Stoked to finally share our first guest lecture by .
My favorite quote from the piece
All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who's really bad at it. You don't have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a little bit better so you can survive the war of attrition.
It’s a critical reminder that consistency and small improvements over a long period of time are key to the success you crave.
Hope you enjoy.
— Daniel
When I started blogging about music in 2001, it was just for my little corner of the world. I was playing in bands, going to shows around PA and NJ, and noticing that the bigger music sites weren’t covering any of it. So I bought a domain name and started writing about my friends every day. That’s how this all started. I knew what I was talking about, I knew who might read it, and that’s how I’ve worked ever since.
At first, I wrote very plainly—“just the facts, ma’am,” I’d tell myself. It kept me out of “trouble,” but wow, was it boring.
Over time, I got good at digging through small-market newspaper sites, pulling quotes from band interviews, and building posts around them.
Bands told all kinds of wild stories, but this was pre-social media, so those soundbites didn’t travel the way they do now.
In 2006, I added the blog to my resume on Monster.com and landed a three-month contract at AOL Music, writing blurbs for the homepage that millions of people saw every day. I remember making a typo in one of those blurbs and getting a stern talking-to from the editor-in-chief. After he walked away, a coworker leaned over and said, “Geez, we’re not saving lives.” I’ve carried that wisdom with me ever since.
Two years later, I launched a metal blog for AOL Music called Noisecreep. I got to hire a staff, do bigger features—like following Bring Me the Horizon around Times Square—and meet my metal heroes (Rob Halford is as nice as you’d hope).
Unfortunately, that was when SEO and social media collided. Growth at all costs. Suddenly we were publishing 20+ posts a day with half the budget. I burned out hard and never went back.
When I left, I knew I wanted to get back to making readers feel something or learn something. If you feel something, it sticks. If you learn something, you walk away smarter. Everyone wins.
So I started Skull Toaster in 2011, writing metal trivia questions on Twitter. I’d phrase each question to spark curiosity. Like this one from Friday, August 17, 2018:
Happy Birthday to guitarist Gilby Clarke.
In the early ’90s he replaced ____ in Guns N’ Roses.
Even if you didn’t know the answer, you at least learned that Gilby Clarke’s birthday is August 17 (answer: Izzy Stradlin).
I posted over 2,000 questions and sent more than 1,000 nightly email newsletters with the answers, Monday through Friday. Each one was like a mini blog post, breaking down the band, the era, the album. That project kept me afloat—spiritually, at least—during some lean years.
It gave me purpose. Kept me learning. Kept me writing.
My buddy Sean Cannon—who came on board to help with my blog back in 2005 and later worked with me on Noisecreep—once said, “All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a little bit better so you can survive the war of attrition.” Sean went on to win a Peabody for developing The Pope’s Long Con with Louisville Public Media. He never stopped. He just kept surviving.
You don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun your friends.
I got my blog up and running again in 2018 (sethw.xyz) and started backfilling it with photos and other odds and ends dating back to 2004. I launched my newsletter in 2021 on Substack, and now I update my Social Media Escape Club site almost every day with something.
I write 500 words and sometimes delete them, just re-write it from scratch. I keep quotes and ideas and tuck them away into WordPress drafts and come back to them later. I write in spurts, between YouTube videos or playing with my cat. I dictate thoughts and ideas and never go back to them, knowing full well its still effective because I had those thoughts and said those ideas out loud - they don’t disappear.
For me, staying in the game is winning, and winning just means I get to play again tomorrow. I just never stopped writing for my little corner of the world.
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