Be The Best YOU Possible | Wendy Day Life Skills

Hi guys, how are you? Okay, so you're sending me a lot of emails, which is wonderful. It's helpful because it lets me know what topics are important to you, and I would rather make videos that you're going to watch than videos that you're going to ignore, obviously. Um, I don't get paid to do this. Well, that's not true. I think I've made $59, um, in the past 4 months that I've been doing this at YouTube. Yay for that! Might even be $62 now. Um, but anyway, for the most part, I do not make a living doing this. I'm doing this because I really want to help you guys. So it, it's helpful to me for you to best tell me how to help you. So, um, that's what I'm doing. I'm responding to the emails that you send me, and for those who know me, um, the comments that you're making on, um, on social media. Um, it's very helpful. Thank you very much. So today I'm going to talk about life skills, um, and this is really something that's going to benefit you beyond, um, the music industry, right? Because these are things that you can use in everyday life. Um, for me, I'm always trying to find ways to be the best me that I can be. I'm always trying to improve myself, um, mentally. I should probably do it physically too. A little overweight over here. Um, but I really want to be the best mental me that I can be. That's important to me. And because of that, there are certain topics that I tend to gravitate towards. I read a lot, a lot. I read every day, so I get a lot of information through magazines, through— there's a company that takes books and they take the main ideas and points of the book and they kind of put them into a summary, if you will. It's— I think it's called Blinkist. It's a newsletter that I get weekly, and it's really helpful because they take a lot of nonfiction books, and that's what I read. I read all nonfiction. I don't, I don't really read fiction. I don't really read to escape life. I read to better myself. And what they do is they will take different popular business books and they'll kind of excerpt them so that I can read. I can sit down and read 4 summaries instead of 4 books. And I don't do that to avoid reading the book because I like the summary, what it does is it makes me go and, and pick up the book. I'm an Audible subscriber. It's like $15 a month, and it allows me to choose one audiobook per month to listen to. And, and I do that when I'm driving or when I'm someplace like the airport where I'm just sitting around. Instead of playing on the internet, I will pop on my headphones and I will listen to an audiobook. I do the same when I'm driving. My car still has a CD player in it, so I will either listen to books on CD or I will stream them from my phone by Bluetooth into the car so that I can actually listen to the books. And the areas that I tend to focus on to help myself are the areas where I feel that I could use more improvement. So many of you are asking me to recommend like what I read and what I listen to, but just bear in mind that, that I listen to stuff that's helping me grow, and you may not need help in the same areas, um, where, where I do. So the areas that I, I pay attention to in terms of life skills is time management, because I always feel like I could be doing better with my time. I read a lot of marketing books and a lot of sales books, more marketing than sales, but I always feel like I can be doing more in terms of marketing, especially in the music industry because things change so quickly and we're an industry of bandwagon jumpers, meaning, if I do something with an artist, every other person out there that's working with artists does the same thing. Or if you do something new and different with an artist, then I see you doing it, I'm gonna jump on your bandwagon and I'm gonna do that too. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's kind of how we all learn what works and what doesn't. But just understand that if everybody's doing the same things, then nobody's standing out because we're all basically doing the same things. So I read a lot of marketing books to stay current and to get an understanding of what works in other areas and what works with other types of music, you know, what works in the consumer goods industry. You know, if a cell phone company is trying something new that might work for a rapper, then I might take that idea and run with it and test it and see how it goes. I read a lot about social media marketing, um, and I read almost everything that has to do with getting better at social media marketing and digital marketing. I read a lot about Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads. Um, these platforms are forever changing, and I try to stay on top of all of those changes so that I can implement them. I personally am very slow to implement on social media, but only because social media does not directly affect my income. As an artist, it directly affects your income. So you should be focusing more on social media information and campaigns and knowledge than any other thing that I'm talking about here. But for me, it's not like I post articles on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook and it brings me clients. It doesn't. It adds to my brand, but it's very rare that someone will read an article and say, oh gee, I need to hire Wendy Day. So it's just not my number one priority. But as an artist, a musician, a producer, a DJ, um, a songwriter, a singer, whatever you do that's creative, you're building your fan base on social media. So you need to have an extremely intimate knowledge of how it works and what's best. So I would suggest that you, um, read as much as you can, whether you find it on websites that are legitimate, or whether you read books, or whether you watch videos on YouTube. Like, it doesn't matter how you get your information. What matters is that it's accurate information, meaning the person that is teaching you has some knowledge of the topic, some extreme knowledge of the topic, not just a superficial knowledge. Of the topic and that you apply what you've learned. You have to have action. You have to take steps and implement. You can't just read how to do something and hope that it transcends. You've gotta actually make movement forward to, to implement what you've learned. And that's where most people break down. A lot of people will get the knowledge, but very few will actually apply the knowledge and implement it. I read books on leadership, not a whole lot on leadership, but, you know, I run teams of people, so I'm forever looking for ways to motivate them and to be better as a leader. Sometimes my communication skills are lacking. I get really busy and I forget to update people, so one of the aspects of leadership that I really focus on is communication. You know, what apps can make it easier for me to communicate with my team, what different areas of technology are offered that will allow me to be a better leader. So I read a lot of stuff about leadership, not as much as the other areas, but it's certainly an area that I read. Also, I like reading autobiographies and biographies of successful people, and they don't have to be famous. I really don't care if they're famous. I care more that they're successful and that they've been good at what they do. And, um, I just really enjoy reading those. The last one I read, I think, was Elon Musk, which was really fascinating because he's a dreamer who happens to have the money to be able to back his dreams. And to me, that's just really amazing. Um, and then the last thing that I read is about relationship building, business relationship building, um, because it's an area where I'm very weak. And that comes back to that communication skill You know, I'm on the phone all day working. The last thing I want to do when I, you know, shut down my computer at night, which is usually around— I stop working like around 10 o'clock at night— the last thing I want to do is make phone calls to people and ask them how they're doing. You know, I'd much rather read a book or, you know, spend half an hour or an hour watching mindless TV than just so I can relax. And the thing about building relationships is that you actually have to make effort and interact with people. And that's just not something that comes naturally to me. I'm naturally an introvert. I'm not an extrovert. So I'm not somebody who just naturally reaches out to people. And I especially realized this when I first started dating Tony 5 years ago, um, and saw how he keeps in touch with people and how amazing he is at it, I realized, wow, I'm really lacking in that area. Like, like, dude is on it. He— I can, I can ask him right now how any one of the people in his circle is doing, and he'll, he'll be able to give me an update on them because he just, you know, either talked to them on Facebook or he messaged them or he spoke to them by phone or by email. But he— everybody in his circle he has interacted with in the past like 2 weeks to a month. So he knows exactly what's popping with them. And, and I really, I really respect that because for me that's work. Like, that's not something I do naturally. For him it comes natural, you know. So it's, it's, it's an area that I've really been working on and trying to build And the way that I do this, guys, is like I'll take time out of every day and I will Google for a different topic. And you know how it is when you're playing around on the internet, like one topic takes you to another topic, which takes you to another topic, and all of a sudden you go down the rabbit hole and you start, you know, you start going through different layers of information. And I'll read websites, I'll read magazine articles, I'll read like wherever that search takes me, whether it's video, whether it's articles, whether it's a podcast. For social media, a lot of it is podcasts, so I do a lot of listening for when I'm, you know, when I'm educating myself on social media marketing and how to get better. I focus Personally, I focus on Twitter and Instagram. I'm not great at Snapchat. In fact, I don't even snap anymore. I'm not great at Facebook. It's just, it's an area where, based on who my followers are on social media, I just get better interaction and I make a bigger difference on Instagram and Twitter. I know a lot of you find Facebook to be really valuable for you. Tony finds Facebook really valuable for, you know, for his, his world. For my world, not so much. I've got 5,000 followers on my personal page, and I probably know 150 of them. So it's not, it's not extremely valuable for me to go onto Facebook. I'm sure, you know, I still post there, and I post articles because I'm sure the people that follow me, that's why they follow me. They want knowledge about the music industry because that's my brand. That's what I've been doing for 25 years. But in terms of building my career and helping my clients and helping artists get to the next level, Facebook is not it for me. It doesn't— it's not helpful for me or for my clients. So I tend to research the areas that are best for me. I'm doing a lot of content marketing reading right now because I want to make sure that as I do these videos and these podcasts and the articles that I write, I want to make sure that I'm reaching enough people and people that can really benefit from the information that, that I'm sharing. It doesn't make sense for, for somebody in the film world or in in, you know, somebody who sells widgets to watch my videos about how to get a record deal. It just doesn't make sense. Um, so I want to make sure that I'm reaching a market that's mine in the most efficient way possible. Um, I also have some apps, um, that cover the news, and, um, I think it's called 360 News. I'm looking it up right now. Yes, it's called News 360. And the thing about News 360 is that you can tell it what type of information is of interest to you. You can do the same thing with Google Alerts. You can tell it the, the topics that matter most to you, and then it will go crawl the news media, the internet, the, the recent internet, and it will find articles from the past week or so, mostly the past day or two, but for the past week or so that talk about the topics that you tell it are important to you. Like for me, I care about content marketing, I care about, um, marketing, sales, I care about music business, music industry, hip-hop. So these are all topics that are plugged into my News 360 feed so that every night when I'm laying in bed and I'm about to fall asleep, I'm going through the feed to find out, you know, what articles matter. And some of them I'll read right there. Some of them will be really good and I'll email them to myself so that I can read them when I'm less tired or when I have more focus. But I find that to be a very helpful way first of all, to pass time, and second of all, a very helpful way to gather information about topics that matter to me and are of interest to me. And then the last life skill point that I'll make is that make sure as you're doing this that you're not taking time away from something that can bring revenue into your world. Meaning don't pass up money in order to read an article about the music business. Find, find a way to do it all. Find a way to make time for everything, even if it's something as simple as the only free time you have is when you go to the bathroom. Then read in the bathroom. Then that's what you should be doing while you're sitting on the toilet, basically. You know, you're gonna have to make time for the things that are most important to you and let go of the things that aren't. So I hope this was helpful. Again, it wasn't really music business oriented per se, it was more life skills oriented, but, um, I just feel that these are important things so that you can be the best you that you can be, as I become the best me that I can be. And my measurement is against myself. I don't measure myself against other people in the music industry. I just make sure that I'm the best me that I can be. Okay guys, thanks for tuning in. Bye.