My Artist Development Workbook Is Here...Here's How to Use It

In partnership with

Meet America’s Newest $1B Unicorn

A US startup just hit a $1 billion private valuation, joining billion-dollar private companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and ByteDance. Unlike those other unicorns, you can invest.

Over 40,000 people already have. So have industry giants like General Motors and POSCO.

Why all the interest? EnergyX’s patented tech can recover up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods. That's a big deal, as demand for lithium is expected to 5X current production levels by 2040. Today, they’re moving toward commercial production, tapping into 100,000+ acres of lithium deposits in Chile, a potential $1.1B annual revenue opportunity at projected market prices.

Right now, you can invest at this pivotal growth stage for $11/share. But only through February 26. Become an early-stage EnergyX shareholder before the deadline.

Invest in EnergyX Today

_{This is a paid advertisement for EnergyX Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.energyx.com. Under Regulation A, a company may change its share price by up to 20% without requalifying the offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission.}

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

The Workbook Is Here — Here's How to Use It

So for the past two months I have talked about writing a workbook that you fill out to help you think deeper about who you are as an artist. The first two sections of the Artist Development & World Building Workbook are live (for paid subscribers of either my newsletter or YouTube channel). Getting the beginning of a project right is always the hardest part, and this took longer than I wanted — but it's done, and a lot of what comes next is already well underway. More sections are dropping over the coming months as I am writing this in public for subscribers and then it will be available commerically. Let me walk you through what's in it now and how to actually use it.

Making Your Copy

The workbook opens in a protected view, meaning you can't edit it directly. Hit “File” in the top left corner, click “Make A Copy”, and save it to your own Drive. That's your working copy.

Here's the thing about updates: I'm not going to modify the original document in place each month. When new sections drop, I'll show you exactly what's been added, and you'll bring those sections into your copy. Think of it as importing new chapters as they release. It'll be obvious what's new, and I'll walk you through it each time.

Why This Work Matters

The introduction in the workbook makes the case for why you're doing this, and it's worth reading before you touch anything else. It takes five minutes max. The short version: artists who create work that genuinely resonates aren't guessing at who they are. They've asked better questions and thought deeper about their art.

The era of the "mid" artist — a mediocre version of someone else — is getting less viable every year. If you're using the same prompts and references as everyone else, you're producing slop. The work this book asks you to do is the specific antidote to that. The goal, as Brian Eno put it in a conversation with Ezra Klein, is to get back in touch with what actually moves you — not what you think should move you, not what the algorithm tells you to like, but what genuinely hits you. That's the raw material this book is trying to excavate.

Rules Worth Reading

Before you start answering questions, read the rules section. It's short, and it'll save you a lot of frustration. A few highlights:

You don't need an answer today. These questions aren't designed for your brain to knock out in one sitting. Some of them will take days or weeks to answer properly. Write one sentence now, come back later, and suddenly five more come out because you're in a different headspace. That's the point.

Don't knoll. Knolling is the habit of endlessly arranging and organizing things without actually creating anything from them — the equivalent of watching guitar tutorial videos instead of playing guitar. If you've spent more time in this book than you have making music over the last 90 days, put the book down and go make something.

Don't erase old answers. As you grow as an artist, your answers will change. Keep the old ones. Cross them out if they no longer apply, but leave them readable. Being able to look back at who you were when you started this is part of the value.

Section One: Life Questions

The first real section isn't about your artistry — at least not directly. It's about getting your life and your creative goals aligned, because dissonance between the two is one of the most common things that quietly kills momentum for artists. If there's a gap between who you want to be as an artist and how you're actually living, this section starts surfacing it.

The questions here are things like: if money weren't an issue tomorrow, what would you be doing? What do you want to have happen creatively in the next year? What's getting in the way of that? What do you need to learn, and what skills do you need to actually practice?

There are also three short exercises in this section. One is a calendar audit — looking back at the last two weeks and asking honestly whether that's what a calendar looks like for someone who's trying to get where they say they want to go. Another asks you to cut one thing from your life for a while. Not forever. Just long enough to put real weight behind your creative priorities. The third points to a member’s video on building better habits and accountability.

Section Two: Big Picture Artist Questions

This is where you start zooming in on who you actually are as an artist. Questions in this section include: What makes you unique? What do you see that other artists in your lane don't see? What do you believe that they don't? How would a fan describe you to a friend who's never heard you? What rules or conventions in music do you find boring enough to break?

These aren't questions your brain is going to answer well on the first pass. Let them marinate. The exercise at the end of this section asks you to conceive, intentionally, how you develop into the artist you described in your answers — what you'd actually have to do to close that gap.

The LAMES Analysis

LAMES is the framework I developed after years of sitting in major label meetings, watching SWOT analysis fail artists completely. Business startup frameworks don't map onto music because music is both business and art at the same time, and most business advice doesn't account for the art side at all.

LAMES stands for Lore, Aspirations, Misperceptions, Exploits, and Strengths — worked backwards because that order makes more sense in practice.

Strengths are everything you do well. Exploits are your unfair advantages: a friend who's a great director, a connection at a label, a guitarist with a YouTube following, an uncle with a warehouse you can shoot in. Misperceptions are what people get wrong about you, because correcting those is one of the most powerful things your content can do. Aspirations are where you're heading — what you want people to say about you when they're telling a friend why they should listen. Lore is your backstory, your Easter eggs, the details fans can obsess over and share with other people.

Every time you sit down to make a TikTok, a music video, a photo shoot, or even a song, you should be looking at your LAMES analysis and asking how you're using it. It keeps every decision anchored to what's actually authentic to you rather than what just seems like a good idea in the moment.

What's Coming Next

The sections dropping over the next few months cover your positioning as an artist, cataloging your touchstones, world-building, your creative palette, and your own artist language and meta-narrative. That's the deeper work, and it builds directly on everything in these first sections. Get these done first.

If you have questions or things you're turning over while you work through this, bring them to the weekly Q&As. The more specific, the better. That's where we go deeper together.

Want To Get It?

Simply subscribe to my member feed on YouTube or click the button to upgrade your subscription to the newsletter below. New chapters drop each month.

Subscribe to Premium Subscription to read the rest.