Each Piece In Its Own Place
It’s 3:09pm on Thursday July 10, 2025 in Hopewell Junction, NY and I’m listening to Larry June because him, 2chainz and The Alchemist are right - life is beautiful. Even though I’m sitting in exactly the same spot as yesterday, it looks just a little bit different. Maybe it’s because I’m older. Maybe I’m paying more attention. Maybe I just want to see it this way. All of the above.
For the past few weeks, the first thing on the top of my daily to-do list has been “DIGITAL STRATEGY.” If a task stays on the daily to-do list for weeks, there’s probably a deeper problem… maybe you’re not meant to do it… maybe it’s not for you… let me say this: don’t give into doubt if you don’t want to. Now let’s be honest, a digital strategy wasn’t ever getting done in one work day. I’m just one guy and that’s a big plan with lots of facets; this kind of plan takes serious attention to many details. At least, I think it does. I don’t know. I don’t actually know. But I said as much yesterday.
My original digital strategy was this: Understanding and I would write a song once a week, record the process and then sit down and have a conversation, inspired and about the song we made that week. I would cut all that into an episode of Making Music with Beautiful Idiots, and that’s our tentpole. It’s a new song, a studio music video and a podcast all in one, an all encompassing welcome to the world of Beautiful Idiots. The YouTube show usually comes in somewhere from eight to fifteen minutes long, and then I could clip that show into short-form content for social media.
I still think that’s a good plan. None of the clips have driven any growth but - and here comes that honesty again - I think it probably has a lot to do with the visual quality. I’m not as good as I need to be. I’m not saying it’s the only thing holding us back but I would definitely understand if someone told me it was one of them.
Here’s another thing, though, and it’s something that I never really considered before. The YouTube show and the clips from the show for socials might be a fine idea, but it isn’t the whole plan. It’s just one aspect of what may work. There are lots of other ways we can show up online that could help, because one thing just isn’t enough to paint the whole picture, and in today’s world people seem to want to know the whole person (as if anyone could ever know a whole person, especially from a distance) before they give any precious time to their product. It’s a weird backwards way to decide how you consume art if you ask me but I’m writing in a room alone right now. Nobody asked me. So I’ll stop.
HERE’S ANOTHER THING, THOUGH, AND IT’S SOMETHING THAT I NEVER REALLY CONSIDERED BEFORE! Maybe that show and the clips are fine as way to show up and create on YouTube but maybe that’s just for YouTube. All these different apps, they’re all different rooms. They need to be decorated and furnished appropriately if you want to get the most use out of all of them. I mean, you wouldn’t put a bed in the kitchen would you? And how about a bed in in your dining room? Also, what would you say to a bed in your bathroom? The internet, though it may seem like it sometimes, is not one of those nightmare apartments in NYC, so the bed is for the bedroom and that’s probably it. Maybe there are a couple things that work in multiple rooms, but those are daybeds and chaises. I’m losing the thread. Every room needs different stuff, and like honestly, when you think about it, fucking duh.
Why didn’t I do that the first time? It does kind of sound hard and very time consuming. But it’s something that I want to give me big rewards in the long run, so why shouldn’t it take a lot? Chris Martin said “nobody said it was easy”. So did Willie Nelson actually in… I think an Apple commercial maybe… do you know the cover I’m talking about? I feel like there was a cow. Maybe it was a milk commercial? Whatever. I’ll look it up. Make it fun.
-J.P.
P.S. - It was a Chipotle commercial! Freakin’ Chipotle!!! I like this version