Navigating life as a creative professional is a lot like a crossword puzzle…
There are some clues
You don’t know most of them
Getting something right feels like a miracle
It’s confusing and time consuming
You wonder why you started this thing in the first place
But in the creative world, unlike the crossword puzzle…the answers are not on page 86.
Great players (musicians) are known for how well they play, their style of play, and if they hit mostly correct notes.
Great artists are known for the songs they release and how well those songs connect with a market.
In general if you practice really hard you can be known as a great player. You can read charts and play fast and take solos and play to a click. And add a little finesse.
But the only sure outcome of relentlessly practicing being an artist is that you are in fact an artist. You might have made five albums but they’re not very good and no one listens to them…you’re still in artist but all that time and practice and commitment didn’t make you a great one. Because artists trade on musical emotional connection. Not ability or worth ethic or commitment. Ultimately no one cares if a rock band is good at guitar…people only care if they have an awesome rock song.
»» Of course there’s considerable overlap here. Most players are artistic. And most great artists got to be great because of some degree of skilled musicianship.
Whether it’s writing a song, making a sandwich, driving downtown, or building a relationship, the idea of ‘quickly’ introduces an interesting tension…because you know the process, you know how to do it, you’ve done it all before, but now you have to do it quickly.
Maybe the thought is that you’ll only have to do it quickly once, so just get through it.
Maybe the thought is that doing it quickly will make you faster at it overall moving forward.
Maybe the thought is the quicker the better because the process itself doesn’t have value, only the result does.
Maybe the thought is that going quicker is an interesting new angle and you’ll learn something new along the way.
All the same muscles and motions just…quickly.
I had four major things break at my house within one week.
Each of them had its own origin, its own timeline to failure. None of them talked with one another. None of them were plotting.
They just all lined up on the same week. No reason.
Oftentimes ‘why me’ is just a waste of time…especially when things are going wrong and there’s a lot of work to do.
Finishing is the second hardest part but probably the part we have the least practice with.
The hardest part is starting. And then the middle is where we spend most of our time.
So it’s a lot more rare to get any practice with how to finish something because we usually either quit before we start or quit during the middle because it’s too long.
But when we see something through and we create the opportunity to finish, it’s important to recognize that opportunity…take in the sights and sounds and feelings of bringing something to completion. Practice finishing. It’s hard to get there. You might not be good at finishing yet. Keep finishing and you’ll keep getting better at it.
It’s not that everyone needs to like what you do with the attention given to you by an audience but you need to know what your aim is…so that there’s something to like.
The best artists know their aim.
Not necessarily the biggest most successful artists…the best ones.
A great new artist in a small club is electrifying…even though they may not make it to the big stage.
A mediocre artist in an arena is unremarkable…even though they made it to the big stage.
Know your aim. You’re not always going to hit the target but you need to know what you wanna do with all that attention. The attention is a gift to you and the best way to pay it forward is to lead the way to a place they (just might) wanna go.