Episode 496: Pure Art: The Neal Pert Lesson on Staying Fresh with Mitch Joel

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind, where we get real world insights on winning from people who have accomplished amazing things. I'm your host, Larry Wydell, and let's get going. I'm here talking with Mitch Joel, and it's a lot of fun, Mitch talking with you because I know you know about winning and success, and I know you know how to communicate it because you've done so much of it in your life. And there's a lot of people that have a lot of progress they could make if they would, like, open up and share a little bit with other people, get out of your shell. It's people that are high achievers. It's easy to want to get covered up with so much stuff. There's so much to be done. You want to do it yourself. But then you just become. You narrow your world and things start to go stale. You know, as soon as you master something, it starts to go sail. I had a. This comes up all the time. If you're a concert pianist and you get paid to go around the world, if you're still not learning new music, you're going to get bored. You're not going to be able to get yourself to practice. In fact, there was a stage Eric Clapton went through on this in his career, and they were interviewing him for. Someone like yourself was interviewing him for Hard Magazine or some kind of, you know, magazine out there. And he was saying, you know, like, you know, we're talking about how I play. He said, but the thing is, after a certain point, you realize everything's been invented on the guitar. You know, double stops and pulls and pushes and slides and, you know, everything's been invented. Dinner tapping and, you know, but he. That was where he was at that point in his life, you know, probably a bad place.

Yeah, it was probably a bad place.

It was a bad place.

I think there's a couple of thoughts that I have when you. When you talk like that. One is Neil Peart, who recently passed away, the drummer for Rush, which is one of the tougher moments. Again, Covid. Thanks, Covid. Neil, very late in life relearned how to play. I don't know if it was for physical or psychological reasons, but when he relearned how to play, the way he plays, in the complexity of Russian progressive rock and what they do, it was not only great, but a whole other way of thinking about the instrument for him. That led to another experience for the listener. So even, you know, the whole, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I think is a bit misplaced because we like to think it's always the young person who comes. I don't necessarily prescribe to that, but the other analogy I would say is, but let's say it is always the same. So I speak 50, 60, 70 times a year on stages all over the world. And I can tell you that even though sometimes the content, most of the time, the content is exactly the same. Every show is a different show. Yeah. How can it be that you two can't be tired of playing Sunday Bloody Sunday after all these years? And the answer is, if you played live or did anything in the live experience, you realize that that part, the performance of the song, is actually a small part of the whole experience. There's a different audience, there's a different moment, there's a different energy, there's a different person on stage, there's bands, there's dynamics, there's lighting. There's all of these things that every time make it very new and different and also create the potential for something else to happen in that moment. And I prescribe more to that. So people will say, oh, you know, you don't do this bit in your speech anymore. Do you still do that? Whether I do or I don't, it's different every time, even though it's actually the same every time, but it's not. And I believe that to be true about anything that we create. You have artists who are doing fundamentally the same work over and over, but it's fundamentally, completely diametrically opposed to anything, you know, they've ever done. And that's where, you know, we asked earlier we could full circle this. Been at this for about an hour. You full circle back to pure art. That's what I mean is that it's very different. Like, even now, we're doing this by video. And I've done a lot of keynotes. Virtually. My mindset is that it's very different when I give a keynote virtually, it's almost like the recorded album. And when I'm there in person, it's like a live experience. One's not better than the other. They're both really enjoyable and really fun to be a part of. They're just really different. And that every time I record that album or the next album, it's going to be different. And every time I give that to you, we can apply those lessons to our work. That every day you show up, it's not the same zoom meeting and that's not the same to do list. It's another experience. That's going to maybe trigger something in you or a boss or a team member. That's going to be the way in which again, to circle back to the other thought of going long and deep. It's not the same thing over and over. And the minute you believe that, you have to break that cycle.

I have a question for you with Neil Peart. I don't know how closely. I don't know how closely you listened to him. I couldn't listen. I couldn't listen and tell the difference. But the funny thing was about that story was when he finally came back to his band and got in the groove and he's got this new thing now, he's playing his new way, the first reaction from the rest of the band was, he sounds the same to me.

Yeah, but. But it was so different for him. And I mean, the truth is, you know, I met Neil a couple of times over the years. Neil was very private out of the other, out of the trio. I happen to know their management quite well. And, you know, again, at the time, I mean, again, you talk about the regrets you have in life. I try not to have many regrets, but there were countless years that the band would come through town and I'd say, I'll catch them on the next tour because I just seen them enough and a lot. Never enough now. But, you know, I'm going to have the pleasure of sitting Al Getty, in fact, semi recently when he did his big bass book and had him on my bass podcast. And just that I always, you know, you kind of listen to artists like, oh, my. Our latest album is our best album. Your eye roll like this. You know, anytime you play a song, everyone goes to the bathroom live. We know, we know. But they truly believe it in the sense of they feel fresh and creative. And I feel that audiences are often very quick to dismiss that. And what I mean is we're very easy to dismiss the familiar as what we like.

Right.

It's a very good way to think about your life and your work. It feels good because I've heard that song Spirit of radio for 20 years. I've heard it over and over again. So, of course that's familiar feel, it's warm, it feels good. But that doesn't mean it's better and it doesn't mean it's the greatest. It doesn't mean it's the latest. It's a sentiment, it's nostalgia. There's a lot of factors that play into it. And we're human beings and we tend to cycle Back to those moments. I like to believe artists who say that this is their best work, because I believe they're truly trying to create something new and different, and that's something we can all aspire to.

Yeah. Yeah. It is amazing that they'll all universally say this is. You know, there's certain patterns.

Some don't. Some don't. And some also just stop recording and you know that they're just going out to play their. And again, that's also. There's nothing. I enjoy that more than anybody. There's nothing more than amazing than sitting through decades of. Of a. Of. Of a discography.

Yeah.

That becomes an anthology that you can literally pinpoint. I mean, I wasn't thrilled with the last performance of Genesis, especially where Phil Collins was at physically.

Right.

But I could peg. I mean, moments that, you know, weren't mine, that were my brothers, but I know that they went through. And I heard that song as the soundtrack to that. That's very transformative, too. I'm just saying it's not the only thing.

What if, you know, when you speak, what is the one main thing you want people to. It's like a book, an article, a song. There's one main thing. It's hard for people to walk away. I went through years, decades of recruiting training, and then there would be highlight meetings where you'd have the stars come in. I always tried to get it at least one main phrase or idea that kind of, you know, really bounced off my spine a little bit, you know, that I could take with me out of there. So I would, like five years later, I can't do it now, but for a long time, I could pretty much tell you every major event I went to, because I had a concept that somehow came alive more than I'd ever realized it before. It's always something I'd heard before, but it, like, came alive by the way you're talking right there, the way they presented it, the way they went through it, and all of a sudden I got it. When you do your speaking, what's the main impact of main message and impact that you like to have?

Yeah, it's a tough question to answer because what I hear, my brain translate that as just give me the punchline. And a lot of times the punchline isn't the best part of the joke. This is the fact that. But I would say that there are two fundamental thoughts that I want people to think about. One is that as complex as technology, innovation and disruption seems to you, the average consumer is seamlessly and Easily adopting it and begging you to do the same. So the example would be Tinder. You swipe right, swipe left, and you can find someone to mate with. How hard is it to find the phone number on your website? I mean, just that as an analogy. Right. The cycle is much more complex to find someone to mate with. And yet I can swipe right. And if that person swipes right or left, I don't know that my wife doesn't let me date. But I'm told one of those is. So there's that. And I believe that new technologies, when done well, change actual behavior of consumers and how they buy. So that would be a little nuance on that idea. And the next one is that, well, how do you win on that? And the answer to how you win on that is you have to make your complexity invisible to everybody else.

There you go.

Now, that might be a simplistic pattern that I didn't create that rule. But I believe at the end of it, what the dialogues, the conversations you have ultimately with clients and audiences is them reacting to. Well, you know, it's easy for Apple to do it or Amazon to do it. And the answer is whether it is or isn't, they're making that complexity invisible to the consumer. That's adopting the behavior. That's the area I'm fascinated with. I love that area.

You know, and who's really masters of that is Disney. You know, their parks. So the most high tech, technologically advanced, their training of their people, you know, all of the machinery to get those rides they hide. You know, when you think of Disney. Yes, People where they think of Disney as fun, you know, it's like, you know, that's fun. But what it is is the most technologically advanced, complex in the world, or as advanced. You know, you could send, create rockets and send them into orbit with the technology and the brains they have working at Disney. And it's all under the happy veneer. So it's a matter of providing the complex experience, but in a way that doesn't burden the user.

Yeah. I would even take it to a different level. When I think about Disney and you think about what their most recent growth has been, you look at Disney and you go, well, it's just easy. They just copied Netflix. Yeah, maybe. But there was a whole lot of things happening behind the scenes in terms of licensing and successful that brought them to a place that could compete at that level with it. And this is coming from people that are primarily known for physical experiences, not digital only experiences. Now you could look at their broadcasting arm and make arguments about ESPN and on and on. But that, that to me is. Is what makes it beautiful. That when you're talking about it, you didn't even mention Disney or espn.

Right.

And when I think about it, I think about those properties.

Right.

And that's the beauty of a very complex system that makes it very invisible and easy to everybody else.

Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Mitch. This has been a lot of fun. And tell us again, your podcast, what would people get out of your six Pixel podcast? And then you have your bass podcast.

Sure. Well, yeah, if you go to 6pixels.com, that's my general hub and that's where you'll find the podcast. Every week you'll find other pieces of content. Every week I have a link exchange with two other very smart people. So you get six great links for choosing one for each person. So it's. That's the way it works out to six radio hits. Other things, I typically will write one type of thought piece a week as well there. The podcast is generally like this in the sense of I'm trying to have very powerful conversations with people around topics or books or areas of expertise that I love and I'm passionate about as well. So it's less of a Q and A and more of a conversation. And I really took and replicated that model to have with the bass players, which you can find@notrebel.com you'll see the podcast there. Notrel.com isn't my site. It's another site that happens to be the largest space for bass players and that really was just a way to highlight unsung heroes in music and live shows. So, yeah.

Fantastic. Well, thanks so much. You've been very generous, very open and will you. Your speaking engagements, are they open to the public ever or.

Sometimes they are, you know, sometimes they are, yeah. Less on my website and more on my social. So if you follow me there, there are definitely association based events that are open to the general public or the industry at large. So that happens, you know, several times a year. And, and yeah, I don't typically, I'm not one to be beating my own chest. So you don't hear me. The content that I create is for the audience. You know, what value can I give to you? And I try to make it less about me. There are enough people talking about how great they are. You don't need to hear somebody else talking about it.

Well, I've found a lot of high achievers. The hardest thing to get them to do is to tell you what they've done. You know, it's just like I built the first. I built the Empire State Building. I built 10 of the 12 major, biggest buildings in New York City, but you'd have to drag it out of them. You know what I'm saying?

But so nothing wrong with a little humility in this world, Larry. It's fine.

Not alone in that. And I think that has a lot to do with not letting yourself get in the way of making things happen and also passing the credit on to your team and the people that help you do all these things. And so thanks so much. This has been great. I've enjoyed it.

Pleasure connecting. I appreciate your time. Thank you.

That wraps up this episode. Consider leaving a rating and review if you like what you heard. In addition, I have a free video for you and it contains my best insights from 20 years of running my own business and also coaching million dollar earners. You'll find it@whitelownwinning.com webinar. Thanks for listening and do it big.