Welcome back to The Club List, a newsletter about making a business out of what you love. Thank you to everyone who sent kind words about the first edition!

Last week, I suggested to pick a repetitive thing you do for your creative work and spend 30 minutes a day doing it up to three times. I mentioned that doing this significantly altered my life, and that there’d be a good story about it. Today, you get that story, in all its absurdity and promise.

You’ll also get a fresh thing you can use today for what you do, and the List of Clubs includes a hat tip to a roving duo of dancers that I think are really onto something. This will be good.

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So, with the intro behind us, it’s time to get into that creativity hack I keep talking about. Here’s a little story about the time I indulged my weirdest self for two months and changed my work, art, and life for the better.

The Ballad of Mike Toilet

Let’s go back to May 2019. Things were going great for me professionally. The marketing agency I co-owned at the time was gearing up to produce a 1,000+ capacity conference that summer, and I had taken a few days to myself to visit friends in Seattle and say hi to the fine folks at KEXP. But I also had studied music and played live before, and I badly wanted to make an album. I just couldn’t get out of my head about the idea enough to know where to start.

Then, as tends to happen in Seattle, I spent a lot of time listening to grunge and noise rock.

I listened to a lot - and I mean a lot - of Melvins that trip. This is their song “Honey Bucket,” which, as I discovered on a hiking trail, gets its name from a regional portable toilet company. The band’s lyrics are word salad. The guitars are the point, and they’re loud. We’re talking “punch a hole in the sky” loud. Nirvana cited them as a major influence.

Before I got back to New York, an in-joke with one of my Seattle friends had led me to start my own “band” (me with a drum machine maybe) and call it Mike Toilet. The name was the absolute worst name I could think of. There was no temptation to craft it for mass appeal, or to consider how it would be marketed. I wanted to make big, stupid Melvins-y guitar riffs and stop overthinking so much of my life.

So I came home and, knowing I only really cared about big riffs very suddenly, I started making myself spend 30 minutes every evening holding a guitar. I used an amp I’d had since college, cranked the distortion, and recorded myself playing whatever came to mind in front of a tiny Zoom Q2n camera. The intention was the intention. Strip the ego, leave the id. I wanted to hear it and see it as well as I could, in all its ridiculousness. If I got to three new riffs, I stopped early. Keep it off-the-cuff, I thought.

Well, after about two months of this, I found myself going somewhere interesting with it.

For one thing, I was having the time of my life. That comes first.

But there were other good things. I had made myself send clips from a few of the better riffs to musician friends of mine, partly so they could share in the lunacy and partly to overcome any nerves about playing for people again. Turns out that many of them didn’t even know I played guitar. A bassist friend found out, and that led to us forming our band Lost Decades and writing a full album with our friends the following year. I finally did something I’d dreamed of doing.

I also noticed it was becoming a lot easier to break executive function deadlocks at work. Before, I’d sometimes talk myself out of trying a new way forward for a client project because I had learned to think about all the ways it couldn’t work. Now, I’d try something new, identify what could happen as it went, and then I’d just do it. This process is truer to myself. It has informed a lot of what I do, and what I help others to do.

Mike Toilet has not released any music officially. That was never the point. What it did release, in many ways, was me.

One Thing You Can Use Today

I know the 30 minutes-every-day thing requires a commitment. Sometimes, you just don’t have the extra half-hour. Maybe you’re at a conference, maybe you’re selling designs at a convention, or maybe you’ve got a long night ahead of you at your second job. Well, I learned something from my old guitar teacher many years ago that translates to many fields:

Every day, try to pick up whatever it is you use that’s exclusive to your creative practice, and just hold it for 5 minutes.

Why does this work? That’s easy.

You’re training your brain to make connections with the thing in front of you. If you’re learning something new, this is especially important. But it’s useful if you’re very experienced with it, too.

A special caveat to business owners reading this who don’t have a tactile creative practice yet: You should find something to do this with anyway. I highly recommend a journal and a pen. If you don’t read outside of your field very often, do it with a book. Thank me later.

And yes, it also works for simple exercise. Like dancing. It’s about to be a great weekend for that!

List of Clubs

These are the kinds of clubs I’d like to be in around NYC! Wherever you might find music, art, or a compelling experience under one roof, that’s a club to me. I only list clubs I’d enjoy going to. If I list a client, you’ll know.

Friday, June 7 - Truncate with Boys’ Shorts @ Basement
Basement can be a lot to deal with (weird door, odd vibe depending on night, etc), but this is worth it just for Boys’ Shorts in the studio. They’re Greek, they opened for Hot Chip, and well…just listen to “Crop Tops.” You’ll get it.

Saturday, June 8 + Sunday, June 9 - ReSolute XL @ H0L0
I got tipped off to this party by @club.stack on Instagram, a dance-loving duo who I am not affiliated with but already love everything about. Their site bills them as “New York’s only source for accessible and sexy dance parties,” and they have a “call to dance” hotline that takes things back to New York’s pre-smartphone days. Get the number from their site and call it, you won’t be disappointed.

Sunday, June 9 - Public Service @ Herbert Von King
Toribio and Mickey Perez are two of my favorite DJs in New York. This is their free day party in a park. Toribio runs the party BDA, which stands for Bring Dat Ass (and lives up to the title). Immaculate choice.

Thanks for reading! And now, an image of me in the club…

The Club List is a newsletter from MeInTheClub.com. All issues are available at TheClubList.net. To inquire about marketing services for your work, contact [email protected] and include "Services” in the subject line.