If you’re going to start with the Christmas music already…

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Nov 6, 2011 in Blogging, Music | 1 comment

… may as well be the good stuff. One of my favorites, Sarah McLachlan’s Wintersong:

(available on Amazon)

Happy wintertime, everyone.

If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!

Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!

Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!

Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

How to correctly sing Auld Lang Syne

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 31, 2010 in Blogging, Music | 2 comments

Every year, people sort of hum Auld Lang Syne as the ball drops. Every year, you don’t have to.

Music and lyrics:

Just the lyrics, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind ?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne* ?

CHORUS:

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp !
and surely I’ll be mine !
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
and pu’d the gowans fine ;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
frae morning sun till dine ;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere !
and gie’s a hand o’ thine !
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
for auld lang syne.

CHORUS

If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!

Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!

Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!

Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Favorite Christmas songs

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Dec 19, 2010 in Blogging, Music | 1 comment

Recently, Amy Garland asked me about my favorite Christmas song. Here’s mine, from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It sums up everything that I love about this time of year and never fails to bring a tear to my eye. Listen carefully and enjoy it. If you like it, please do right by the band and buy it for yourself.

If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!

Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!

Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!

Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Music to power your workday

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 2, 2010 in Awakening, Music | 8 comments

I listen to a ton of music during the workday to help me power through stuff, especially when I need an extra boost of energy, creativity, or motivation. Since a number of people have asked, here are some of the albums I recommend. Most are either in foreign languages or lyric-free, because the language processing side of your brain is a serial processor. This means it can handle one language stream well, but can’t multiprocess well – so a song with lyrics that you understand is likely to slow you down and reduce your productivity, rather than boost it, if you’re doing anything else involving words (like email). As an added bonus, music without lyrics is guaranteed not to offend anyone in your workplace.

All of the albums are affiliate links that pay me a commission via Amazon.com. (come on, did you expect any less?) Most of the albums are in MP3 format for any player including iTunes/iPod and anything that will support an MP3. Some are physical CDs.

See a larger version here.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

Friday fun: what's on my iPod for productivity

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Mar 5, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Music, Sales | 3 comments

It’s Friday. Let’s have a little bit of fun. One of the things that makes me productive during the workday? The right audio. Sometimes the audio is training, most of the time it’s good tunes. Here’s some of what’s on my iPod while the day is flying by. You’ll notice that for the most part, I avoid anything with words in it – instrumental rules the day for cognitive psychology reasons. Few people can effectively process more than one language stream at a time, so listening to words in a song can conflict with trying to write words on the page. Hence, most of the music is instrumental.

Full disclosure: Of course everything is affiliate-linked for commissions. Did you expect otherwise?

Music to work by

The Epic Score folks have some of the best music in iTunes for coding, drafting, and writing. If you need to boost your own sense of urgency, Action & Adventure is the recipe for you. If you need dramatic copy, Epic Drama fits the bill.

If you’re a Blizzard fan (i.e. Warcraft player) one of the best albums to get, hands down, is the Echoes of War symphonic set. Echoes of War are all the familiar Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo themes you know and love, arranged and performed by a full symphony orchestra.

Volume 1:

Volume 2:

The soundtrack to Wrath of the Lich King is pretty good by itself, btw.

Looking for something a little slower paced and different? The Tibetan Master Chants album with Lama Tashi puts karmically useful sounds in your head, as various sutras and mantras are chanted. If you like that chanting kind of background ambience, this will deliver.

Finally, if you need a hefty dose of heroism, John Ottman’s Superman Returns delivers.

Brain Food

If you’re in any kind of organization that sells something, I consider Tom Hopkins training to be Sales 101. Yeah, some of it comes across as cheesy, but for a novice salesperson who needs any kind of framework to start being minimally effective, Hopkins’ system is as good as any. Way back in the day when I was a technical recruiter, my firm sent me to his Boot Camp at the price of $3,750. Nowadays, you can get pretty much the same content for $18. Listen and learn.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around new media and social media still, there are very, very few books as good as Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation. He narrates his own audiobook (which I view favorably – I’d rather hear the author unless they have a terribad voice) and it’s worth it if you don’t have the time to read the book.

Gear

There isn’t a day when I don’t use my Bose headphones. They’re awesome for travel, sure, especially on noisy airplanes, but they’re also awesome in the office for filtering out all the background crap that is subtly taking a toll on your brain via your ears. Air conditioning, fax machines, noisy coworkers and hallway conversations, laptop fans, all that ambient noise – it takes its toll. Using these headphones rocks, plain and simple. They’ll cost you an arm and a leg but if you do any kind of work that pays you more for more productivity (via bonuses, commissions, etc.) then these headphones will pay for themselves easily and quickly.

Hopefully this set of resources will help you squeeze more juice from your day too!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.

The awakening of superhero powers and the salvation of conferences

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Oct 22, 2009 in Awakening, Music | 10 comments

Let me tell you a brief story about the day I learned about our superhero powers as human beings.

It’s nine o clock on a Saturday, regular crowd shuffles in…

In December of 1994, I went to a Billy Joel concert at Nassau Coliseum during one of the final legs of the River of Dreams tour. I’d been a fan for a while, all through high school, so attending the concert was the pinnacle of fandom for me. That night, Nassau Coliseum was packed to the rafters, 17,000 people and change all stuffed inside, nearly everyone a diehard fan as it was the end of the tour and all the casuals had long since attended. The diehards came out in force because, well, that’s what diehard fans do with their favorite musicians.

…well we’re all in the mood for a melody, and you got us feeling all right…

Like many musicians, BIlly Joel has his hit songs and crowd pleasers. He ends every show with his signature song, Piano Man, and the crowd always, always sings along.

The concert was a great one, but it was the ending that floored me. Because it was such a diehard crowd, people had been singing along in little bits and pieces all night long, but from the moment the first notes of Piano Man dropped out of the speakers, the crowd instantly unified into one.

…he knows that it’s me they’ve been coming to see, to forget about life for a while…

Hearing 17,000 people singing along in one massive chorus, nearly every single person in the crowd pouring their hearts and souls into their voices (myself included), was an astonishing moment. It felt like a massive tidal wave of energy as the building shook from that many people unified for one purpose, forgetting about life for a while and leaving their individual selves behind for just a few minutes.

If you’ve had a similar experience, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You leave your body for a little while. You forget that you, the individual exist, and for a few, brief, glorious minutes as you belt out the lyrics you’ve known by heart for years, you touch something far greater than yourself. You touch the spirit of everyone else in the room, hall, or stadium, you join them, and you feel an amazing unity with every person around you.

…sing us a song, you’re the piano man, sing us a song tonight…

It was that moment that woke me up to our awe-inspiring power and made me continue to question to this day just what we’re capable of as people, as human beings. What if we could tap into that kind of energy every day instead of just when our favorite musician was in town? What if we could bring that kind of power to everyday moments and not just reserve it for special occasions administered by Ticketmaster?

I think we can. I know we have the capacity, the capability, because I was there when it happened and felt it firsthand. When you touch a moment of unification like that, you feel nearly invincible, immune to all the ills of the world as you’re no longer your single, solitary self but something greater.

Three lessons. First, if you are any kind of performer, marketer, speaker, or entertainer, the more opportunities you have to gather your fans together in real life, when all of the energy we possess as living human beings can be pooled into one room, the greater the chances are that magic will happen. As wonderful as the Internet is, it simply cannot transmit the raw power of that experience. Nothing can. You can’t blog it. You can’t Twitter it. You can’t record it even in HD audio and video and transmit it to someone who wasn’t there any more than you can do so with a first kiss or a bite of the best pie you’ve ever tasted.

Second, no matter who you are, look for experiences that contain the potential for that magic. Even a small gathering can be powerful. The catch is that you have to be there. Over the summer at Matthew Ebel’s VIP Beer Bash, he played one of his signature songs, and the small group of us in that room, at that time, all singing along was no less magical. Sure, it didn’t have the scale of Nassau Coliseum, but there was still the sense of we rather than me, and when I listen to the recording, remembering and reliving that moment, it still brings a smile to my face more than any of his other recordings because of the magical direct experience we all shared.

Third, there is no substitute for being there. You can watch videos of conferences, you can listen to audio recordings of concerts, you can follow the live stream of an event on Twitter, but there simply is no substitute for being there. This above all else is why things like real life social events, conferences, and conventions will never go away, no matter how good our rebroadcast abilities get, because there are so many things that cannot be shared any other way than direct experience. If you’re a conference organizer or planner, the more you can do to facilitate the “you had to be there” moments, the more irreplaceable your conference will be. Having a bunch of talking heads on stage is easily replicated. Having a singalong in the lobby of the conference center (as Chris Brogan did at PodCamp Boston 3) is nearly impossible to replicate. Give people the freedom to create their own magic, and your event will be booked solid just for that alone.

Enjoyed it? Please share it!

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com