Most music business advice focuses on what you should do. Build your fanbase. Release consistently. Pitch to playlists. Network. The list goes on.
But Joe from Home Studio Corner recently shared something a little different, and honestly more useful. On his lates video which coincides with the 17th anniversary of running his music production blog, he talked through what he calls his “To Never Do” list.
Seven things he actively works to stop doing because they pull him away from his goals.
It’s not a productivity framework. It’s a mindset check, built from 17 years of coaching musicians and watching the same mental patterns quietly wreck people’s progress. Worth paying attention to.
You can watch the original video below…
Why a “To Never Do” List?
The idea is simple. Instead of adding more things to accomplish, you identify the habits and thought patterns that keep blocking you. Joe keeps his printed out and looks at it regularly. Not as some motivational poster exercise, but as a genuine reminder of the ways he tends to get in his own way.
As he puts it, the things on this list move him away from his goals, priorities, and potential.
And here’s the thing that makes this relevant to anyone trying to build something in the music business: the technical side of music is learnable. Software, gear, mixing, distribution, all of it can be figured out. What’s harder to fix, and what Joe has watched hold back more musicians than any technical gap, is what’s happening between the ears.
So here are the seven things on his list.
1. No Spiraling
Joe is upfront about this one. He has a perfectionist streak and a nagging belief that he’s not good enough. When something goes wrong, his brain goes looking for proof of that belief and finds it fast.
The pattern looks like this: a song doesn’t turn out the way you wanted, a product launch underperforms, a client walks away. And suddenly it’s not “that didn’t work” but “I am a failure.”
He credits Zig Ziglar with the line that stuck with him: failure is an event, not a person. Something can fail. You can’t be one.
For anyone in the music business, this matters a lot. You will release things that flop. You will pitch things that get ignored. If you let those events define you, you’ll stop taking the risks that actually move your career forward.
2. No Comparison
This one hits hard for musicians. You hear someone else’s production, see someone else’s numbers, watch someone else land the sync deal you wanted, and suddenly everything you’ve built feels small.
Joe borrows a framework from the book The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy.
The gap is the distance between where you are and where you want to be. The gain is everything you’ve already overcome to get here. Most people spend their time staring at the gap.
The problem isn’t having ambition. It’s when comparison becomes the lens through which you see everything you do. It makes you tense, it makes your work worse, and it keeps you focused on what you haven’t done rather than what you’re capable of.
The fix is simple but not easy: look back before you look sideways.
3. No Defensiveness
Put yourself online and someone will misunderstand you, disagree with you, or just decide they don’t like you. Joe’s response used to be to defend himself. Now it’s on his list as something to never do.
His reasoning is solid. If your sense of value depends on other people’s approval, you’ll spend your whole career managing reactions instead of making things. Being okay with being misunderstood is not weakness. It’s how you stay focused.
This applies directly to music business situations too. A bad review, a difficult collaborator, a contract dispute. Defensiveness usually makes those situations worse, not better.
4. No Criticism of Self or Others
Joe draws a clear line between critique and criticism. Critique is constructive, it’s aimed at a better outcome. Criticism is just tearing something down, and it usually says more about the person doing it than the thing being criticised.
He admits he can get a quiet satisfaction from talking down about someone else’s work, but he’s honest about what it actually does. Nothing. It doesn’t make him better. It doesn’t move anything forward.
Same goes for self-criticism. There’s a difference between honest self-assessment and just beating yourself up. One helps you improve. The other just keeps you stuck.
5. No Hiding
This might be the most relevant one for anyone trying to run a music business.
Hiding doesn’t look like hiding. It looks like research. It looks like learning a new feature in your DAW. It looks like watching another YouTube video about the thing you already know how to do. It looks like staying busy without moving forward.
Joe’s observation is that the thing you most want to avoid is usually the thing that matters most. The uncomfortable email, the unfinished song, the business decision you’ve been sitting on. Avoidance is a signal, not a solution.
He also makes a sharp point about learning software. If you’re deep in tutorials about your DAW but haven’t recorded anything in weeks, that’s not learning. That’s hiding with extra steps.
6. No Criticism (of the work before it’s done)
This feeds into the hiding point. Half-finished projects, abandoned ideas, songs that never got released because they weren’t quite right. Joe is familiar with all of it.
The version of this that affects music business people most is the tendency to critique your own work so aggressively before it’s even done that you never finish it. You self-edit before you self-express. Nothing ships.
The goal isn’t to lower your standards. It’s to let the work get done before you start judging it.
7. No Half-Hearted Work
The last one is about flow. Joe talks about the work that makes you lose track of time, the stuff you do where an hour feels like ten minutes. He wants to spend as much time there as possible.
For music business purposes, this is worth thinking about practically. What parts of what you do put you in that state? And what parts drain you? The goal isn’t to only do the fun stuff, but to get efficient at the draining parts so they don’t take over, and to protect the time you spend on the work that actually energises you.
Trying to learn everything before you make anything is, as Joe puts it, just another form of hiding.
The Bigger Picture
What makes Joe’s list worth sharing is that it’s honest. He’s not presenting himself as someone who has figured it all out. He’s sharing the things he still struggles with after 17 years of doing this for a living.
And that’s the point. Building a music business is a long game. The technical skills are learnable. The mindset stuff is where people actually get stuck, and stay stuck, if they don’t pay attention to it.
Worth bookmarking this list and asking yourself honestly which one you need to work on most right now.
