I have been watching a lot of old live music on YouTube. I am not sure how I got on this kick but it has been quite the binge-fest of old Pearl Jam, Foo Fighters, Billy Corgan and Chris Cornell acoustic sessions… all great stuff.

One of the recommended videos that popped up after a Rage Against the Machine clip was Tom Morello on The Howard Stern Show. The title was something like ‘Why Tom Morello Doesn’t Cut His Strings.’ For those of you that are ignorant like me… when you string your guitar it is standard practice to cut the excess string at the end. Tom didn’t do so.

Howard asked Tom about this and he mentions doing it initially because he thought it was cool… then getting shamed by older musicians to cut his strings bc he wasn’t in the baddest band in town; so he did… then once playing with Rage, realizing he was in the baddest band in town, he went back to not cutting them. Love that.

Howard then asked if the type of guitar he plays makes a difference. No – gear doesn’t matter. Tom replied.

He tells a story from 1988 where he spent a few hours making some basic adjustments to the guitar and his amp and then leaving it. He didn’t love how it sounded but he was obsessing over the settings, so he stopped. He uses the same settings and the same pedals to this day.

Tom makes the argument that instead of worrying about the settings he focused all of his energy on creativity. “I stopped learning techniques and started getting good at making mistakes,” Tom said.

Focus all your energy on the creativity.

This was literally mind blowing. And I am not exaggerating. It might sound ridiculous but I have a history of obsessing over gear. There are items that I would do so much research on in order to find the absolute best and then I would find a great deal on it; of course with free 2-day shipping. This thing is going to change everything. Spoiler alert, that was never accurate.

The gear would come in, I would open it and put it on a shelf. A lot of things have never left my shelf. I have items that I bought and sold without ever using. I have spent more time thinking about which lens is best than I have actually taking photos…

This was something that troubled me considerably at the beginning of picking up that craft. Not when I first started but after I started thinking I knew what I was doing. Then it was gear, gear, gear…. ugh. There has been more than one occasion where I would find myself in a gear loop and start researching the best this or that… only to find out that I actually already own that item… I already did the research which is what prompted me to buy it… last year.

It wasn’t until recently; and I mean the last month or so that I started really purging. I switched camera systems and went all in on one instead of being split between several. Facebook marketplace, OfferUp, eBay, and KEH Camera all have been a part of this exorcism of excess. I just dumped it all and it feels great.

At a certain point you have to decide in order to proceed.

Decide and proceed.

Now, what does camera gear have to do with you or life? Gear and/ or settings, as Tom described, are just a metaphor for those areas that are capturing way too much of our attention. Why are we spending so much energy trying to perfect the flyer, the email, the LinkedIn post? Just decide and proceed.

The hard thing about planning, researching, or editing is that these are safe reasons to delay. The absence of them would be down right foolish which makes it very easy to use them as reasons for not launching, not sending, not publishing… not shipping your work as Seth Godin would say.

BUT.

These activities need to be kept in check. These are perfectly legitimate activities that can become excuses.

You cannot research, plan or edit your way to the point of knowing what the outcome will be, before shipping the work; whatever that work might be.

This article has been in Draft form since April. It needed editing, sure. I haven’t been editing it for the last 6 months, though. It needed about an hour of focused attention. That hour was only made possible because I made the decision to focus on it, ship it and move on.

Decide and proceed.

-Nate