NHT Blog

Everyone loves a good story.

Humans are naturally curious. We try to figure out the answers to our own problems, as well as those that don't involve us at all. We always want what we can't have. When we're only given little pieces, it's like having your favorite meal dangled in front of your face, just out of reach. It leaves you craving more.

Over the weekend we set the clocks back an hour, which meant that we gained an extra hour that night.  The tendency is for people to jump in there with, “I think you meant to say an extra hour of sleep.”

Every four years in February we get an entire extra day on the calendar due to it being a Leap Year and thus there being 29 days in the second month of the year instead of the usual 28 on the calendar.

A friend of mine at one point had 90 thousand TikTok followers.  She said she posted three times a day because that’s what it takes to get that kind of following, attract more people to your account, and satisfy the people who have hit the Subscribe button.

We live in a generation where everything is designed to happen faster. We want instant gratification. People want tangible overnight success: Likes, followers, viewers, a dream business, a dream house, a trusting relationship. The main key that people have the hardest time with– especially in a generation where we want short-cuts to everything– is patience. It’s the hardest to master. The very thing we struggle to trust is the very thing we need most.

Recently, I sat down with a friend of mine who owns a hyper-local print magazine that is distributed for free to hundreds of businesses in the area. During our conversation, we started talking about how much the media landscape has changed just in my lifetime alone. I am a millennial, and I saw firsthand the shift from ordering magazine subscriptions to having virtually everything available digitally.

I recently announced that in January I will be a speaker at Podfest Multimedia Expo in Orlando.  Upon being notified of being selected, I completed the agreement that the organizers ask everyone (who is going to be a speaker at the event) to sign.  In there it very clearly states that you are there to share educational content from the stage and not venture into areas like political commentary or selling.

It’s okay to admit that you might be sick of hearing the word ‘collab’ at this point.  Admittedly, it does get thrown around an awful, awful lot these days.  It has for a while now, actually.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but unless and until a synonym replaces it, you’re going to have to simply accept that that is one word that is not going to go away any time soon.  Although I have to tack onto that, nor should it!

Three days ago, I was the feature on an AMA (Ask Me Anything) that the San Francisco Writers Conference put on (via Zoom).

Every so often the planets will align for music creators, and they’ll land on something that checks the boxes.  For me, “Nitelite” by Seth David Branitz could very well be in that discussion.

And good for him, by the way, since the casual music listener has no idea about the countless songs that get written, feel really good, but don’t end up going anywhere.  Thus, it’s all the more reason to celebrate when a song lands as the writer and/or artist hoped it would.

For more than a dozen years now I have seen and been reminded of the importance of managing expectations.  In fact, it has become so prevalent in my life that not only do I give it out as one of my top pieces of advice to people, but I even did a search on this very website to see if I’d already written a blog about the topic.