One of the bands I work with once said, “Better to do something than do nothing at all”. Another quote is the circus owner Phineas T. Barnum that said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity”. Of course, in the worst situations, there is bad publicity and doing things totally wrong. In most cases, it’s not. And I feel many withhold themselves just by being afraid making a mistake.

Doing nothing is really safe, I can admit that. Progression wise though it’s pure stupidity. Without taking chances you are not going further. My biggest successes have been through mistakes. Also, a lot of knowledge comes from making mistakes. There is a difference between making mistakes and making mistakes.

I sent out a newsletter today. It was very fast because I had just two hours between two different quite important panels and today was the last day we could get the letter out before we got new numbers to send to in our mailing system. Of course, I had to put things together in no time. No chance to double-check. Not even the links and spelling were just through the spelling program.

So, I had a choice. Send it off and see it as a promotion thing. Or just abandon the opportunity to make some noise for my festival?

I was more like, well if there are any mistakes, who cares? it’s just one of the hundreds of newsletters that I send out in a year. And the promotion is more important than the safety of having someone going through it. And in a newsletter that is over three pages long, there will be mistakes, especially when you don’t have time to proof read and just copy and paste and adding things.

Off it goes. And of course, I see an error in the header that is not corrected by the spelling program just as it went off. Well, what the heck it’s not that it can be misunderstood just a wrong letter.

That is the thing, if I feared the mistake there would be no promotion. In today’s media, everything goes very fast. I worked for a company that had that problem. The boss was a very weak leader and afraid of any mistakes. By that, we only sent out two press releases a year, of course, went through 20 people for corrections and proofing. The problem was that it never went well because people tended to forget about the company in all these times that went by each message. In the fast lane we live in today you just have to go ahead in more cases than just sit on the break.

Then a mail came in from an artist that has applied to the festival. With just the line “Please spell right”. The funny part is this is an artist we booked for another festival I worked with. He and his so-called manager was a pain in the ass the whole time so we never rebooked him. They didn’t understand jack shit about how the industry worked. He was a running joke in the booking department of old farts that shouldn’t be playing music any longer. He used to be a big artist in his home country, but that was over thirty years ago, and he still thinks he is some kind of star. With 197 followers on YouTube, I rest my case.

Of course, this is a real mistake. Just give me a reason to reject your application and you get rejected. I even deleted his address from the system, so he won’t ever get any mail about opportunities that we give out from time to time.

So I leave you with another line that one of the talented bands I work with wrote “I’d rather be wrong if they are right.”