M. Theo Epstein stated, “We’ve played bad baseball… We’re not pitching, we’re not hitting, we’re not playing good defense, we’re not running the bases well. So take your pick.”

While I have little insight on wholesale changes the club could make (especially in April), I do have one suggestion that would spark the offense.

I’m a big believer in red flags. I’ve ignored some in the past only to be burnt in the end, so I seek them out now. When I go into a retail establishment for the first time, as soon as I walk in the door, my eyes immediately go to the ceiling. If I see more than 1 or 2 burned out light bulbs, I know there’s an 85% chance this will be my only visit to the store. Similar to the “broken windows” theory, I’ve found that if a retail location doesn’t pay any attention to changing their burned out light bulbs, they’re probably not paying much attention to other details as well.

Back in late February I blogged about becoming more productive and tracking how I spend my time during the work day. It has been a great help, and since becoming methodical about the process I have seen a great boost in my productivity.

In March I began scheduling my time in advance, which was stage two. Obviously, I failed to schedule any time in March to blog about stage two so I wasn’t as successful as I would have liked to have been, but it was a start.

I’ll be launching a new site on April 10th: 109Ways.com. It will feature 109 Ways to Improve Your Business. If you drop by between now and then you can sign up for the FREE 109Ways newsletter and get a sneak peek of the information I’ll be presenting on the site.
More soon!

There’s an old exercise in logic that goes a little something like this: Imagine you flip a coin 100 times in a row and on each one of those flips the coin turns up heads. What are the odds that the coin will land on heads on the one hundred and first flip?

The logical answer is 50%, but our instinct takes over and we look for the reason why it came up heads 100 times in a row and wager that it will be heads again. Is the coin heavier on one side? Is it a two-headed coin? Is it rigged in some other way?

So, when we go out to watch live music in Texas and see that the audience is evenly split between male and female, when we look at who is buying Texas music and see that it’s evenly split between male and female, and when we look at the people working in the Texas music industry and see that even there, if not quite equally split, women are well represented, we can’t help but look up at the stages of Texas’s dancehalls and honky-tonks and wonder where the female artists are.

Moving into an extremely busy time of the year with two dozen balls in the air, I have focused on increasing my productivity. If I can squeeze an extra hour out of the day as a result of being more efficient, that’s 6 extra hours a week. If I work 50 weeks in a year, that’s 300 extra hours. That’s the equivalent of accomplishing an entire extra month of work in a year. That’s pretty powerful, especially considering that right now I’d settle for an extra 15 minutes.

A search on flickr for Gruene Hall today yielded 2,597 results. A Google image search returned almost 140,000. A lot of those pictures are largely the same, but photographers over the past few days have had an entirely new kind of photo opportunity at Gruene Hall – remodeling.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by comparing the size of their television to the size of their library. Our family owns two big screens, but they are dwarfed by the size of our library.