Good reading for those trying to make some changes

Another great article that I read and would like to share!!!
Your Daily Habits
Your future is hidden in your daily routine…

Do you have the habits of a successful person? Your habits alone determine who you become. Your habits alone determine if you succeed.

James Allen said, “We are anxious to change our circumstances, but we are unwilling to change ourselves.”

Put it another way, we are anxious to succeed, but we are unwilling to create the habits that cause success.

The Law of Habit

The Law of Habit states that the more frequently you perform a task the easier is becomes to perform that task the next time, and consequently, the more difficult it becomes not to perform the task.

If you go the same way to work everyday, you would find it difficult to go in a different direction, simply because we are creatures of habit, and we protect the habits that we have, good or bad.

Over 90 percent of the tasks that we complete are rooted in habit: the way we put on our shirt, brush our teeth, skip flossing at night, all are rooted in habit.

Our habits are a very powerful tool, and when used to our benefit can be life altering. However, they can also be used to our detriment.

The Purpose of Discipline and Will Power

Discipline will only get you so far. In order to make progress you need to tap into the power of your subconscious mind, the source of your habits.

The subconscious mind is the “work horse” of the mind because it controls your habits; it manages the “habits” that accounts for your life.
If you have good habits programmed into your subconscious mind, then you will do good things, and you will succeed. And, if you have bad habits programmed into your subconscious mind, then you will act accordingly.

Discipline and will power are to be used to create the right habits, and then those habits will give you the life you desire.

Change Your Habits

Today I want to encourage you to change some of your bad habits to good habits and use the power of “habit” to change your life.

If you can learn how to have a perfect day, then you can have a perfect life, you just have to duplicate that day through the tool of your habits.

Your habits are a servant, and they will enslave you or free you. You choose by using your will power what they do. When you consciously make a choice over and over again, it eventually becomes a habit. Your desires are turned over to the force of habit, and you become the slave of the habit.

If you’re wise you will use your will to create beneficial habits, and those beneficial habits will grant you the life you desire.

The Profound Power of Habits

Your habits will take you further than your dreams. You don’t need a miracle, and you don’t need to be lucky. You need the right set of habits.

If you have the habits of a rich person then you will become rich, if you have the habits of a thin person then you will become thin, if you have the habits of a successful person, then you will become successful, it’s all about the habits that you have.

It’s important that you discover the habits that cause you to succeed in a given area. Once you find what those habits are it’s just a matter of using your will to repeat that activity over and over until it becomes a habit.

Getting the Right Habits

If you can get the habits right, the results will come automatically. A habit of investing large sums of money will eventually make you rich; a habit of eating the right foods and exercising will eventually give you the body of your dreams.

Will power can’t do this for you because you only have a limited amount of will power. That will power is used up every time you resist a habit and even when you’re under stress.

Will Power

Will power shouldn’t be used for avoiding habits directly, but for creating new habits; a slight but crucial difference.

That’s why it’s critical that you muster up all of your will power to create a habit and not use your will power as the source of controlling your activities. You can’t consistently use your will power to keep you from doing your habits. You must use your will power to create new habits.

How do you create new habits? By performing the task over and over again at the same time, in generally the same way.

When you do this you will have a new habit, which will take control over the old habit. It won’t be easy at first, but once the habit becomes set, it will be as difficult to break the new habit as it was to break the old habit.

Breaking Old Habits

The best way to break a habit is to replace it with a new habit. You replace eating bad food with a habit of eating good food. You replace not working out at 1:00pm with working out everyday at 1:00pm. Not saving money with saving money. You find the opposite of the task and you perform that as well. And if you can do it consistently, through will power at first, then you will build the habit and the habit will cause you to succeed.

How long will it take? It depends on the complexity of the habit that you’re trying to break and how deeply it’s rooted in your life. But one things for sure, if you keep on going in the right direction you will eventually get to your destination. And another thing, failure is not an option for you, so keep working on creating the habit until you succeed.

In Closing

Nothing is more important then the right habits which will cause success. Can you build the right habits, I believe you can? Here’s to starting new life-changing habits, here’s to your success.

- KNOX


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#MMMP this is another great piece of food for thought!

A great article for All my Friends

What is a greater priority in your life: happiness or success?

While it is possible to achieve both, we often sacrifice one for the other when making major life decisions such as what career to pursue, whether to move to the suburbs to afford a bigger house, or whether to attend a family event if it means getting less work done.

The science of happiness, also known as positive psychology, basically studies human behavior and positive emotions with the aim of determining what factors can result in an increased level of happiness. The conclusions from this research can provide interesting insights into how we can maximize our happiness.
The following concepts are featured in the book Happiness Hypothesis, which is a great book for learning about the findings from happiness research.

Does Increased Income Improve Happiness?

Research that examines the correlation between income and happiness has found that increased income has a very small correlation with happiness for most people. The exception is for people who live in the conditions of poverty, in which money can help provide basic necessities like food, shelter, and transportation. Once people reach the middle class however, additional income tends to have little effect on happiness.

This counterintuitive finding can be explained by our ability to quickly adapt to new conditions, also known as “the adaptation principle”. While winning the lottery may provide an immediate boost in happiness, studies suggest that lottery winners return to a level close to their baseline happiness in about one year. We’ve all heard stories of the miserable millionaire or the unhappy but successful professional. This finding suggests that it can be a big mistake to pursue a career primarily to gain a higher salary over a career that you intrinsically enjoy.

The Progress Principle

Pursuing worthwhile goals is often a major aspect of how we choose to spend our time. People can spend years pursuing a specific goal while imagining how happy they will be once their goal has been achieved. However, “the progress principle” suggests that we receive more happiness from making progress toward our goal than we do from achieving a goal. This can be explained by our brain’s reward system which provides a boost in dopamine immediately after we make progress towards a goal in order to encourage behavior that leads to genetically favorable outcomes like accumulating wealth or power. This supports the old adage that the journey is more important than the destination or as Shakespeare said : “Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing”. If you are not enjoying the journey, you may not be pursuing the best goal.

Reducing Your Commute

The American Dream has traditionally involved getting a good job at a corporation so that you can buy a nice house in the suburbs. However, the adaptation principle comes into play as we quickly adapt to having a larger home but we typically don’t adapt to a traffic filled and unpredictable commute. People who experience slow traffic arrive to work with higher stress hormones in their blood and commuting to work is often reported as one of the most unpleasant activities in our day. Choosing to live closer to your work, even if you have to buy a smaller home, can be a wise decision in terms of maximizing your happiness.

The Importance of Relationships

One of the strongest variables in happiness that we can control is our personal relationships. An increased quantity and quality of personal connections can have a significant impact on our happiness. This is one reason that people who attend church are happier on average than non-church goers and married people are happier on average than single people. Spending more time with your close family or friends rather than working extra hours can also lead to a happier life. Additionally, your income can provide a more positive impact on happiness if you choose to spend it on experiences that you share with family and friends such as a dinner at a restaurant or a vacation instead of buying luxury items like expensive cars or accessories.

Finding Flow

Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined the name “flow” for the idea of engaging so deeply in an activity that you lose track of time. The Happiness Hypothesis describes flow as the “state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what some people call ‘being in the zone’”. Finding what activities lead to a state of flow for you, such as playing a sport or writing a guest blog post, and allocating more time to these activities can lead to a more enjoyable career and life.

Happiness research may not provide the secret to achieving happiness but it can suggest ways in which we can potentially increase it. The conclusions are often based on the “average person” so these ideas may not work for everyone. However understanding the findings from happiness research and experimenting in your own life can help you determine what will ultimately lead to “the good life” for you.


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#MMMP Read this! For all of you talking about what the music industry used #nohottubtimemachines

The New Music Industry is Not Coming

We can all stop waiting for the “new music industry” to arrive. The new music industry is not coming, it is here already. The only thing that will change is change. New models reshaping the way music is marketed and distributed will continue to change the landscape, and there will be many. Right now we have an emergence of abundance within the music industry. There are countless new artists emerging and the same goes for the ways of consuming those artists. This will not change; the emergence will continue to evolve as humans will continue to evolve. With that being said, there will be a shaping and weeding out process. The shaping and weeding out process will define which artists and which models work best for you individually, the consumer. The process of definition for the music consumer will cross all boundaries including race, gender, and age. I would like to include money, but I can’t help but to imagine the rich kid who only wants to see their favorite artist live, so they pay for live shows whenever they decide to.

The music industry of yesterday consisted of great control. If one could just control the few available key aspects, they could and have controlled the market. Distribution in the days of music consumption yesterday consisted of record stores. This is something that I am very fond of, as I remember being a kid working in my grandfather’s record store in Northern New Jersey. I remember the days of going to one-stops in Brooklyn early Saturday mornings and rushing back to New Jersey to make it in time for opening. The distribution dollars still led back to the same few places. Huge media conglomerates controlled distribution channels and consumption channels through radio, tv, and later on portable devices. This took MAJOR funding. It was unthinkable to go against these conglomerates in this state of the music industry. The costs of producing, distributing, and marketing a record were extremely expensive. Even if you had the funding to produce a record, marketing and distribution channels were still tied up with the large media conglomerates.

With the emergence of new music technology, the scope has broadened on all levels. Technology has made way for new opportunities, thus creating new models. The internet has eliminated a lot of past costs within the music industry; this goes for the way music is recorded, the format of music, the marketing, and especially the distribution outlets. New models have taken away the control aspect. A child can be born, grow up developing their musical talent, gather people who can assist in the process, record an album, market that album, distribute that album, get paid, and repeat the process over and over without ever dealing with a record label for their entire career. And that’s just the basic capability of an artist operating in today’s music industry.

Right now we are looking at three entities that are battling in the “Who’s Going to Shape the Music Industry Showdown.” None of these entities are record labels; in fact they are all technology companies. They are Apple, Amazon, and Google. Does this spell doom for major record labels, I doubt it, but who knows? That’s the beauty of the current state of the music industry. It is imploded with an unforeseen greatness of potential. In the coming days, we will see artists partner with entities that we never would have imagined, in fact it’s happening now! Incredibly amazing talents that we never would have heard of in the days of yesterday now have a shot. Sure there will be lesser talents also with opportunities, but if you don’t want to listen to them DON’T. You now have that power in today’s world. The control of the experience has returned to the user, where it should have and always be. So has the music industry changed from what we once known? YES, and it will continue to change, but you will hold the reigns. Follow the technology at your own discretion. The new music industry is here, and from the looks of it, the new music industry will always be here.



About the author: Taurean Casey is a Co-Founder of Music Assistant Now.


- KNOX


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#MMMP a great article for my friends with a facebook bandpage

Sudden Page Removals Threaten Facebook As Music Marketing Tool

This guest post from Moses Avalon originally appeared on his Moses Supposes blog. As a producer and engineer of Grammy award-winning artists, Moses earned several RIAA Platinum awards. He's also the author of two top selling music industry reference guides: Million Dollar Mistakes and Confessions of a Record Producer.

This week The Next Web.com posted a alarming story of how several prominent Facebook pages were deleted for unspecified copyright infringement complaints. The episode gave a rare window into the mind of Facebook, their polices and how easy the gift of a free fan-magnet can have serious hidden costs for artists.

How would you like to wake up one morning and check your Facebook page to see that you’ve gone from 10,000 fans– to zero? Scary? It could happen quite easily if someone was to complain that your page was infringing on their copyright. You may ask, wouldn’t the complainant need proof? No. In fact, according to the recent events re: the Ars Technica incident, you don’t even need a Facebook account.

One anonymous complaint is all it took to sentence several prominent Facebook fan pages to sleep with the fishes. These pages were allegedly posting infringing work and/or promotional links to copyrights they did not control. In the speed of a mouse-click, their fans, data, email logs and all evidence of their Facebook existence, vanished. Facebook didn’t specify what items were infringing or tell the creators of the removed pages who the complaints came from. Their accounts were just GONE, with no human to whom an appeal could be made.

Now, to artists this might seem like a bonanza. Facebook–an ISP–giving the heavy hammer against infringement to creators of content, but upon closer examination, all is not rosy.

If Facebook is going to take a zero-tolerance policy about alleged infringement, regardless of degree or investigation, artists could end up in a potentially worse situation than when ISPs turned a blind eye to copyright issues. How so?

MUSIC MUGGINGS

Not focused upon much in the main-stream media, is the fact that record labels and artists can have intense rivalries. Extreme cases are stories like the East Coast/West Coast beef of the rap world that took the lives of artists Biggie Smalls and Tu Pac, but many other animosities exist that are far more subtle.

Some famous songwriters, for example, disapprove of certain artists and enforce their own interpretation of the compulsory license and fair use provisions in the Copyright Act to shut down legal covers of their songs.

Many demos use un-cleared audio samples temporarily as well as bits of melodies, guitar riffs as part of the creative process. In fact, the artist development process is rife with corner-cutting infringements that are necessary to grease the wheels of progress. But, with Facebook as enforcers, every copyright-commando has a weapon that requires only a keyboard and a beef to road-block a developing product.
Acts, fighting over logo design or a group name in a territory, could use an anonymous complaint to suspend or completely remove their rival’s account.
A label, could agree to license a sample to another label for a test release, then “change their mind,” after its posted for review.
Authors of hits can object to a badly recorded versions of their “masterpiece.”
In each case, such content owners could bypass the expensive and slow legal process with an simple infringement complaint to Facebook, and instantly vaporize the many fans an emerging artist worked so hard to aggregate on the Social Network.

WHO IS IMMUNE?

No one. Most every form of pop-music uses melodies, samples, and components of previous sound recordings. It’s virtually unavoidable, especially if you’re producing rap, R&B pop or hip hop, where samples or a “collage”of tracks are a part of your creative process.

If removal of a fan page and all its valuable data is probable, with only an email-based appeal process, then more transparency is needed in the court of Facebook.

For a company that has built their $50 Billion dollar value on content submitted by emerging artists and average Joes (who do not understand intellectual property) a more precise method of determining the actionability of infringement accusations should be a priority.

Until that time relying on a Facebook account for street-cred or building a fan-base might be mistake. Many PR and marketing gurus have warned about this in the past, and the ones who have been using FaceBook as the tent-poll of their methods now know why. One PR friend of mine put it this way, “Everyone is rethinking the big blue F.”

Have you or some artist you know had their Facebook page removed due to infringement accusations? Speak out.









ReverbNation Upgrades Free Facebook App
May 2, 2011 at 1:34 PM


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