garry’s subposthaven

Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

Nobody wants to read your shit.

Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.

They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

What’s your answer to that?

1) Reduce your message to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form.

2) Make it fun. Or sexy or interesting or informative.

3) Apply that to all forms of writing or art or commerce.

When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer, must give him something worthy of his gift to you.

Very humble versions of success can lead to a wonderful life adventure.

In the twelfth century, a church in the English town of Dunmow promised a side of bacon to any married man who could swear before the congregation and God that he had not quarreled with his wife for a year and a day. A husband who could bring home the bacon was held in high esteem by the community for his forebearance.

We get a lot of questions and feedback skipping, lag, or whatever you'd like to call it). A lot of it is beyond our immediate control because it has to do with browsers, internet connections, and resources used by a user's computer, but we're always on a lookout for ways to keep lagging/stuttering to a minimum.

People of Earth, there is hope.

If you use Firefox, please check out this Lifehacker post on tweaking Firefox to minimize "jumpiness" in Youtube, which should apply to JamLegend: http://lifehacker.com/5342636/how-to-fix-annoying-youtube-jumpiness-in-firefox. Basically, Firefox saves what's going on in your browser in case there is a crash, and this activity causes interruptions when you're playing anything Flash-related (including JamLegend!). You can reset how often Firefox saves the info to minimize the lag.

This involves editing the about:config settings in your Firefox. Please read the Mozilla.org page on about:config before doing the tweak if you haven't worked with this aspect of Firefox before. Please refer to Firefox's support page if you need more help.

Try out the hack and let us know how it goes. You can always read our original blog post on stuttering with its helpful hints, or go ahead and post in the comments any other ways you've dealt with the problem.

Thanks to Andrew at JamLegend. If you haven't tried Jamlegend yet, now's an awesome time. It's a fun free guitar hero game on the web. It rocks.

I just completed a research project in which we interviewed the founders of 549 successful companies in several high-growth industries – the ones VC’s are most likely to fund. We selected companies that had made it out of the garage and were generating real revenue. Guess what? Hardly ten percent of the serial entrepreneurs took venture money in their first startups. In their subsequent launches, the proportion who took venture money went up to a quarter. In other words, three-quarters of even the most experienced entrepreneurs didn’t rely on venture capital