Lessons
The Hermit and I hijacked Greg’s CYGN-B thread last week and took it on a wistful look at long ago. We realized it didn’t belong there and deleted our ramblings on that thread. I’ve created this thread to have a place to talk about the lessons that are sometimes learned years and even decades later. Or feel free to take this thread wherever it leads.
One example of a lesson learned much later was the discovery that it wasn’t the audience moving on that killed Laserium. Back in 1973 Laserium had a marketing model that worked and planetariums were hungry for content. The problem – the marketing model had a half-life. Ivan tried a variety of things to chase the audience. Forty years later I found that audiences still loved the Laserium. Despite the sad fact that I wasn’t remotely as good a Laserist as I was back in the ‘70s.
I worked as a Laserist for four years and then as management and an occasional Laserist for another year. I woke up one morning and realized that I took a promotion that moved me away from the part of the job that I enjoyed. I could have done shows at Griffith, but that would have taken money away from other Laserists. Two weeks before I quit we got the RUSH tour, and I wanted to do it. That didn’t happen. The interesting thing is the guy who did the tour was asked by the band to do their next tour. They wanted him, and said he could get the lasers from whoever he wanted. He picked Laser Media. I asked him how it was going while he was on that second tour – I still remember the gist of his answer. Well he said, I already knew how to run power and water, and it wasn’t really hard to learn how to press the start button. So the lesson – sometimes getting what you want becomes a boring grind.
"There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun." Pablo Picasso