Unless You Personally Ask Them

Every performer in the world needs an audience. And to get one, they have to ask people to come and see their performance.

No one will come to your thing unless you personally ask them.

That’s a message I always try to drive home before my Aces Concert, because they want an audience and they aren’t accustomed to having to drum one up. (With a big choir program, the audience forms itself out of parents and siblings; with 12 singers, there is no such built-in audience.)

No one will come to your concert, to your art showing, to your party unless you personally ask them.

At first, it seems like this is only the case until you reach a certain level of success, but look closer – every performer at every level is spending a lot of their time asking people to come to their performances. Targeted advertising, email blasts, even social media posts are all designed to be a form of “Will you come to my show?”

Even at the top levels, it’s true. Lin-Manuel Miranda went on The Tonight Show right before In The Heights came out last month to do his version of personally asking people to come see it. He can’t go to door anymore, and it won’t sell enough tickets if he just personally asks his friends, so he makes 1,000 press appearances in order to reach you and me and say, “Hey, I made this thing, will you come see it?”

No one will come to your thing unless you personally ask them.