The Bigger Picture Is the Only One You Have to Focus on
He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes.
—Chinese Proverb
Understanding Success
The fine line between failure and success in every endeavor, but specifically in the music industry, is marked by persistence and the ability to constantly maintain high levels of drive and ambition to achieve your most desired results. Regardless of how difficult and overwhelming the obstacles you might need to overcome or the position that you might find yourself in may be, you will undoubtedly find yourself victorious in the end of such cycles if you ensure full dedication to your efforts and persistence with your actions. Success will unfold, eventually. It is undeniable. Your career performance and the overall level of success that you can achieve are mostly a matter of self-belief and confidence, rather than actual ability and qualities—the most successful participants in this industry are never necessarily the most talented, but the most persistent, devoted, and hardworking ones. Trusting yourself, your talents, and your potential determines the direction of your development and growth, as the specifics of your self-awareness control your actions in terms of the goals and the ideas you have toward your professional activity and the way that you approach and deal with the respective obstacles, which you have to overcome in order to prove yourself successful. Believing in yourself is a notion that dictates your efforts in the process of shaping yourself to the person who is able to achieve the results, which you are aiming to accomplish. Most people are not successful because they do not possess the desire to be, subconsciously. Every person possesses the chance to achieve and reach their desires, but due to already established prejudices and perceptions, they decide not to do so. It is you against the world and you better be ready to place your bets on yourself in this battle, if you want to win it in the end.
Success is not measured by the amount of money you earn or the achieved levels of influence, fame, or attention that you generate. Success is a term that implies and describes your ability to have the freedom to live your life the way you want to. So, it is important to clearly define what the meaning behind this word for you is, personally, in order to make sure that you are undertaking the right steps in the process of following the right goals. Personal success and professional success are two different terms that should not be mixed in their essence by the artist. However, once the final destinations of these two channels match, the artist can be assured and certain that this is an indication and a sign that their mind is on the right path to success in the music business. You are not working toward a profession and a career in the conventional sense of the word. You are working toward achieving your calling, so you have to almost accept the pursuance of your goals as an obsession. For a long period of time—especially if you want to reach the highest possible levels of this business—your activity as an artist should not be the first thing on your mind; it should be the only thing on it, no exceptions. The road to achieving your goals will be hard and your personal life will suffer to a larger extent than you can even imagine, but you should be ready to pay this price and to be actually willing to do it as well. Possessing this strong desire and drive for greatness and success, in most cases, is a quality that is either present or absent in a person’s character and is almost impossible to be taught in reality. However, from a psychological point of view, the nature of a person’s essence is such that it always aspires to reach certain achievements marked as essential for the given personality. Hence, even if the artist’s personality features do not include ardent passion for prosperity, they should make sure that they are capable of maximizing their present potential for drive and ambition and to take advantage of it while seeking career affluence.
What does sustainable career mean? Ultimately, this is a term that represents the artist’s ability to be in a position where they can earn enough money to satisfy their living needs and be comfortable and able to concentrate their full attention and working potential on the process of improving their respective craftsmanship. In order for this level of activity to be achieved, you have to ensure a high level of monetization to your respective professional projects. Or, in other words, if you want to be able to do what you do, you have to make sure that you are earning money. You can utilize and invest your full potential, capacity, personal qualities, and talents in your career only once your mind does not have to worry about other aspects of your life. Hence, it is important to make sure that all of your basic needs are always met and that your mind is not overwhelmed by any thoughts that might harm your full dedication to your craft in order to fortify the productivity and quality of your working potential, which you need to utilize in order to eventually gain the accomplishments that you are seeking.
Career Path
Start by taking advantage of every opportunity for growth, even for free. It is of significance to be able and ready to take advantage of any eventual chances for growth that you might be presented with, especially during the very early stages of your professional evolution. Achieving conventional success in the industry is an operation, which very much depends on external factors that the artists very often cannot affect with their actions, and most of the times, chances for immediate, desired, and crucial growth come suddenly and unexpected, when they cannot be anticipated. Therefore, the artist must acknowledge and be aware of the fact that appropriate opportunities for career progress are not to be missed and they should always be taken advantage of. Most of the people tend to let their personal fears affect their rational decision in such circumstances and choose personal comfort over the possibility of professional growth, which is an approach that completely and massively reduces your chances to succeed. Promptness, swiftness, and preparedness are core qualities for every participant in the entertainment business, but it is also highly likely that during the course of your career, you will find yourself in a situation where you will have to act immediately, in a rapid, yet strict, manner in order to take advantage of a career-defining opportunity. As a matter of fact, you will most probably encounter the chances that you have been putting an incredible amount of time and effort to generate and that can elevate your career instantly as an abrupt occurrence. Having said that, it is necessary for an artist to anticipate such turn of events and be prepared to think and act quickly, expeditiously, and hastily in order to be able to benefit from every single possibility for growth that might become available in due course. It is likely that you will be asked to fill a suddenly freed support slot for a big concert, to perform on radio or accept a touring offer in a matter of minutes, so the quality of being not only constantly ready to eventually commit to this sort of opportunities, but also capable of organizing yourself and work under tight and strict deadlines, without letting such circumstances damage the value of your product (regardless of its nature), is most certainly an asset that can put you ahead of your competition in numerous different ways. Pressure makes it better. Do not avoid it—embrace it. Many acts base their decisions on their comfortableness, instead on their professional interest. However, carefully assess your decisions in terms of utilizing the opportunities that you are being presented with once you are in a position to clarify your goals and how such decisions can affect them, since every single action can have major consequences, which can affect the development of your brand. In order to be in a position to fully utilize and take full advantages of the chances for career growth that you are being presented with to your benefit, it is important for you to strategize your moves without any personal feelings or emotions reflecting on your rational thoughts. In other words, you will have to be able to very often neglect and overcome any strong personal feelings, opinions, and prejudices you have toward certain individuals and circumstances if you want to ensure that you are capable of capitalizing on every situation that you are being involved in. It is important to say that, although sometimes you will have to ignore and overlook the emotional effects, which some interactions and cases are presenting you with, this does not mean that you have to forget your perceptions and notions and change the way you feel. If you have something to prove, do it. Utilize and recognize your feelings and transform them as motivation to succeed, but do not use them as a base for your decisions.
Results Take Time
Never expect quick and immediate success gratification, because if you evaluate the efficiency of your actions based on this approach, you would be often frustrated and not satisfied with your work due to completely irrelevant reasons. The main principle behind every single piece of action and operation in the music business favors the quality, not the expediency, of your activities. It is about achieving the right result, not the quickest one. The direction is always more important and valuable than the speed. Do not rush. Impatience is your worst enemy, because it favors time over quality. You should avoid the chance of being negligent to the details of your activity due to being concentrated on meeting deadlines, whose importance is unreasonably fixed only in your perceptions. The music industry is not an activity field that can offer you fast and immediate career development and results, so you should be aware that the lack of patience is definitely not a trait of your character that you would like to be associated with and exploit over the course of your professional activities. You should make sure that you are hungry, driven, and yearning for success, to possess the ambition to put all of your capacity and working potential in the process of working toward your goal, but you should also make sure that you are looking to achieve the right outcome, not the quick one, with your actions. There is a huge misconception about what exactly the term success in the music business is formed by. Unlike previous periods, where popularity was definitely another word for success, the situation in the current state of the entertainment business is not in a position to certify and confirm such statement anymore. Nowadays, the possibility of achieving popularity in a short span of time, relying on factors and circumstances that are not necessarily dependent on your profile, is still quite a realistic outcome, considering the fact that the way the music is being perceived by people can still generate a significant amount of exposure, if the consumer is being presented with a quality product. However, it is also safe to say that popularity is not something that can guarantee profitability and sustainable career, unlike before. Hence, sustainability is not a matter of high-quality product showcased in the right circumstances, being at the right place at the right time due to luck and fortune. It is a matter of professionalism and hard work, consistently applied to a career throughout a long period of time. It is not about intensity; it is about consistency. But it is mostly about an intense consistency—the ability to perform your respective actions and advance with your development in the highest and most efficient tempo possible over the longest period of time. The rate of your enthusiasm and drive to succeed should be constantly high and you should not let the time to have any negative effect on it. The positive outcome is a result of steady progress and perseverance to the whole process and not episodic efforts. It is very similar to the process of going to the gym essentially, for example. You cannot expect that you will achieve significant progress with your body transformation as a result of one training session, regardless of how intense and productive it would be or how dedicated you might be to it. The bigger the volume of work and the bigger the amount of time that you spend on your working capacity on are, the better and more impressive and sustainable the final results would be. The same principle applies to a career in the music industry as well—you can devote all of your money, time, and passion in your career over a short period of time, but the truth is that the positive results are a product of a long-term, constant commitment, not of chaotic, unorganized, and unstable outbursts of motivation and transient drive for success.
Sustainability over Popularity
It does not mean that you are rich if you are popular, and vice versa. Exposure and popularity does not necessarily equate to income. The high performance of your brand in one of these aspects of your activity is most certainly a step forward to improving your progress in the other one; however, each one of these areas should be treated separately, with different approach and mentality. Achieving popularity and ensuring a sustainable income are two fundamentally contrasting tasks that you would never be able to complete according to your benefit if you expect that one method would provide you with the results that you need in the two fields. Learn how to treat and utilize your success from every single perspective if you want to construct the fundaments of a career, which can satisfy not only your personal desires, but your common human needs and requirements as well.
Goals Prioritization
Construct and develop your brand to a sustainable, respectful, and prolific name in this business, concentrate on your long-term goals in favor of your short-term ones, and carefully and strategically allocate your efforts in order to maximize the rate of your efficiency. Long story short, choose quality over quantity and invest your work in promising opportunities and projects, instead of aiming to achieve quick, but temporary success, by unnecessarily overloading your working potential. It is important and of significant meaning for every artist to be capable of rationally assessing the characteristics of their product and to use them to their benefit in the process of setting realistic and reasonable goals that are pursuant to their current development stage.
Stay focused on the end goal. Do not mistake progress with success. It is completely reasonable and understandable to be excited, enthusiastic, and delighted once you see that the efforts that you are investing in your career are being justified and you are achieving growth in your activities. However, such developments are not to be misjudged as success. An artist should clearly understand that such positive results are only an expected course of action, whose purpose is significant only in the sense of pursuing your final, ultimate goal. Allowing temporary positive results to change your predetermined mentality and outlook on your professional activity can have a crucial effect on your work, so an artist should always accept the pleasant results generated in the process of approaching the final stage of their planned success with restrained positivism. You cannot let yourself feel satisfied. You should be satisfied only with the thought of chasing satisfaction and with the concept of always improving your current status and accomplishments. You can never afford to be complacent or indifferent toward your activity. When achieved after relentless work and dedication, success can be incredibly overwhelming to a point where it can significantly cloud your already established perceptions and judgments to a level where it will damage your further career development. It is very hard for some people to maintain healthy mentality and correct psychological approach. Every single successful endeavor that you undertake should be assessed as just a step to another one.
Remember that you will never achieve success if this is the essence of your actions. You will never receive and generate attention if this is the main thing that you aim to get. Do not target attention when it comes to creating your music. Your one and only goal should be to express yourself and genuinely enjoy and cherish the opportunity to use what you are in the process of achieving what you want. Once you start valuing the success of your actions based on the attention that people are providing you with, that is when your efforts with this will become less and less efficient and irrelevant. Do not try to impress people with your music. Try to impress yourself with it. And do not feel bad if you notice that your enthusiasm and passion toward your actions are not shared, appreciated, or understood by the audience at some point. You should never let such reactions make you belittle yourself and undermine your satisfaction of fulfilling the desires of your essence.
Dedication to the Process
Success is a natural process that you cannot fast track. One thing should happen before another and you cannot skip stages to directly reach the final one. The big results happen once you realize that it is all about the culmination of small progress that you have generated throughout your professional career. Short cutting means that you are short cutting your potential and the opportunity for you to showcase and cultivate the full range of qualities and features that your profile possesses. There is no tool that will do something that you cannot or transform you into something that you are not. There is no shortcut, no easy way for doing things. You are more than welcome to try and aim to fast track your development, but you can be certain that you are most certainly not capable of short cutting it. The nature of the business and the community is such that hard work and personal approach are the words that are capable of ensuring progress. Do not make exceptions and do not tolerate underperformance. If you set standards related to your work, efforts, productivity, or advancement, you should always make sure that you will complete them correspondingly. Do not make excuses or try to convince yourself that you have a proper and actual reason and excuse to not deliver the results that you have promised yourself to generate. If you, for instance, have decided that you will contact 100 promoters per day in the process of booking your own tour, you should do so and the fact that one day you have experienced lack of energy and dedication to do so cannot justify the fact that you have contacted just 50 of them. Let your work and actions describe your value, do not rely on words to do so. Excellence speaks for itself. Essentially, everyone can claim and say that they have produced great and high-quality results, but the people who have actually achieved it do not need to promote their accomplishments further or in a hyperbolic manner. It is very easy to produce low-value work that meets common standards, but the main goal is to generate rare results that only you are in a position to achieve. When undertaking a certain endeavor, the artist should understand that every piece of activity’s main purpose should be not only focusing on achieving the final destination of the said operation, but also acquiring and developing professional and personal growth by expanding the artist’s knowledge, experience, expertise, and qualities throughout the process of completion of the said project. Every career move should not be perceived just as an opportunity for expansion from a business perspective, but as a chance to learn and extend the potential of your talent and professionalism. Hence, underlining the need of having a learning curve associated with your activities, as well as the chance for meeting your career goals, is the approach that should be utilized when it comes to choosing the professional opportunities to take advantage of in the process of developing your activity.
Understandably, it is very difficult to note what and how you should do in order to improve your chances for achieving a successful career in the music industry. You should rather first determine what and how you should not do, rather than the opposite. Obviously, creating a high-quality artistic product is a common sign for success that every well-performing act is familiar with. Due to the complex nature of creating such overall effect, however, it is extremely challenging to list all of the aspects that an excellent, effective product can be associated with. However, it would be relatively easy to mark all of the points that you should avoid in the process of creating it. Moreover, every artist should be aware of the concept that success very often is not a matter of achieving and working toward certain aims, but also subtracting elements of your activity with negative effect on their career. When it comes to appearing dysfunctional in a certain part of your overall performance, you should be able to recognize when it would be better to not try to overcome the problem, but to simply remove it instead. Trying to build a well-operating career is quite a challenging and difficult task to be completed, and aiming to do that while carrying burdens and problems of different nature in your bag is not only a method that lacks efficiency, but such that can significantly damage your performance in the long term; hence, it is important to not indulge in any operations and procedures of achieving a goal, if the characteristics of your profile contain problems that might act as an obstacle and hinder the success rate of your actions. If there is an issue, address it immediately. Neglecting problems will not make them disappear, so you have to be sure that you and your performance are in the best possible conditions to generate positive results before launching the procedure of achieving them.