I heard a speaker tell this a story of how he arrived to his speaking gig early and was shown to the auditorium. There was a grand piano in the center of the stage. The man from the auditorium said, “I’ll go get some guys and we’ll move the piano for you.” Left by himself, the speaker decided to move the piano. He gives the piano a push and watches in horror as one leg buckles and the whole thing tilts and comes crashing down. It turns out the piano had one broken leg, which the speaker had no idea about.

One of the downsides of incompetence is that you don’t know you are incompetent.

I grew up wanting everyone to think I had the answers. I would frequently answer questions with “facts” that sounded right to me. Sometimes bluffing worked, but eventually people catch on. It took a lot of growing up before I was able to say “I don’t know.” Now, when I have an opinion, I will state it as an opinion: “I’m not a doctor, but I’m pretty sure if you can see the bone you want to go to the hospital.” My friend Reid has a saying: “Having an internet connection and google does not make you a doctor.” The most emphatic thing I will say is: “I could be wrong, but I’m 97% sure that your brakes are not supposed to make that grinding noise.” I’m never 100% sure; I’ve felt 100% sure and been 100% wrong. Sometimes things have changed since the last time you were there. It turns out some kinds of root beer do have caffeine in them.

I’m a pretty smart guy. But I’m not a mechanic or a doctor or even a plumber. I approach everything assuming it can be understood, but I don’t start off assuming I understand. I’m not saying you shouldn’t leap into brand new things; in fact, I’ve made a career of it – sometimes having a lack of knowledge brings a fresh perspective. But some days, the smartest thing I’ll say all day is “I don’t know.”

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Why is it so hard for us to be grateful for what we have? I have air conditioning – right now it’s 96 degrees outside. Do I thank the air conditioner every day?: “Thank you, Air Conditioner, for making my life so cool.” Instead I just take it for granted that the air conditioner is doing the job it was born to do.

I grew up in a tropical climate and we had one air conditioner in my parents’ bedroom. Our whole family slept in their room at night and the air conditioner was only turned on at night in order to save money.

We can always find things to be sad about, and we can always find things to be happy about. I think that’s why helping with the homeless is so good for perspective; you really come home grateful for things like air conditioning… and well… having a home to come home to.

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instead of asking for a blessing
may I see the things I am already blessed with.
then, I will always lead a blessed life.
rather than not knowing my blessings till they are taken away.

instead of asking for something, anything to give me hope
may I learn faith, which is unswayed by shadows and storms
thus will I learn to hope in the darkest of times
and rather than asking for others to lean on
others will lean on me

I ask not for riches or treasures but for clarity of vision
for then I will always be able to see truly how rich and how treasured I am

(plus I’m practically blind, have you seen my glasses? they’re like coke bottles.)

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Writing is a lonely thing. At least for me it is; I sit in my same old room and I try to coax something out of nothing. I try to make the instruments sing new songs or make new sounds, but my fingers fall into the same worn grooves of the same chords every time. It feels silly sometimes pretending to be a songwriter. I wonder if the songs mean anything to anyone else but me. Sometimes I start to believe my critics and I think it’s time to quit trying.

And then I discovered youtube.

Well, actually I discovered all the people on youtube who took the songs we wrote and did something with them. Thousands and thousands of videos. I tried to watch them all and gave up after an entire day. There are people singing Superchick songs, playing Superchick songs, teaching other people to play Superchick songs, remixing Superchick songs, making music videos to Superchick songs, riding horses to Superchick songs, animating lego to Superchick songs and dressing up like zombies and choreographing a dance routine to Superchick songs. In fact there’s one insanely awesome girl named Melissa Pemberton who stunt flies airplanes to Superchick songs. There’s an 8 year old girl playing drums along with “Rock What You Got.” There’s a female wrestler who makes her entrance to a Superchick song. I even found people covering songs I wrote before Superchick.

It’s all a little mind boggling.

You sit in your studio/dungeon like Howard Hughes during the recluse years. You sift through the same old soil every day, hoping something new takes root, and you never think it’s going to mean anything to anyone… And then one day you discover people singing these songs and making them their own. I remember teaching myself to play axel F on the piano as my liberation from classical music, and never in my wildest dreams did I imagine someone would teach themselves to play a song that came out of my fingers. And then write it out onto sheet music and give it to other people so they could play it…. It’s really humbling. It gives me hope.

I fail to meet my own standards. I fail to meet the critics’ expectations. But it’s a huge blessing to have written songs and that someone in an itunes review would then say:

This album was the soundtrack to my summer.

Thank you so much to anyone who ever listened.

(Read more thoughts from Max at maxwax11.com)

Imagine this. You have been to the doctor and you have been given a year to live. This is a good way to understand what is important to you. I’m going to make a bracelet: WWIDIIHAY2L. What Would I Do If I Had A Year To Live? If you ask yourself this guiding question regularly, you’ll get right to the heart of life. You won’t be looking back, wishing you could have the last 10 years “like gold in your hands.” Obviously, we cannot live every year like it’s our last year – that would be similar to being in one of those booths where they blow money around and you have one minute to grab all the twenties you can out of the air. This is not about that year. This is about the 10 years that come before that year. The 10 years you might be living now.

With that in mind, here’s what I’ve learned so far. Your mileage may vary:

1. We do not have time to just exist. If we don’t try, don’t risk, don’t fall, don’t learn and don’t strive, we’re probably not living. When I go rock climbing, if I don’t fall off at some point during the day, then I wasn’t pushing myself and I didn’t get any better. Falling is not failing. Not falling is failing.

2. If you’re going to leap off a cliff, make sure you understand what you are leaping into. Know how much coffee you will have to sell to stay open before you open. Research, talk to people who have been where you want to be. Test, prototype, repeat. Move fast and loose. Sometimes to get to where you want to be, you have to make that leap just make sure there isn’t a rope bridge somewhere that you could take instead.

3. We do not have time to be stuck or lost. If you look 5 years forward and your job is still making you unhappy or your boyfriend is still not going to ask you to marry him or Comcast is going to keep overcharging you for its crappy service, it’s time to either make the changes yourself or move on. If your plan for the future is hoping anything besides you will change, then it’s time to make a new plan.

4. We do not have time to hold onto grudges, anger or past hurts. Say what you have to say. Get it off your chest. People are the only true joy on this planet and we stand to lose that when we wall them out. If the people who hurt you aren’t worth knowing, then move on and invest in people who are… but either way, let the hurt be in the past. Don’t bring that stuff from the people you hate to the people you love. If they are family, they might be the same people, but try anyways. We do not have time to want people to be how we want them to be; they are who they are. Learn to love imperfect people. You will feel better about yourself when you do.

5. Impressing people or worrying what they think about us is a waste of time. I once saw some guys on TV picking up girls on the beach by telling them they were in Bon Jovi. The girls were duly impressed, but it was all a lie. Why do we pretend to be more than what we are? We might as well tell people we are in Bon Jovi (on a side note, is it just me or has Jon Bon Jovi not aged in the last 30 years?) Chances are you don’t even like the people you are trying to impress. Why kiss the feet of the people who kick you?

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Hope and belief are what keep us moving forward. Without, we simply exist; we fill our lives with diversions or numb ourselves to the door marked life. We wonder why we don’t feel much. Our ability to work, to fight depends on what we believe, the man who digs for buried treasure digs twice as fast as the man who believes he is digging his own grave. To succeed, you must fight, to fight you must believe.

Hope is a feeling, and faith is the discipline of hope when that feeling is gone. In a crowded subway, if hope and belief leave a seat, a passenger named fear will ride in that space. Fear and doubt fill the car with smoke if we do nothing.

Hope and belief fuel miracles. When we sit down to write, step out on stage, climb the mountain, venture into the darkness to slay the dragon, it is not common sense but hope and faith that propel us. Fear would keep us hidden in the tall grass, silent as mice.

Fear and doubt twist us into a mobius strip of anxiety. We go around ad infinitum, surfing for internet cats rather than spend that 5 minutes we promised ourselves we would work on our novel or work out. It is fear that tells us we are better off not to try – but it’s belief that makes us need to try. Fear and doubt are the unseen puppet masters. If we do not fight their power we are their zombies. They trick us into believing that they are not with us, that we do not carry this dark trickster. When we confront them, they are mafia hoods, shaking a warning finger at us as we reach to open the door. I fear they will break my legs with a baseball bat, but fear is my own self, writ large in the smoke and shadows. Our greatest battle is a spiritual battle. I watch my friends losing this war: screenplays going unwritten, companies going unstarted, ideas dying on the vine like overripe rotting tomatoes. Bitterness is the post traumatic stress disorder of the creative generation.

How dare we try? Surely we are not brave enough or talented enough for our own standards.

The truth is, it’s not us that achieves the dream; it is only us who takes the step… and indeed sometimes fear is right and we strike out. We are struck down. Sometimes the whole world watches and laughs and points. Sometimes our friends snicker behind our backs. And sometimes it is the worst of all, and our efforts are not even mocked – we are a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. We did not even make a sound as we fell.

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Every Superchick record, about two thirds of the way through, I will make a big posterboard calender. Everything still to be done gets a post-it and I will attempt to fit 90 days of post-its into 30 post-it spaces. It’s time management Tetris: you are praying for a straight four but you get the wrong L and your bricks are stacking up into inelegant towers. One badly placed T and you’re done. Or if you are coasting downhill on a skateboard and you hit a rock, suddenly you are falling downhill and your whole world becomes getting that next foot under you so it’s not your face that hits the pavement.

Right when it feels like that, I get the call that I have pushed to the back of my head by sheer denial. I know what the question is:

“What do you want to do for the cover?”

My heart sinks. I did not have space for a giant post-it that says “think of great cover concept.” There are no days allocated for this. This is our upside down L, our undoing.

Back before iPods, before the Jurassic 5 era, I signed a big record deal and promptly lost control of the record and its packaging. The designer was breathtakingly exotically hot, and I stunned a roomful of people by not only disliking the cover, but proceeding to so enumerate the things I wanted changed that I made the designer cry. Men rushed to comfort her and I was vilified and made to stand in a corner. I resolved not to let that happen again. As a designer, I know I am the kind of client designers fear, since I am obviously a control freak and am not easily mollified by designer jibber jabber or being fantastically exotically hot. It is a measure of how much I care about details that I made the hottest girl I had talked to in real life cry. Now that I look back, I do feel bad that I made anyone cry. It was a harbinger of things to come: my insensitivity has made many a girl I was working with cry… except for Tricia, who once made me cry.

So for the next record deal, I insisted on having control over the imaging as well as the music. I found the guy who had done my favorite album cover and hired him. I loved his work and I was thrilled to be working with him. I went to his place to see the ideas, and I was as Brian Gocher would say: “whelmed.” He had laid out the photos we sent him, albeit with some nice typography. I kept talking about his other cover I loved and finally he said, “Well they had this concept which was to make it look like an old book, so I did that. You don’t have a concept.” And that was the truth of it – he was simply working with what we had given him. He’s a very talented designer, but it wasn’t his job to come up with the fantastic concept. If I wanted one I was going to have to come up with it.

For me, it’s not enough to just have a cool looking cover. I feel like a lot of album art seems oddly unrelated to the music. DVD covers do a great job of letting you know what you are holding. You can tell the difference between “28 Days” and “28 Days Later.” I want the cover to communicate, to jangle, to add a layer of meaning to the music. It’s as much a personal expression as the music is. It is the curse of being a designer. Marketing people usually want different things in a cover: they want it to be very bright and have “shelf pop.” Nowadays, they want it to pop when it is shrunk to the size of a postage stamp on iTunes. I deeply miss the vinyl era, although it was before my time. The 4 panel foldout of Paul’s Boutique is an expansive joy. It is immersive – you can get lost studying the details.

So needless to say, when they ask me what I want to do for the cover, my heart sinks because I want the idea to be really good. Better than my greatest idea ever and better than the best album cover I’ve ever seen. That good. Isn’t that what we all strive for? To make the best art the world has ever seen ever? Sadly I always fall short, but I sure go down fighting. It is a panicky feeling to have a hard deadline, high expectations and no idea what you are going to do. It is easy to bleat from the back seat about where we are going. It is a different thing to be driving a bus full of people with no idea where to go.

Continue reading to learn how we landed on all of our various album covers, from the megaphone girl on Karaoke Superstars to the yearbook theme of Last One Picked to the battered look of Beauty From Pain to my favorite cover, Rock What You Got… and now my invention on Reinvention at Maxwax11.com

When we wrote the song “Alive,” I asked fellow ThumpMonk Gocher to do a Frankenstein-inspired intro piece. He did such a good job that when I played it for my management, they asked if we were going to have to negotiate the rights to the sample. I wish I could have seen Gocher doing the voices, since he had to practice the accent that was indicative of that time period.

Much to my further amusement, Youtube user kyu88cne has re-enacted the entire scene in lego. I love when a little creativity gets passed around and comes back as something different, especially if it’s done in legos.

You can see it here:

Alive in Lego – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_6S6bll_PQ

rock on kyu88cne! keep being creative.

I keep saying this:

Everything is changing in media. I have seen the future, and it is all of you making things in your basements and bedrooms. It is your voice that will change this world. Do not be muzzled by your doubts or your circumstances, but rise up and let your shouts be heard.

Bonus points for use of lego.

… What a unique time in history we are in. I had lunch with a very cool guy who said “we are looking at the renaissance again” and I totally agree with that. Thousands of kids with no adults to tell them that it shouldn’t be done that way. The revolution starts now. Look around, you are the revolution.

Now, the only thing holding you back is you. Be like water. When you reach an obstacle. Go around. If you have the tiniest crack, water will find a way in. Water cannot be stopped and wears down even stone over time. Start with the belief that it can be done. If you believe, you can find the will. The will is the most valuable asset you have. If you lack the will than take a cue from personal trainers and set yourself up to win. Start something with a buddy who will keep you going. Or hire someone to show up and listen to you play music every day. Trade accountability for something they want to do. If you can’t do it alone, find people to make music with. If you can’t find people in your town, then find people on the internet. Gocher who is my other half in ThumpMonks lives in New Jersey. I’ve seen him once in the last 5 years but he’s worked on almost every record I’ve done in that time. If you want to be a professional ice skater and you live in Africa, you might have a problem, but almost everything else is solvable.

Let nothing stand in your way. Dream, learn, practice and express yourself through your dream. Don’t be proud of how cool the songs on your ipod are. Be proud of the music you make. Living in an expensive vibey loft does not make you vibey. You are buying other people’s vibe and hoping to associate yourself with it. Make your own art. Express your own creativity. Cook, customize motorcycles, make records, movies, whatever it is, do it. Define yourself not by what you consume, but by what you create.

If you are getting angry right now, ask yourself, why you would be angry with someone who is telling you to go for your wildest dream.

‘I bring the pure flow, like water around, the rocks of life won’t pull me down….’ – from the song Pure by Superchick

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