EXPERIMENT - Ellie Goulding - #Entspresso

Good morning, Believe Nation! Today's message is experiment. Over to you, Ellie Goulding. It's key to everything, or it's key to what I do.

I wouldn't be here without experimenting like crazy. I like so many different types of music. And I hoped that I could get away with including all of those different influences on my first record, and I think I got away with it, and maybe on my second as well. But I mean, like, I would say that I'm a pop artist, I make pop music, but it's not without a lot of experimentation and also, you know, risking doing, you know, writing something that maybe isn't very good or is or is silly, you know. My voice is my instrument, so sometimes I sing things that just sound crazy, but then, like, one take out of 20 will be really, really cool, and then I keep that one, and then that's that. So yeah, experimentation is everything for me as a musician.

I think experimentation is at the key to success, not just as a musician, not just as an entrepreneur, but in general, in life. You need to experiment. You need to take the ideas that you have in your head and go out and try stuff. Because if you're not experimenting, then what's happening? Then you're just living life by the book. You're just doing things that other people tell you to do. You're doing the same things over and over and over and over and over again. You're not trying anything new, and so your life becomes this boring repetition day in and day out. And that sucks, especially as a creative entrepreneur who wants to grow and make a difference. So I want to address what I feel holds people back from from trying, from experimenting. The first part is I think people are just afraid of being judged. They're afraid of failing, they're afraid of putting themselves out there and trying something new and it not working out and people are going to laugh at them and they're going to be embarrassed. And that is not the way to live your life. If you look at successful people, the further and further ahead they get, right, the more and more success they have, you'll find that those super successful people, they don't care about how other people perceive them. I am not doing what I do because I'm worried about other people's judgments. And the people who are at the bottom, the people who never get ahead, the people who continually struggle, are the ones who are always afraid of how other people are going to judge them. You're going to make mistakes. You will try things that will not work out. And the key is you need to start building that muscle. You have to start building that experimentation muscle. Because when you put something out there and it doesn't work, what happens is you grow stronger. When you take an idea from your head and you put it out there and you try, every time you do that, you grow stronger. Every time you care a little bit less about somebody else's opinion of you, you grow stronger. And you have a choice every single day. Every single day you have a choice. To either grow stronger or shrink back down. Every time you get an idea and you do something about it, even if it doesn't work, you grow stronger. You build that muscle so you could do it again, and next time with more power. Every time you get an idea and you don't do something about it and you shrink down and you tell yourself why you can't do it and you're worried about other people's judgments, then you get weaker and you reinforce that story. Either way, you're reinforcing a story to yourself that you can do this and you can be strong, or you can't do this and you're weak. And every day you have an opportunity to reinforce either story. And I want you to start playing here. I want you to start feeling like you are powerful. I want you to stop caring about what other people think of you, and I want you to start, when you get an idea, doing something about it. And it doesn't just happen overnight, at least from my experience. It doesn't just like, you know what, tomorrow I don't care what anybody thinks of me. You could say that, but to actually believe it, I don't know. But you can do it in steps. You may not be able to go and lift this huge weight, but you can work your way up there. And every day you get a little bit stronger. And so every little tiny micro win is still a win that makes you stronger unless you move one step forward. The second thing about experimentation I think holds people back is they feel it has to be perfect. It has to be the perfect thing. It has to be all worked out before they ever get started. And that is not the path. What you have to understand is most of the learning that you'll get, most of the figuring out what it's going to be, comes from actually trying it. Whatever idea you have, you can't just come up with it in your head and write it down on a piece of paper. You have to go out and start doing it, and you'll learn by the doing of how to adjust. So as an example, one of my instructors here at Toronto Dance Salsa wanted to practice storytelling in our classes. So instead of just coming in and teaching how to do a turn in salsa, she's giving a story around it. Maybe it's her own story of how she learned it, maybe it's another student's story about how they learned it and difficulties that may have had and how they came through it. Because her goal in being an instructor here is not just to teach people how to be dancers and learn a certain move, but to build people's confidence, to strengthen their soul, to become better humans, to take what they learn here, the feeling they get, and have that have a ripple effect out on the rest of their life. That's their goal. That's what she wants for her students. She wants to be one of the best instructors of all time for her students because she had a profound impact on their life and not just teaching them subject matter. And so she experimented, she had this idea, she did something about it. And at the start, it wasn't working so well. Her stories were long, they may not have had the right theme, it was hard for people to understand, she was summarizing instead of going deep into the material. It wasn't a great first start, but that's to be expected. And she got some feedback. There was one particularly harsh message that came from one of the students that said, I would rather go with this other instructor because this one is, you know, spending too much time storytelling and I'm not getting value from it. And I showed it to her and it was really, really, you know, hard to take in because when you know that you're not doing a good job and then somebody shows it to you, right? Here's what this person said. It can be really hard. But to her credit, she didn't stop and she kept working and she kept getting better and she kept practicing and she kept adjusting and she continued to experiment. To the point where earlier this week she had an amazing class, one where everybody left on such a high that they're gonna remember for the rest of their week, rest of their month, maybe rest of the year, that class that they had with her. And she transformed in that class from just being a dance teacher to somebody who's having a profound impact on the lives of her students. And that happens in everything that you do. You're going to suck at the start. Expect it. That's okay. But don't let that hold you back from trying and experimenting. You go out there, you try something, you adjust, you get better, you tweak it, you see if you like it. So many of you have these plans in your head, these great ideas that you have, and you do nothing with them. Get them out and try. Stop worrying about what people think. Build that muscle to get stronger and realize that the learning comes from the doing. Not just the thinking. So the question of the day today is, I'm curious, what are you guys experimenting with right now that's pushing you to be better, that's pushing through some limiting beliefs you might have? What's the hardest thing you're experimenting on right now? Leave in the comments below. I'm going to join in the discussion. I also want to give a quick shout out to Nora Santo. Nora, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book, Your One Word. I really, really, really, really appreciate it, and I hope hope you're enjoying. So thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso. I wake up every morning, espresso keeps me going. Hey, Believe Nation, if you want a little bit more inspiration on experimenting, I think these bonus clips will help you.

I stopped listening to music after Kurt died because it was so emotional just hearing it.

I didn't want to hear it on the radio. I didn't want to play it.

I didn't want to join another band. And then after a while I realized that it was the one thing that was going to help me get through everything. So I started writing lyrics, I started writing songs, and I went and recorded this demo tape. A record company called and said, "Hey, we want to release your record." I said, "But what? That's a demo. That's not a band. It's a thing I did by myself in 5 days." And you played every instrument.

Yeah.

So then I started to think, "Wow, maybe I will try this.

I've never been the singer of a band." Was it a tough transition from drummer to frontman?

Absolutely. It took years, man. It took a long time.

It's interesting the way it starts. There's some moaning at the beginning, which makes—

Which one?

The first song on the record.

Birthday.

Don't know the titles. No one told me the titles. Just heard the record. Is it called— look at that exclusive— Birthday. Yeah, you say birthday in a lot. But that's a very mature progression sonically to add those kind of moaning sounds, as opposed to being the Disney person you've been known to be over the years.

Sure. But I mean, I'm not necessarily—

It's not a bad thing.

Yeah, no, of course. No, I think it's more me being able to experiment. You know, going into the booth and actually having the confidence of being like, all right. Let me try this, let me see if this works, and messing around with melodies or just harmonies or, as you say, moaning.

Well, that's what it is, isn't it, kind of?

I guess that's the right term for it in a way, but yeah, no, I think in a way I really was able to just play and that was fun.

You write in your book, 'cause you were talking about the act of writing, you say, and writing and planting roots and everything, you say magic exists but often requires some planning. But you were talking about writing, I think it seems to also apply to the music even. You have some planning but then there's that room for improv.

Well said, absolutely so, yeah, all that effort of study, and I was, the early records that the three of us made together, we were experimenting, we were learning how to play our instruments, we were learning how to write songs, we were learning how to arrange, especially through, say, Farewell to Kings Hemispheres, we were learning so much about arrangement and orchestration, in the sense of a three-piece rock band, and all of that gathered together, and then by, say, Moving Pictures, 1980. So we'd been together 6 years by that time, and then we gelled, and all of those studies, all those courses of study that we went through together with pure innocence and pure enthusiasm, suddenly they became a unified approach that Moving Pictures and from then on carried for us. And then as that time, even from that time, yeah, we continued to experiment absolutely with different kinds of songs, different kind of arrangements, orchestrations of all kinds, different producers. There's another good example. You can get comfortable working with the same producer, and some people do their whole career. But we always felt we wanted new brains to pick and new criticisms, new enthusiasms, just new opinions even.

In late 2012, I worked on a book launch for Tim Ferriss. He wrote a book called The 4-Hour Chef. It was his third book. It was published by Amazon. And because it was published by Amazon, we found out at the very last minute about 6 weeks before launch, that it was gonna be banned by every major bookstore in the United States. And this is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you if you were doing a traditional book launch, 'cause that's where books are sold. So how do we hit the New York Times bestseller list? How do we move copies if all the traditional marketing stuff is out the window? That leaves growth hacking, right? How do we do this? How do we treat this book like a startup that we're creating from nothing? One of the first things we did was a BitTorrent giveaway where we gave away something like 250 pages of the book, videos, photos, all sorts of extra stuff. It ended up getting downloaded, I think, about 3 million times. It drove 250,000 people to the Amazon page. It was the single most effective thing. I've worked on close to a dozen bestsellers. It was the single most effective thing that I've ever seen in the history of book marketing. And it came from giving a sizable portion of the book away. And so it was this proof for me that the traditional marketing, the untrackable, the untested things aren't working anymore, and that we want to experiment and we want to try new things.