I’ve been thinking a lot about the term “impresario,” and what that means in today’s culture of web 2.0, social media, and hyper-connectivity. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, an “impresario” originally meant, simply, someone who organizes, and sometimes funds, operas. The guy who really took that term and brought it back into popular consciousness is Seth Godin, known widely as the most popular marketing guru, well, of this century (so far). Mr. Godin is one of my favorite authors and fountains of wisdom, and I derive a lot of my attitudes and ideologies from him. (His book Tribes is a must read.)
In any event, I was driving along, really feeling quite bored, as I tend to do on long drives, and decided to search for “seth godin impresarios” on YouTube. The first result that came up was an episode of Tim Ferriss’ podcast, where he interviews Mr. Godin. Of course, I ate it up. I am sure that a series of re-listens will be in order for this one, but the biggest thing I got out of it was actually Seth’s dedication to daily blogging, and his view that anyone with a blog should be similarly dedicated. Seth’s words:
Everyone should blog, even if it’s not under their own name, every single day. If you are in public, making predictions and noticing things, your life gets better, because you find a discipline that can’t help but benefit you.
This got my wheels going a bit – huh? Every single day? C’mon, Seth, do you actually see that as attainable? I mean, obviously, it’s attainable for you, but what about the rest of us? But then I realized: Wait a second! What if, just what if, I were to actually start blogging every day?
The power of this question was, and is, seductive to me. I love to write, and I love to blog. I believe in blogging because it provides a forum where someone who’s “making predictions and noticing things” can bring his ideas into consciousness – without having to publish an entire book. Of course, we can still write books, but why hold off?
Things like “Thirty Day Challenges” rarely work for me. One of the ironic dilemmas I face as someone who really believes in the act of blogging is that I may not always be in line, twenty-four hours later, with the values, or the desires, or the convictions, I put my forth in any given blog post. This being the case, I will simply ask the question,
“Boy, how cool would it be if I were to write a blog post every day?”
Why would I write a blog post every day? How would such a practice serve me? More importantly, how would it serve you, the reader? These are all questions worth asking. After all, doing anything every day is a Big Life Decision – actually, it’s a decision that has to be made repeatedly, every twenty-four hours. In Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, he unceasingly drives home the conviction that the true artist, or, “professional,” shows up “seven days a week.” This is the central tenet of Seth Godin’s Impresario. Godin talks about the Impresario as being the next, higher level from the Entrepreneur because the Impresario really is an Artist at heart – somebody who’s not afraid to put himself and his ideas out there, day after day.
Probably the biggest reason I’m inspired to start blogging daily is because I have so many ideas about this Impresario and what he or she could mean for the world. For me personally, Artistry extends so far beyond just the Art, and this has becoming increasingly obvious to me in recent years. Blogging daily would, for me, be a way to consolidate my ideas, in a much more organized, trackable, chronological way. It would allow me to explore even further the implications of the Impresario, and to allow such explorations to be made public, so readers like you could follow the trajectory and offer outside experience. And it would, hopefully, offer value to the growing litany of resources and conversations about the Impresario.
The subject of Impresarios is so breathtakingly huge and has so many implications in virtually every area of modern life, that I feel a responsibility to explore it in some capacity. Blogging about it every day could be just one way to start to explore this New World. But do I have it in me to be a Daily Blogger? I guess we’ll see tomorrow.
If any of my emotionally-charged musings provoke a desire to interact with me, the best way to do that is to send an email to piersonkeatingmusic@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!