Successful Musicians Podcast – Episode #52: Cultivating a Personal Brand for Lasting Success with Eric Thayne

Successful Musicians Podcast Episode 52

Interviewer: Jason Tonioli

Hey, this is Jason Tonioli. I’m a piano player that grew up believing it wasn’t possible to earn a living and support a family with music. I’ve proven that idea was wrong and I’ve met hundreds of other people who have found success with their music. This podcast features stories of musicians who have found their own personal version of success and fulfillment in both music and life. This podcast is meant to inspire musicians and help them believe in their abilities and motivate them to share their talents with others. This is the Successful Musicians Podcast.

Jason Tonioli:

Welcome to the podcast today. My special guest is Eric Thayne, who is a multi-talented piano guy, but has really found his niche in doing short form content and video. Eric, I know you’ve had a ton of experience in helping creators and general artists. You started out as a recording studio guy, but you’ve really evolved into being the coach of a lot of these creators that do video content. I don’t know whether there’s an actual world record for this, but I know you’ve done a lot of how many videos can we actually film in one day. I’ve got some crazy stories that way. I’m excited to chat with you. I know for our listeners, Eric is one of those guys that is about as down to earth as they come, but he’s also been up on the Funnel Hacking Live stage, teaching thousands of people and just very, very willing to share his time and give some advice. Welcome, Eric!

Eric Thayne:

Hey, thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me on.

Jason Tonioli:

Eric, let’s dive in. Let’s rewind the clock back to when you started out as a musician. I want people to just understand your background as a musician. The whole idea is, okay, finding success as a musician is sometimes difficult and your story is actually you’ve stepped away a little bit from the music. Share your journey, how you got there, and then we’ll tie this back in on how music is part of your life.

Eric Thayne:

I’ve been playing music ever since I was six or seven years old, started playing the piano, and my family was very musical, and parents supported that and wanted us to learn. I would play the piano and take piano lessons and learn. You go to piano lessons, and they always want to teach you classical music. For whatever reason, it just was never interesting to me. I did the basic piano lessons and I got into more advanced stuff, and then we’re playing Chopin and Beethoven and stuff. I would never practice. I could play pretty well. I never practiced the piano. You just couldn’t get me to do it. I know myself better now, but that was a clear sign that I just wasn’t interested in what we were doing. It was just really hard. I was procrastinating. I couldn’t get myself to practice. I would show up to the lessons without having practiced. Then my parents were like, what are we even paying for this for? The whole thing.

It wasn’t until I was 15 years old. At this point, I’m going on what? Eight years of piano lessons. I’m 15 years old. I got a piano teacher who changed everything for me. This piano teacher, we started out the same way. We got in, and he started pulling up classical music, and I started playing it. He actually listened to me, and I was like, I don’t really like playing this music. He’s like, what music do you enjoy? I was like, Well, more like New Age piano. If you know Jon Schmidt or Lorry Line or Jim Brickman, or those guys, that was the music that I really enjoyed playing. He’s like, okay, well, then let’s just play some of that. He started pulling up some of that music for me and having me play it. I enjoyed that a lot more. I was able to start playing those songs. Jon Schmidt was an idol of mine, and I loved his music, and I would play through all of his books and get really good at his songs and everything.

One day, I walked into my piano lesson with this guy, and he was playing this song on the piano. It was just beautiful, like nothing I’d ever heard before. I was like, what is that? That was amazing. He’s like, oh, I was just making it up as I was playing. I was like, What? You can do that? That’s a thing that people can do? He’s like, Yeah, it’s just improv. I said, that is what I want to learn how to do. I was like, That’s it. That’s what I want to know how to do. He’s like, Yeah, I can teach you how to do that. I’m like, okay, cool.

The whole piano lesson, the whole thing shifted. I started learning how to do improv on the piano. He would put music in front of me and he would say, okay, I want you to play this music. I want you to play it in time, but I don’t want you to sight read it. I want you to look at just the fundamental notes that you can find throughout it that you need to hit. Then I want you to improv something that is related or similar to what you’re looking at. I was like, okay. The first few times, it was really clunky, and I couldn’t do it. His rule was I wasn’t allowed to stop, so I had to just keep playing. It was really hard at first, but after a while, I started getting better and better and better at it. It got to the point where now I can sit down on the piano and I can just play. I’ll just play with my feelings. If I’m feeling sad, I’ll play something sad. Whatever I feel, I can just sit down and play. It’s actually a really cool creative expression for me. He taught me how to do that. I learned piano that way. I started writing music. I was always creative in composition and everything. I started coming up with my own songs, wrote some sheet music, and recorded a couple of albums. This is now going into college and everything.

Then what I ended up doing is I ended up starting a YouTube channel. I want to pursue music and try to make this happen and see what could happen with this. I started a YouTube channel where I would do mashups and covers. We would take a song that was popular, for example, and I would write an arrangement of it, and then I would go and record all of the instruments, the piano and the guitar and the drums and the synths and all that stuff. Then I would bring singers in because I’m not a singer. Never been able to sing really well. I’d bring singers in, they would sing the track, and then I would record it, mix and master. Then I would go and shoot and edit the video. I was learning video production at the same time. Then we put these things together and I put them on my YouTube channel. It actually took off pretty well. Over the course of a couple of years, I gained about 30,000 subscribers for a thing that I was just doing on the side. It wasn’t bad. It was never meant to make money. I just did it for fun, but I did these videos, and then we started doing mashups where we would take 20 songs from the whole year that were the Billboard top chart songs, and then we would mash them all up together and we’d do these crazy videos and everything. That whole experience got me connected with people and started getting me eyeballs and people knowing who I was. I started building this community of things that started happening. It was crazy. Some of the stuff that happened, some of the people that I got to work with, some of the experiences that I had.

I think probably the culminating moment of it for me was when I told you that Jon Schmidt was an idol of mine, and I grew up playing all his music. Well, I actually got to open for him at a concert. I actually played with Jon Schmidt and got to meet him backstage and everything, and that was the coolest. For anybody that doesn’t know who Jon Schmidt is, you probably heard of the Piano Guys, who on YouTube now are really popular. He’s a pianist. I actually got to play with Jon Schmidt and do a concert with him, which was really cool.

Jason Tonioli:

Probably one of the coolest human beings in general out there.

Eric Thayne:

Very good guy.

Jason Tonioli:

I grew up really enjoying his music as well. I’d not heard of him until I’d gotten back from Argentina. When I worked at Bank of Utah, we ended up sponsoring his shows. It’s a couple of mutual connections. I ended up having lunch with him, and we sponsored his Christmas concert for several years. I still remember being at a high school playing upside down on a two-piano duet with him. When nobody knew who Jon Schmidt was. It’s one of those where I think you talked about Jim Brickman. I think for every musician, there’s these individuals that inspire that next group and Piano Guys for sure. Cello sales have probably gone through the roof since Piano Guys came.

Eric Thayne:

Yeah, for sure. Awesome.

Jason Tonioli:

You were doing videos and just deconstructing what you said there. I think it’s awesome for the piano teachers that might be hearing this. I think it’s really important that they recognize and be able to recognize. Classical is maybe not the cool thing, and being able to have people play that music that they like. I’m finding that there’s more and more that are starting to teach improv, but for a long time, just the typical classical path is all that was taught. There was no YouTube back 20 years ago to be able to give you the lights to play the video game version of whatever the songs were. It’s definitely a lot.

Eric Thayne:

I think the reason why we all love classical is because it teaches you the chops. It builds your muscles. It’s a solid foundation of piano skills, and so I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I did do it for a long time, and that was how I initially learned. I think that a piano teacher should be… I’m really grateful for this piano teacher who recognized what I was interested in and what I really wanted to do and helped me go and do that because rather than me being forced into one vein of creating classical music, and then honestly, probably only ever becoming mediocre at it because I didn’t love it, he actually helped channel my talent into what I was passionate about and what I was frankly good at and helped me I don’t want to say world-class. I don’t know, that sounds weird, but world-class at it, to become really good at it to where I could actually perform. I created music and did all this stuff that got a lot of attention. Those things happened because I focused on the thing that I was actually passionate about. I think that’s important.

Jason Tonioli:

I think as I look back on my early days in piano, and I think this is almost true of probably 99% of piano students is, most of the time when we’re that 14 or 16-year-old kid, we’re not mature enough to recognize that there’s a whole bunch of other types of music we can play, and we just want to fight our mom on practicing. It’s like, I rarely practiced as well. I wish I had practiced and been more mature and be like, hey, if I can learn how to play Chopin, I’m going to be able to do a whole lot of other stuff. That’s the biggest tip, I think, for teenagers. If I can just tell them, look, be more mature about this and realize you’re laying a foundation. I think the other motivation I had as a teenager is when I was told that girls like guys who play piano, that was motivating as well, right?

Eric Thayne:

That was the big motivation, right?

Jason Tonioli:

You really had a pretty successful beginnings of a career. I mean, very few people ever even go to the point where they were making videos and doing what you’re doing. What was it that caused you to step away from music or take a fork in the road that has taken you a little bit away from music? I can tell you love it. It shows on your face how much you enjoy the music side.

Eric Thayne:

It’s not that I’ve been taken away from music. I still play. I still love to write music. We have a piano in our house, and I love listening to music. I love playing the drums. I love playing the guitar. I do still play. In fact, I found myself lately actually getting more into wanting to write more music and wanting to record more music and do some of those things. I feel like I’ve come back into it. I’ll tell you what happened. I wouldn’t want this to discourage anybody who wants to be a musician professionally. It’s just you have to make decisions for yourself. For me, I never felt like it was really in the cards. The YouTube channel in that whole era was probably the closest I ever got to it. I think even then, I was just doing it for fun. I never really wanted to be a full-time musician. I’ve always been very entrepreneurial. From when I was very young, I started my first business when I was 13 years old doing graphic design and then that turned into web development and iPhone development and branding, and then went to school for it, and then started the recording studio, started making those videos, got into video production.

I’ve been entrepreneurial for my entire life. My entrepreneurial ventures were always in creative realms because that was what I loved, that’s what I was passionate about. I got into the music thing. I started a recording studio, started helping musicians. We helped a lot of musicians to become very successful just by using content, by using videos, by producing coverage, by making YouTube videos, by using social media video content to help them to be successful. We had one artist that we worked with that we did quite a few videos for, and we had some of them go viral and get millions of views. We had one of her videos, one of her songs, actually ended up charting on the billboard charts in the UK for the singer-songwriter charts. That did really well. She ended up becoming a contest on The Voice. She was top 10 on American Idol. All this stuff happened, not that I did all of it. She’s worked very hard, but a lot of the catalyst was her creating content and putting herself out there.

I think what’s really interesting about that is that the world that we live in, and this was 10 years ago, the world that we live in now, especially, even more so, is so the traditional means of distribution and having to get in with a record label and a distribution company and all those things, all those walls are falling down. It’s becoming more and more possible for individual creators, whether you’re a musician or an entrepreneur or whatever, to build your own thing and build your own audience and have your own distribution and become successful as a musician, as an artist, as a creator, than it ever has been before. I think that’s what’s really incredible.

For me, while I actually transitioned from making music into making YouTube videos, and then I started to realize that I really enjoyed the video side of it more so, at least as a business opportunity. Then I got into the video side of it. I started a production agency, and I started working with these musicians, and then took a whole detour into online courses, internet marketing, and learned all of that, got in the ClickFunnel world and did all those things. Now I’ve actually come back to video production, and it actually almost feels like I’m rediscovering my creativity.

Who knows where I’ll go from here but regardless of whether you’re a musician or you’re a creator, an artist, or whatever it is, the fact that by creating content and putting yourself out there and sharing your talent and your voice with the world. You can build an audience by yourself that you can bypass all of the distribution channels and all the red tape that traditionally has been in there, especially in the music industry, that’s It actually makes it so that you can be very successful on your own as an individual. I think that’s really the power of today’s day and age.

Jason Tonioli:

Well, and I think a lot of the labels aren’t even interested in talking to you unless you’ve built that following. What’s been so fun to see is the key is not to knock the labels because I think there’s a good manager when you’re tied in with the label. When it’s right, there’s definitely things that those labels can provide to you. In the past, they’d take 90% of any money that was made. If you were lucky to get left with 10 cents, that was good. It’s almost flipped the other direction now. The reality is, I look at my career path, and I lasted two days in the music program at the university I went to. I ended up going and changing my major and dropping out. I was on the path thinking, oh, I want to go be like Hans Zimmer and write John Williams-type scores and do orchestra. I found out it was going to be third year, maybe fourth year of going to school that I’d finally get to be allowed to do orchestra. I’m already published. This is stupid. I went over to the business school and did marketing.

Honestly, I think as a musician, the marketing stuff that I learned was more important than any of the music I could have learned as a classical studying musician. I think that’s something that a lot of musicians in general, and anybody who wants to be successful on their own, you’ve got to put in some time to learn about the marketing side, the funnels. Even if you don’t think you want to be entrepreneurial, that’s a game-changing success factor that I see for a lot of people.

Eric Thayne:

Yeah, for sure. There’s the business side of it, right? I spent a lot working with not only musicians, but also filmmakers, but creatives in general. It’s the one thing that most of them are missing is this idea that you get into wanting to just do the thing that you do and then forget the marketing of the thing that you do. 23:16 If you want to be successful doing the thing that you do, you got to figure out how to market it. There’s a difference between creatives and entrepreneurs. This is how I define the difference. Creatives typically start with the solution. They start with, Here’s the thing that I want to do. I love to make videos. I love to make music. I want to do this thing. What creatives need to do, if they want to be successful with that, if you want to make money and grow… And by the way, the purpose of making all that money as a creative is so that you can actually go to deeper and deeper levels of your craft. You won’t be able to get there if you don’t have some funding. That’s a really important thing. Most creatives start with the solution. What they need to do if you want to be successful is that you’ve got to go and find a problem that your solution solves. That’s how you start thinking entrepreneurially as a creative. It’s like, I’ve got this thing that I love to do. If you’re smart and you want to make money, when you look at it, you’ll think, What’s a problem? What’s a pain point that I can solve in the marketplace using this thing?

Entrepreneurs are very different. They start with the problem. Okay, so entrepreneurs, people are really entrepreneurial. They don’t care about what they do. They’re not creatives. They’re not I want to make videos, they go, where’s a problem that I can solve in the marketplace? They start with that pain point, they find that pain point, and then they go and figure out a solution. Usually, it’s not even them doing the solution. They go and hire the team and bring the people together to orchestrate a solution to solve that problem. Where the entrepreneur lives on the problem side, the creative lives on the solution side. If you want to be successful as a musician, you’ve got to figure out a pain point to solve with your solution. If you want to be successful as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to figure out the creative side of how to be innovative and original and actually create a really good solution for that problem.

For me and for my filmmakers and for the musicians that I’ve worked with, it’s always been like, how can you learn just enough business skills to be able to be successful with this? It’s not that you have to completely dedicate your life to business but recognize that if you want to be successful as a musician, if you want to be able to perform your craft at a high level, you’re going to need to be successful. Otherwise, you’re just going to be struggling forever. In order to do that, you’ve got to learn the marketing and the sales aspect of it and understanding the industry of the music. If you do that and you combine those two things, then it allows you to actually grow and be successful in your craft.

Jason Tonioli:

I almost feel like musicians, especially, almost have this arrogance that somehow, oh, I’m going to go write this song and everybody’s going to… The music or the art that I create is going to be so good that it’s going to be a hit song and everybody’s going to care about it. I don’t know whether it’s just a musician thing. I’m sure it’s that way with a lot of people that create things. I do think it’s so critical for… Maybe it’s to go back to being a teenager taking piano lessons when we were too grumpy or immature to realize, okay, if I learn this thing, then I’m going to be able to do the thing I really like to do. I just feel like there’s so many musicians that, and this happens I see also as business owners, where people know they need to learn how to do Facebook ads, or they know they need to learn how to do video content, or all these little things that you don’t have to be an expert at it, but you got to at least put in some time and learn it so that you can know how to help the people around you be successful so that you can have that craft or the thing you create, get out to the world.

Eric Thayne:

I think creatives need to learn how to disassociate quality of their craft from making lots of money. It’s this idea that if I just become the best at this, then I will also be the most successful. That’s not true in the slightest. It’s hard to quantify, but I would say that probably the most talented musicians in the world, the ones who really understand music better than anyone, are people you’ve never heard of. They’re not the most successful. Look at Taylor Swift. I don’t know if it’s even argumentable that Taylor Swift is the most successful musician of our time, at least. It’s really fascinating.

Jason Tonioli:

She just passed Frank Sinatra, right? I guess she is now, right?

Eric Thayne:

Well, yeah. Even the NFL is profiting off of her now. There are all sorts of stuff going on with Taylor Swift. I think she’s a really good case study in this exact idea. Taylor Swift is a good songwriter. Don’t get me wrong. She’s a good singer. Is she the best singer in the world? No. Is she the best songwriter in the world? Probably not. Is she one of the best at marketing herself and branding herself as a musician, as an artist? Yeah, probably. The moves that she makes, if you follow just the calculated moves that she makes to promote herself, to brand herself, to whatever, or she and her team together put together, it’s incredible. That’s why she is what she is. That mix with a little bit of luck and a little bit of being in the right place at the right time and having enough talent is great. There’s a lot of people out there, and I don’t mean this to be disheartening for musicians, but you have to, at some level, just put yourself in a real perspective, a real worldview and recognize that even if you’re talented in what you do, you’re not that special. Again, I don’t mean for that to hurt. This should actually be a relief to people to think, oh, you know what? To me, on the outside, looking at the music industry, there are a lot of talented musicians out there. Millions, hundreds of millions in the world that are very talented, very good, and most of them are unheard of.

Every day I’m listening to Spotify, and it pops up a new song that I’ve never heard, and I’m like, this person’s really good, and their voice is incredible, and the music is high quality. I’m like, Yeah, but nobody’s ever heard of this person. What is happening there? The thing is, you’ve got… That’s the talent, the quality. The people that you’ve heard of are the ones that are the loudest. They say visibility beats ability. The ones who are getting the opportunities, the ones who are getting noticed, that are getting the attention, getting the eyeballs, are the ones who are making themselves visible, not the ones who have the highest ability. If you’re a musician and you are talented, like I said, this should be a relief for you. If you’re a musician and you are very talented and you’re good at what you do, I’m not saying you have to be the best in the world. Like I said, Taylor Swift is not the best in the world but if you’re good at what you do, the only key, and you’re not successful, you’re not famous or whatever you want to have, the only key is that you just need to get more visible. That’s the connection. It’s because you only have half of the equation right now. If you add in the other half of the equation, which I would recommend just start creating content, just start talking about it, start sharing your talents online, you put in that other piece, and now things will start to click for you but as long as you only have one piece of the equation, you’re never going to get there.

Jason Tonioli:

This is for musicians, but I think this applies to even for the audio engineers and some of these composers out there that maybe aren’t ever even the person that are going to be looking to be the special one that has all the followers or selling the albums. I think in general, just having more visibility and content about yourself is a key factor in finding that next gig in that next role. I’d love just your feedback, because I know you’re teaching people to create tons and tons of content. I think the thing that a lot often happens is like, I don’t want to create content. You probably lived it yourself. I don’t want to publish every day. I don’t want to do content every day. I hate Facebook. I don’t want to go on Facebook. What advice do you have for just people in the industry in general about putting social media stuff out there?

Eric Thayne:

I wanted to say, first of all, that it’s actually not so much about creating tons of content, especially nowadays. If you can just create a little bit of really high-quality content, that’s going to do so much more for you, especially as a creative. That should help people because I think a lot of creatives want to take time and be calculated and do things well. Then this idea that, oh, I have to post eight times a day, is in denial of your craft. We could just remove that. You don’t have to do that but if you can get to the point where you can post at least a few times a week of creative content on short form video or long form YouTube or whatever it is that you want to do. Some really good, calculated content can be really, really helpful. There are a few musicians out there that have done this really well. Even on the higher end.

If you watch Charlie Puth on Instagram, he shows some of the behind the scenes of his production process and how he’s pulling songs together. He’s one that is really cool. Ben Rector is another one that my wife loves. His music, and his Instagram account is really good, just the way he engages with his audience. Another one that’s amazing is Walk Off the Earth. I don’t know if you ever watch them, but they’re incredible, just the way that they engage their audience and their community. They’ll come up with an idea for a song, and they’ll do a creative rendition of it, and then they’ll ask the audience, what do you think this song should be about? Or write lyrics, and then they’ll bring in people to help them out. We’re looking for somebody to rap on the second verse of this one, and so submit all of your submissions. Then whichever one they choose ends up actually getting recorded on the song, the official song. They do stuff like that. They became famous because they started doing cover songs where they would… Have you ever seen that video from a long time ago where it’s five or six of them all playing the same guitar, and they’re playing “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gautier? That song went viral, or that video went viral, and then they do a lot of stuff like that. It’s just really creative musician things. They’re creating content that is creative and fun and unique and shows you a behind the scenes of their process and also involves the people in the community.

People follow them because they love of them and their character and their personality and everything about them, not to mention their music. Now, when they release a new song or whatever, they bring their audience along the journey with them, and then they build up all this hype towards this launch, and then they launch the track, and then it goes gangbusters. All because of the content that they’re creating, the marketing, the visibility that they’re creating for their music.

Jason Tonioli:

There’s nothing like bringing people along for the ride. I think the music can be great, but unless you’re along for the ride, it doesn’t mean as much. Just the other night when you had Taylor Swift just win the big award for the album of the year, but as she’s getting up there, she had this hook in there like, hey, I’m actually excited to announce that I’m doing the next one. Yeah. I know that was the bigger story than anything that happened on the Grammys. Yet now everybody’s going to wonder, okay, for the next three months, as she builds up to this launch of her thing, she can pepper stuff in all the way along the way, and it’s going to be hundreds of millions of… I mean, It’s brilliant. I think there’s a lot you can learn from that.

Eric Thayne:

There’s a really important learning lesson there, principle there. It’s that Taylor Swift gets up and announces that she’s writing her new album. I don’t know what numbers are. I don’t know if they’ll even come out, but I’m guaranteeing you she’s sold millions of copies of this album, if not tens of millions or hundreds of millions. I don’t know how many albums she sells.

Jason Tonioli:

She won the award. She’s on stage, and then she says, I’m excited to finally share this secret with everybody. I’ve got an album that’s going to be coming out in April. It’s essentially, I think, done. I don’t know that anybody knows as of yet.

Eric Thayne:

You can just imagine how many copies of that album that comes out in April, she’s sold, whether it’s millions or tens of millions or whatever, immediately like that. Nobody’s even heard the music yet. We don’t even know what it sounds like. It could be an album for her just talking and she’s selling all this. It’s a really interesting case study because if you think about it, so many musicians put so much emphasis on the music when in Taylor Swift’s case, people don’t even care about the music. Is the music good? Do they like the music? Yes. But they bought an album without hearing the music. Is it really the music that they care about, or is it just because they just love Taylor Swift? They just love her brand, her personality, her marketing, like what she’s built. Ultimately, everybody that I coach on content, whether they’re a musician or an entrepreneur or whatever, I always drive home this point that in today’s day and age, it’s about the personal brand. The brand, it’s the person behind the business. It’s the person behind the music. It’s the person behind the art. That is what people are fascinated in. That’s what they care about. They want to know the person. They want to do business with people. They want to listen to musicians who are people. They want to watch art that is made by people. That connection is what people are craving.

If you want to grow and be successful with anything, whether it’s entrepreneurship, music, art, filmmaking, whatever, you’d be well suited to spend a lot of time thinking about how you can build your personal brand. You want your audience to fall in love with you, not necessarily your craft or the thing that you do. When you can build that, Taylor Swift did, and you can have an audience of raving fans that just love you. By the way, even if it’s not like the whole world knows about you, if you have a thousand people or 10,000 people who love you and also love your music, but they love you, and it doesn’t matter what you do, if you switch from country to pop music, that’s totally fine. Then to folk music, you do whatever you want, they’re going to follow you because they’re endeared to you as a brand, to you as a person. They have a relationship with you more so than your music, your craft, or the thing that you do.

Jason Tonioli:

As you say that, it’s the person. I think some people, as they’re trying to think, oh, I’ve got to be this brand, the most important thing I can think of is, you need to be you. Don’t try to be somebody else. You got to be authentic and true to you because if you start trying to put yourself out there and it’s this fake made up persona, it’s weird. If you’re doing content, it’s going to eventually come out. It’s got to be truly you. I think what’s so cool is there’s so much access to be able to share with the world now that there’s people out there that will like you no matter what you look like. As long as you’re a good human being, there’s people that will be attracted to you. I think that’s fantastic advice.

As you look back on as you’ve grown as a musician and just a creator in general, what are some of the… If you could go back, let’s just say you rewind the clock back 20 years and you give yourself advice, what would you say to that younger version of you?

Eric Thayne:

I would have started creating content sooner. Content around me. I think the mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs get into, no matter what entrepreneur they are, is this idea of they only create content as a tactic or as a strategy for the thing that they’re doing right now. If I were to go back, I would have gone back even before the YouTube days or the Musician Days or whatever, and just started creating content around like, this is who I am and talking about not just the music, not just the filmmaking, not just the entrepreneurship, but all of it. The fact that I was on stage a few months ago teaching 5,000 entrepreneurs and internet marketers about how to do stuff, and now I’m on a podcast teaching musicians.

There are multiple facets of me. I’ve got this thing sitting next to me right now. I don’t know if you’ve seen this that just came out from Apple. This is another passion of mine. This is the Apple Vision Pro, this VR headset. Technology, and I’m fascinated by that and music and filmmaking and art, but also personal development and entrepreneurship and marketing and sales. All of those things make up who I am. When you’re building a personal brand, your personal brand is you. It’s the combination of all those things – your hobbies, passions, interests, morals, values, beliefs, all that stuff that makes up who you are. That is your brand. It’s really so much about just start being yourself, first of all, which I know that’s loaded. There’s a lot that goes into that but that’s the goal in a short podcast here. Start being yourself, just really getting clear on what is it that I care about? What do I believe in? What are my morals? What are my values? What is important to me? Then start creating content or, aka, just talking about those things and put it online. Talk about whatever it is that you like to I talk about. Put it on YouTube, put it on Instagram, whatever. Start creating that stuff and doing that consistently. If I had done that 10, 15 years ago and started that, which I would say 20 years ago, but that was like Myspace age. It wasn’t really quite there yet but if I had started that 10 or 15 years ago-

Jason Tonioli:

One penny per use when you’d buy an ad back in the original days, right?

Eric Thayne:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If I had started that 10 or 15 years ago and been doing it consistently up until now, think about where that brand would be now. The way to be successful with personal branding and content is you can’t stop thinking about it as, this is a marketing tool for the thing that I do right now. Think about it as, I am a human on a mission, living a life, and for as long as I’m… If you’re the type of person that wants to build things in the world, that wants to do something with your life, some people don’t, it’s fine. If you’re something that wants to, just think about it as like, I’m building this from now until the end of my life. That’s it. When you broaden that time horizon, it helps you to not think so short term about it. I have to do this now and I have to make this happen. Or I have to post every single day, but rather like, hey, I’m just going to make this part of my life that I create content, that I put it out there, that I’m making an impact on the world, that I’m sharing my message. Whatever that message is and however it changes down the road is totally fine but I’m going to commit to doing that from now until forever because it’s fulfilling and it’s meaningful and it’s me impacting the world with who I am.

Jason Tonioli:

Well, and the beauty of that is you’re going to inspire future people to explore who they are and you’re going to have a bigger chance to impact those people. I think Tony Robbins said that you don’t realize how much you’re going to accomplish in a decade. We all look at these one-year time frames of what we accomplished in the last year. We set these New Year’s resolutions. The reality is those goals are important, but it’s also important to look back and be like, in the last 10 years, look at what I actually did accomplish. As long as you’re moving forward all the time, it’s amazing to see how much we really can get done, how much we change as a person.

Eric Thayne:

Absolutely. You got to give yourself that time.

Jason Tonioli:

Last question here, and we can wrap this up. I know you got a new book coming out. Tell us a little bit about that book, and I’ve got one last question for you.

Eric Thayne:

Yeah, so about this book. It’s called Create, Don’t Capture. You’ll have to read it to find out what that title really means, but it really is a lot of what we’ve been talking about in this. It’s for creatives, it’s for musicians, for artists, for entrepreneurs, for anybody that wants to build in the world and create something. I refer to anybody that’s building anything as a creator. I really believe that we’re all creators, and we’re all meant to do that in different capacities. The book is really about how to be a creator in today’s day and age, how to see yourself as a creator, how to adopt the identity as someone who is a creator, who creates in the world. Then also, then it gets into some of the tactical work of how to actually create content and create short form videos and do it in an effective way where you can build an audience and go viral and monetize that audience and make money from it because it’s all of that together that’s what makes it work. There’s the tactical advice on how to do that and how to build the business and make money and everything like that.

It’s really a lot of the deeper meaning of what it means to become a creator and how that will impact your life. If you want to get a copy of that book, you can get it at createdontcapture.com. Like I said, it’ll be out in the next couple of months. I don’t know when this podcast will go live, but it’ll either be close to coming out or out already. You can go get it over there. If it’s not out already, you can get on the waitlist. We are going to be doing a really cool launch for it with all sorts of really cool stuff. You can check that out over there.

Jason Tonioli:

Last question now is, if you think of all of the advice you’ve gotten in your life, what’s been the best advice you were given along this whole journey that you’ve had so far?

Eric Thayne:

The best advice? Man, there’s so many. I think I would say the biggest journey that I’ve been on over the last couple of years that has changed more things for me. I will tell you right up front; this is not the sexy thing. This is not a quick tactical thing. People have seen the external journey that I’ve been on and the success and the eyeballs and the numbers and all that stuff that people see. What they haven’t seen as much of is the internal journey – the work that I did on myself to change my paradigm, my approach to things, how I think about things. One of the biggest things that I did working on myself was figure out how to get back to doing what I love because I love it. What that means is really eliminating the need to be successful, the need to have fame or success or money or attention or recognition or whatever it is that we look for deep down inside that we’re actually craving in order to, and it’s motivating us to do these things. When you can eliminate that need and really just stop worrying about that and get back to doing what you love just because you love it, what happens is that you become attractive to all of those things that you wanted.

What I always say, and I say this in my book as well, is if you’re pursuing something, it’s because it’s running away from you. Whatever it is that you are pursuing right now, whatever it is that you’re chasing, that you’re hustling, that you’re grinding to get, whether it’s an outcome, if you can learn to just let go of that outcome and say, I don’t need that. You can want it, that’s fine, but don’t need it. I’m not craving it. I’m not starving for that thing. I’m just going to get back to doing the thing that I know I’m supposed to do, that I love to do, and I’m just going to do it consistently from now until forever. What will happen is you’ll make yourself attractive to that thing. Rather than chasing it down, if you’re pursuing something, if you’re pursuing someone, they would want to run away. If you’re pursuing something that’s running away from you but if you make yourself attractive to that thing, it starts pursuing you. That’s where you’ll see real success happen.

Jason Tonioli:

Awesome. Eric, thank you so much for sharing your time and just your thoughts and advice. I know that book is going to be amazing. People need to go get that, too. Thank you so much. We should definitely continue this conversation. It’s very rare that I find a fellow piano player that has almost the exact same story as I do of practicing piano. Thank you so much and we’ll get you on the next one.

Eric Thayne:

You bet. Thank you. Have a good one.

First, if you hit SUBSCRIBE, it will help ensure that you do not miss future episodes. Second, if you SHARE this with your friends on social media, send it via email or messages, help us spread the word as well. Third, if you leave an honest review, it really helps with the algorithm so that other people can find our podcast. Finding success and fulfillment in the music industry is possible. Looking forward to seeing you in our next episode.