Stop Doing Productive. Start Being Productive.

All Jay Jay French ever wanted was to make it in a hard rock band. French formed band after band in an attempt to get signed because he believed that was the golden ticket to music success. The only trouble was to get signed, you had to be seen by the right people on the right night.

French reasoned that playing more meant more opportunities for someone to find him, so he performed as much as possible. He had trouble finding the right bandmates who had the same work ethic. After one particular show, two of the new band members hijacked his equipment truck. French paid the ransom they demanded and the band broke up shortly after that.

But French never gave up on the idea of having a band and being a professional musician. He tried again and again -eleven times in all – until he met a guy named Dee Snider. Soon after that, the band known as Twisted Sister became huge.

It took a long time and a lot of adversity for French to be a professional musician. He says that what got him through all this was just to make sure he was a musician tomorrow. He just had to have enough money, another gig, and some bandmates for tomorrow.

Another way to look at it is what Mur Lafferty says about writing.  Her advice is to do something today that will make the tw0-weeks-from-now you happy that you did it. For writers like Lafferty this means writing, but this can be applied to any part of our lives.

If you want to be productive, make sure you are productive today so you can be productive tomorrow.

There’s lots of advice about how to do things; is it big things first or small things first? There’s lots of advice about when to do things…do you theme your day like Mike Vardy does? There’s a lot of advice about who should do things…do you delegate your work so that you can focus on the most important things?

The common theme to all of this is to act. You have to act in a way that leads to being what you want. If you want to run, you run today. If you want to write, you write today. Whatever it is that you want to do, you have to do that thing.

It’s the actions we take that really matter. What is it that you want to be ask what are the actions that sort of person takes? For Jay Jay French it meant being a band and writing songs with lyrics like this:

“Well, all I got to say to you when you tell me not to play

I say, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no”

So, if you ask me why I like the way I play it

There’s only one thing I can say to you

I wanna rock

Jay Jay French wanted to rock. What do you want to do today?