This is so important. We have been fed - especially in recent years - this fantasy that everyone should have a dream job that fills them with joy and satisfaction, and indeed that we shouldn’t accept anything less. This goal is so much more often toxic than not, as almost everyone finds (even if they do get what they thought was their dream job) that work is work, frequently tedious and a grind.
Releasing yourself of this expectation gives so much energy back to you because it allows you to frame it internally as transactional, and being less emotionally invested saves your passion for other things that matter to you, be it music, friends, family, anything. Strangely it lets you enjoy your job more.
Damn, you guys are the shi*t. Thanks so much for the replies. I need some time to process all you’ve said, but just know that it helped my day out big time.
so i haven’t read every response here so sorry if i’m reiterating.
what are you giving up?
if you’re giving up being part of the music business then yeah give it up.
if you’re giving up on creating music for the joy of creating music then don’t give up.
even the most “successful” musician friends i have have day jobs.
niche electronic/avant garde music ain’t never gonna pay the bills.
unless you write a piece that get’s used in a Levi’s advert or similar…
i find it disconcerting that people have normalised success as monetary income.
define success.
a monthly PRS cheque that secures your crack use and mortgage?
or creating something true to yourself that emotionally affects people enough to get a few likes and dislikes on social media?
consideration edit: success is definitely not having to hold a shite job down to focus solely on music, but it shouldn’t be the be all and end all to your creativity and self expression.
Some good advice here. Personally, I ‘give up’ every few months, play my guitar for a bit and realise there was nothing to ‘give up’ in the first place, as I mainly make music for my own therapy, and then get stuck in again. The wish to be ‘pro’ side of things faded away about 20 years ago for me in the commercial sense, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be as professional as we can with our music output.
I self release bits and pieces, and I’d be happy with a gig now and then at an art show or something, but at the moment I’m mostly entertaining my partner and cat with OT noodling, which is also perfectly fine.
take a break. I haven’t switched on my studio to do anything over an hour in over 4 months.
One day something will click again and an idea will pop in to your head. Just fill the tracks up as quick as you can with anything which sounds reasonably good. Come back the next day or so and tidy it up.
I’m no pro. I just enjoy the learning aspect of it. I don’t knock tunes out every week/month or anything. I just like to play occasionally. But sometimes I strike lucky and do something I like and learn from it, this carries over to the next tune and then the next.
Face it. If you give up and sell up, one day you’ll have this idea and you’ll want to try it and the slippery slope will start all over again.
First off, thanks for sharing and for offering us your trust. I think it takes a good amount of bravery to acknowledge these sort of thoughts and feelings to oneself, let alone someone else.
When I was 15 years old I left home to move overseas and pursue a professional basketball career. I spent 4 years in a foreign country alone, working my ass off, dealing with abusive coaches and a brutal system in the pursuit of going pro…eventually an injury forced me to end my stay there and I returned to Europe to try and salvage what I could. I spent nearly 2 years dabbling around as a professional here, moving from one pro team to another — until a first league pro club in a European league offered me a half-decent contract.
During my time in the States I had met and made friends with a Brazilian basketball legend and I called him to tell him about the contract I was offered — and he flat out told me not to do it and to give up my (very short) career as a pro player. The reasons don’t matter today, but it made sense and somehow he just came through to me in a way where I decided to take his advice. I ended it knowing it’s the right thing to do, but man it was difficult…
Here are a few things I learned from that experience, looking back:
It’s important to be honest to yourself, always.
This is difficult because negativity and hope can both blur the picture of what is actually going on. But you should always make the effort & have the intention to face reality (the outer and your inner) head on.
When something is coming to an end, you know.
No need to fret over it, if you follow point 1, you will KNOW. Not just intellectually but with your whole being. So if you know now, respect that. If you THINK now, keep keeping on.
Less judgement, more observation.
As I was not progressing the way I had dreamt I would when I left home, I became harder and harder on myself. More judgement, less patience, less self-love. That’s a really stupid and destructive loop and worst of all, it hinders learning & growth. So my learning here was to judge less and observe more. Difference — a judgement is final, an observation becomes the basis for learning, iteration and meaningful next step in the right direction. If this point speaks to you I recommend this little book called “The Inner Game of Tennis”. It makes some good and simple but useful points about this “mental game”
What determines your well-being with something is markedly affect by your relationship and culture with yourself when engaged with that something. Because of point 3 I started hating basketball and being a basketball player…at one point it was all stress & pressure and zero fun and enjoyment anymore. Make sure you understand this: it’s not Music’s fault if shit feels bad. It’s how you handle yourself and how you relate to yourself in that context that creates the suffering. So rather than asking “does music make me happy?” You should ask yourself “can I handle myself in a way that makes me happy when focused on music?” — i.e. the way you cultivate yourself is what makes the difference, not the context as such.
Sometimes stuff just doesn’t work out.
The media and popular mythology about effort and success would have you believe that if you want something enough and just “work hard enough” you WILL get it in just the way you dream it — and if you don’t “manifest” your ideal dream life then that’s your fault. but that calculation really doesn’t add up at all. Sometimes stuff simply doesn’t pan out. No shame in that. No punishment in that either. Sometimes not even any direct responsibility in that. It just happens and that’s part of life. I say that because the worry about “failing at it” shouldn’t occupy you at all.
Just because I didn’t manage to live my teenage dream to the T doesn’t mean I have to accept a mediocre life.
I had full ride offers to Ivy League schools during my time in the US and I dismissed them without giving them any consideration at all because most of those schools had shitty basketball teams. I want to say that I was so single-minded, so focussed on this one goal, that I really wasn’t interested in anything else. So when I quit I had NO IDEA where to go from there and I first applied to work in a call center cause I thought that’s all I was good for…and I thought that would be my life from there onward. After a short while I started to discover new things about the world and myself though and eventually that led me down a totally different and so far rewarding path in life — there’s no need to live a situation you hate, it’s just important that you respect yourself enough to recognise and follow through on realities you discover within yourself.
Uncertainty is a fact of life.
Depending on how you trust yourself it can become “danger” or “risk” or “potential disaster” (if you project your fears into the uncertainty), or it can be the source of “opportunity”, “excitement”, “newness” and learning (if you project your trust into it). I’m not telling you to practice autohypnosis and tell yourself that you love uncertainty for all the opportunity it brings…rather I’m telling you that you should relate to yourself with honesty and clarity, patience and a learner’s mindset so that you can build trust and confidence in yourself, which in turn will make uncertainty much more manageable and thus allow for braver, more intrinsically resonant decisions.
ONLY YOU can know…when you know.
I know I mentioned this already but I want to make it explicit — none of us can tell you that you should or shouldn’t continue your pursuit. In fact you should resist giving in to any such harmonising/hollow offerings, even if they promise to provide you temporary relief (eg “hey man, you got this, just keep going!!!”). Honesty, openness and truthfulness towards yourself at all times is the best way to keep your inner compass clean and make decisions that are worth living. I like the buddhist motto of “No Illusions!” here. No illusions means making a continuous effort to not cloud one’s perception, opinion and judgement with illusions, be those negative illusions (“I suck!” “I will never succeed” “I should just give up” etc) OR positive illusions (“I’m sure it’ll be ok!” “Well my best friend thinks I should def keep going” etc) but rather to face up with openness and truthfulness that which is ACTUALLY there (within you and around you).
Enjoy the process.
For sure, achieving the thing we aim for is a short high at best. In the end (as far as I can judge thus far) it’s really about the process of living rather than the individual events of achieving. Do what you do in a good way (give your best, treat yourself well, approach what you do with an open mind always, leverage issues or failures into learning and positive iteration/growth) and the destination will become secondary. The great Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo called this “Karma Yoga” if that’s up your ally.
In any case I wish you good luck, lots of learning and especially well-being on your path, no matter which one you choose to pursue going forward.
Go back. Did you like exploring instruments and sounds because you where born with a desire to express yourself musically or did you want to be a professional musician first. Who are you without any title or recognition? Count your blessings, make up a list what you have learned and experienced so far, from the day you touched your first keys or strings till now. No one has to become someone, you are someone.
This is probably slightly off topic but lately when “giving it up” been attacking I’ve reminded me of Dominik Eulberg words
There’s 3 kinds of people
Those who like what you do
Those who don’t like what you do
And those who just don’t give a sh!t
There’s so much knowledge in his thoughts, but a good thing of course is if you’re into his lovely music before you watch. I do plenty of mountain biking to his stuff!
I worked professionally here in Atlanta engineering and some producing in my early 20’s. I was working with some huge names in the hiphop industry, and I was living my dream… so I thought. It was a nightmare and I grew to hate it and abandoned it all together. I was totally lost. I only rediscovered my love for music 3 years ago when I needed an escape while battling a serious illness. Over those 3 years it’s become an amazing hobby. I’ve never been happier making music.
Or another option is to make weird, arty, „experimental“ music, which gives a shit about category, mix, etc.
Maybe it‘s easier finished, maybe it turns out as something special/genuine and maybe you‘re therefore happier in the end.
But probably it won’t be „pro“ (if pro means you can earn enough money to quit your day job).
I think you should give up on trying to be a PRO. I dont think you should give up on music.
Björk Said it really well when she described her creativity as an entity living inside her a “curious beast” I think she described. Her point was that her creativity always came out when she least suspected it when she wasn’t trying to be creative and it wasn’t always in music that curious beast landed, it could be baking cookies or exploring nature.
I believe that in your pursuit to become pro you are suffocating your curious beast. Let go of your ambition and set your curious beast free… it might take a while for it to come out, but I guarantee that it will.
If you really want to go pro, then don’t try to go pro. The risk is that you will fail, but you will be happy… and that’s what’s important!
Some good advice here. I really don’t know that mine is much. I just mess with music for fun. I dream of making an album and some music video’s but actually being a career professional in music I know I would have a ways to go.
I agree though with how if you feel like you can’t do say mixing or some other part up to your expectation and your still putting tracks together don’t be down on yourself for not being some sort of one person wonder who does it all to the hilt.
That’s kind of my bummer too. I love synths and sound design, making random stuff that I know I’m the only one listening to it. But I can’t mix, and I can’t shoot stellar video footage, or play the keys that great, but I express myself and I try not to worry about what if or why haven’t I done ‘IT’ yet?
When I started I just loved some super wet reverb and my synth drowning in it. And eventually threw a drum loop in it. And that’s what I do when I want to just chill. If your fun is gone I would say just take a break and like others mentioned, reflect on what you have learned and maybe one day you’ll come back to it refreshed in a new wonder. Or maybe you’ll figure out what you really need to do in as far as getting out of your half hearted career and at least get into something that can afford you the time to just enjoy whatever it is that moves you next.
I’d say turning yourself into a full time, financially self supporting musician is an almost impossible task:
no matter how committed or
how talented or
how much luck or
how rich or
how well connected you are
(well okay if you have all 5 of these going for you maybe, but really you will need a very strong hand in at least 3 or 4 of these) - and even then, think about the challenges of maintaining sufficient mental / creative stamina to keep your artistic self functioning at this heightened level, day in, day out for at least two or three decades. It’s a formidable task especially as you will also need to generate enough money to pay others to support what you do and at the same time retain those vital relationships with the reliable, loving people around you that will support you emotionally through the hard times which will inevitably come from time to time.
Alternatively find a job you can bear and save your joy for what you love doing.
