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[This week’s newsletter is extracted from a lesson in one of my members’ feed videos]

I want to talk about something I learned researching my upcoming documentary, Why There's No Money In Music.

One of the things about researching is that you take in a huge amount of material that doesn't belong. It's 99% of what you read while working on a book or a movie that you never use. 99.9% if you're not lazy about it. But I found something in there that's really good for y'all.

There's a section in the film on a woman named Teresa Amabile. I'll save what that section is actually about for the movie. What I want is the piece of her research I flagged this week.

Amabile measured creative people's workdays and graded them to understand what motivates them. She is the definitive scientist on how to get more creativity out of people. Everyone cites her, from artsy nerds up to corporations.

Her finding was that setbacks, meaning the opposite of progress, showed up more than anything else on people's worst days. Feeling stalled in your work, blocked somehow, or like you're actively going backwards.

Across roughly 12,000 daily diary entries, making good progress on a project predicted better emotions and more intrinsic motivation. Setbacks did the reverse.

Here's the part that matters. The negative effect of a setback on your inner work life is at least two to three times as powerful as the positive effect of a win. When it comes to frustration specifically, a setback hits more than three times as hard as progress does in the other direction.

And this is any negative event. Not a big one. Any negative event weighs multiples of a good one when it comes to your motivation toward your creative project.

One of the main reasons you're so unlikely to do well promoting your music is this bit of science right here.

We have to train our brains to stop letting every setback, even the tiny ones, outweigh our average days and our wins by that much. We have to acknowledge that our brain is a fucking asshole that is literally self-sabotaging us, and then find ways around it.

This is why I tell you all that I don't look at my data until Friday at 6 PM. I literally do not allow myself to do many of these things.

Last night I was trying to work on the movie, and we're having a stallout on one of the podcasts I produce. I could not stop obsessing over the analytics. It put me in a foul mood, and I usually don't succumb to that.

Then I found the answer, which was the best possible answer, which is that it's not my fault. Everybody's favorite. And it was actually true. The data really showed what was happening, and it's the fault of something else that we have to fix.

The point is that we have to compensate for this in our lives. This concept is so important that if we don't get a grasp on it, we're set up to lose.

You'll be hearing more from me on this. I'd heard people say it before, but seeing the GOAT scientist on the subject put it that plainly made me go, there we are.