“DON’T EVER CHANGE” … WRONG!!!

The worst advice ever shared is, “Don’t ever change. You are prefect as you are”. 

• Where are all the TV repair guys?
• What happened to home telephone installers?
• When was the last time you saw a dad on the roof of his house fixing his TV antenna?
• Ten years from now your car mechanic is going to be called your car IT guy.
• UBERs will be a thing of the past when your AI car can drop you off and return home without you.
• It wasn’t that long ago that only the most expensive cars had power windows.
• Remember when Amazon just sold books?
• 20 years from now your electrical power might be wireless to your house. (thank you Nikola Tesla ).
• What happened to the hundreds of record shops found in every town? Oh yea! MP3 Downloads
• Remember when it took a million dollars to start a video post-production house or music recording studios. Now they are called laptops.

Yea, I’m old but so will you be someday. BUT I’m still professionally relevant and have more work than I can handle.

Why?

I RECOGNIZE CHANGE, ADAPT TO THE CHANGE and “GO WITH THE FLOW”, as my daughter would say. 

They say you can’t stop progress. I agree. (BTW who are “they”) But looking back its been change and technical progress that has given me the biggest opportunities in my career.

Most of you have heard the tale of how and why I started Triple S, “Synthesizer Servicing Specialist”. (boutique tech engineering shop started in the early ‘80s).  Here is the “Readers Digest” version (that’s a publication from the past that told short versions of long stories.  It was a big deal haha).

When I was a preforming club musician I also hacked around fixing musicians gear. I landed a job in a local music store in Union, NJ, Music Town.  They happened to be one of the first music stores to sell this weird new electronic keyboard called a synthesizer.  One of the salesmen, Steve DeFuria, became completely obsessed with learning everything about programming and playing this new keyboard. I became obsessed with learning how this wacky electronic device worked internally and made sounds.

That duel obsession gave birth to lifelong friendship and launched two separate successful careers. Mine was Triple S and Steve went on to become one to the premier programmers and sythn players of that time.  I have to add most “experts” and leaders in the music industry at the time assumed these gismos, synthesizers, would be over in a couple years.

Without that dynamic shift in technology and without Steve and I taking a risk to embrace this tech the trajectory that established the rest of our lives would have never happen.

Since then the story of adapting to new horizons and new tech has been the fuel that’s driven my successfully diverse career / life. And I’m not alone. If you talk to anybody who has succeeded in the entertainment world for decades you will find at the core of that success is CHANGE and ADAPTATION to that change.

Who would have thought pushing colorful buttons on an Ableton Live would be contributing to one of the biggest genres of music?

Fifteen years ago, if you told someone your twelve-year-old sister could edit a broadcast video on a handheld device, they’d tell you were crazy.

How about going to see one of the theaters most successful musicals and instead of the music coming from musicians playing instruments, the cast is making music pushing brooms and beating on oil drums. (“Stomp” if you’er lost).

Every change creates new opportunities. New opportunities open up new creative expression. These new creative expressions take a while to evolve. Before you start criticizing something new and dropping the line, “that’s not the way it’s done.”  How about you take a minute, suck up your ego and learn something new. You might be surprised how combining your years of experience with a new tech can finally push you to the front of the line and let you decide you decide your future plans.