Being an entrepreneur is kind of scary because there is always some sort of risk involved. We know that risk and assessing risk is definitely a learned behavior. There is a group activity that we do in the design world called the “Marshmallow Challenge”. The idea is that you split a room into teams and you give them all the same supplies that consist of 20 sticks of dry spaghetti one yard of string. one yard of tape, and one marshmallow with a goal of creating the tallest standing spaghetti tower with a marshmellow top after 18 minutes. This is a really fun activity and we learn to much from it about prototyping, design, structure, teamwork and communication. I have done this with groups of kids and groups of professional adults. Across the board kids crush the adults over and over again.
This may not make complete sense as I am talking about about so let me tell you why. These groups of adults consisting of designers, engineers, and even architects have years and years of experience but it totally works against them. They spend the majority of time planning and assessing what will and won’t work and negotiating ideas with each other. They spend their time assessing risk and failure. The kids generally haven’t been exposed to as much risk and failure so they’re natural instinct is to just try it and if it tumbles they try again. They fail over and over again but in the end they will prove to be more successful that most teams of adults. I never realized how much recording my first ever band release was like the Marshmallow challenge until I got much older and of course started facilitating the Marshmallow challenge to large groups
So let’s jump into this. So my best friends Brandon and Eric and I decided to start our first band. I use that word in the loosest sense possible. It was our first real band with a name and actual songs. We talked little about this band toward the end of Episode 6.
This was 1991 and the Nirvana Nevermind record had just came out and Grunge was all the rage. Brandon had met this guy named Dan Hosie. He played guitar and sang in this band called Melancholy Buzz. They used to play these basement shows in Flint for their friends and whoever else would show up.
It was kind of weird, I went to a few of them and it was actually pretty cool.. This was my first real live and upclose band experience. These dudes would play and someone would start a little basement mosh push pit and eventually someone ended up going through the wall. They actually recorded a live cassette and released it. It was called live from the Buzzment. We talked about that tape for a long time. In our heads it was this huge release, people we actually knew recorded and released their own music it was so epic!
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