The first time I saw the busker, he was playing the violin. I assume he had been there for some time, but it took me several minutes to notice him.

I have walked through this courtyard dozens of times and never seen him before.

We talk about the importance of being an obvious business, but what does that mean? How do you know when you are being obvious?

He sets up his music stand in a small courtyard between several office buildings. He is located near a series of food trucks, which people congregate around during lunch. There are benches in the courtyard where people sit and eat their food truck meals or enjoy the sunshine. But, there are also many people who walk through this area on their way to somewhere else.

It is not that the music is loud; it is that it is impossible to ignore. I could be looking at my phone or talking to someone walking next to me, but my brain would still register the melody and pick it up again when I stopped paying attention to my phone or conversation.

The first time I saw him, I thought: “This guy is really good.” But, then I realized he was playing off a sheet of music rather than improvising his own melody. The second time I saw him

I was walking down the street the other day when a busker struck up. He was good. Really good. It wasn’t just that he had a great voice, or that his guitar-playing was excellent: it was that he had a certain quality which made me stop and listen to him even though I had somewhere to be and wanted to get there.

I watched him for a while, but the music wasn’t something you could ignore, so eventually I moved on again. The thing about great buskers is that they don’t just make you stop and listen for a minute: they make you want to stay.

The next day I walked past the same spot again, and there he was – still playing, still drawing in an audience, still sounding great. And now I had time to spare, so I stopped and listened to a few songs before moving on.

I was walking through Cambridge yesterday when I heard a busker playing a very odd tune on his saxophone. It was almost like he wasn’t even trying to write a song, but just experimenting with different notes and keys until something interesting happened.

But the more I listened, the more I realized that there was a pattern emerging from the chaos. The saxophonist had found a certain musi

Some of the signs that you are on the right track:

You keep getting weird compliments. For example, one of our users told us that he’d used FogBugz to write a novel and publish it on Amazon. He said it was the best book-writing software he’d used. We weren’t sure how to feel about that, since we don’t actually think of ourselves as a writing tool. But then we thought about it more, and realized that the most interesting compliment was not “weird,” but actually exactly what we wanted to hear. Because one thing we do know is that our customers tend to use FogBugz in ways we didn’t predict or intend when we wrote the code. The fact that people are using FogBugz in ways other than writing bug trackers means that they are willing to put up with a certain amount of inconvenience from the software. That’s good news!

It is a rare thing to see a musician playing on the streets in a big city. I’ve spent most of my life in cities, and have never seen anyone doing so. At least until yesterday.

I was in St Pancras station waiting for a train. Above the sound of announcements and the footsteps of hundreds of people I heard music: someone playing a trumpet. My first thought was that it was a recording, but then I saw him: an elderly gentleman with a mop of white hair and beard to match, wearing a beret and suitably matching waistcoat. He was standing next to one of those massive potted plants they have at railway stations, while people hurried past him as if he wasn’t there.

I stood there watching him play for five minutes. He was really good: he had mastered the art of lip trills and slap tonguing, creating sounds I had never heard before from a brass instrument. The tune he played was simple and repetitive, but still beautiful in its own way – although it might not be everyone’s cup of tea.

A few years ago, while in the process of writing my first book, I had to do a lot of traveling. During this period, I was surprised how often I would get inspired during the flight. After all, on an airplane you’re stuck in a small space with no internet and nothing else to do.

One day while on a flight home, I started thinking about the ways that people make money by playing music (for example, busking). And how you can generally predict whether they will be successful based on how much they practice and their talent for the instrument.

Then it hit me that the reason why most people aren’t able to make money with music is because they have no idea what it takes to be successful. In other words, most people don’t understand what it takes to make money from playing music.

This thought has stayed with me through the years. And as a music producer myself, I’ve noticed that most aspiring musicians don’t know what it takes either! It’s not their fault though…

In this article I’m going to share some of my insights about what it really takes to make money as a musician:

When I was young, I lived in San Francisco and would walk down Haight street on the weekends. One of my favorite things to do was to watch the buskers perform. And one of the most memorable ones was a guy named “the worm.”

He would always dress in black, with a shaggy wig, and a face mask. He would come out before an audience and start beating his chest, rolling on the ground and making crazy noises. This would go on for several minutes while people gathered around him. After he had enough of an audience, he would stop rolling around and stand up. He would then start singing his songs in a very gravelly voice. His music wasn’t very good, but it wasn’t terrible either. The thing that made it special was his performance (and maybe a little luck).

After he finished singing each song, he would pull out a small hat from his pocket where people could throw in their tips. And when I say a small hat, I mean tiny – about 4 inches in diameter by 1 inch deep. It seemed like such an incredibly inefficient way to collect money. Despite this fact, he did pretty well for himself.

I remember one day watching him collect $150 in tips in less than 30 minutes —