Appreciate Your Platform and Always Stay True to Your Personality
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.
—Plato
At the end of the day—as important and crucial as it is to achieve sustainable career through satisfying the market needs of this business—achieving this goal with a product that possesses strong artistic value is the most essential and vital thing that every artist should be aiming to accomplish. Understanding and completely respecting the tendency that success nowadays means strong and calculated business performance is a necessity; however, the main purpose of the music should be always clear—creating a positive impact, sharing a meaningful message, and changing the world and the lives of the people seeking support through art.
Devotion and Tenacity
It is barely possible for an up-and-coming act to grasp the perception of what overwhelming amount of frustration, disappointment, anxiety, and despair would be experienced throughout the process of establishing a career in the music industry. Expectations will not be met, people will let you down, and would like to see you fail; you will have to learn to cope with the frustration of failing people’s ideals, you will find yourself in intense and stressful situations, and you will be the object of judgmental and negative comments. You will receive no support and no one would respect your ideas, desires, thoughts, and quests. The bigger and more successful you get, the more people would like to see you fail and hurt as well. You will be exposed to personal attacks, insults, and disrespectful behavior from people who would like to—plain and simple—make you feel bad about your own accomplishments, achievements, and personality in order to justify their own perceptions and life choices. A point that many people outside of the music business very unreasonably neglect or are not even aware of when it comes to the obstacles that a musician should tackle throughout the process of establishing an activity in the entertainment business is the social one. Pursuing a successful career in the music industry and following your passion and desires nowadays is a task that puts a very overwhelming amount of pressure and stress on talented individuals who are brave enough to follow their personal ambitions. Not complying to the common society standards and expectations, not being able or willing to fulfill people’s perceptions of success, and battling the negative prejudices that a vast majority of the personalities around all of us have regarding developing a profile in the music business can be very damaging for the mental state of a person, and only people who are experiencing this cycle personally can fully understand the incredible amount of sacrifices that should be made from a personal point of view in the process of determining a successful career path in music. The amount of stress faced during the experience of investing significant time, efforts, and finances in pursuing the development of a sustainable profile in the music sphere could be incredibly overwhelming. Naturally, the feeling of being alienated by the different notions of successful life expressed and utilized by the majority of society’s participants presents an emotional stage that is very hard to overcome. But every music enthusiast should be aware of the fact that there is a certain timeline that should be followed by professionals interested in dedicating their time to generating positive results in the music business, which is very different in its essence than the pattern followed by the rest of the people around us. It is always hard in the beginning, so just keep pushing and keep working hard, and do not forget your goals and where you want to be. There will be times when things will not happen your way and your actions will not be justified. In such situations, you just have to continue moving forward. It is understandable to get discouraged when your peers are securing stable jobs, forming families, and fulfilling the requirements and the expectations forwarded to them by the society, while you are being perceived as a failure by not being able to contribute to the same standards. It is normal to lose faith in your talents and choices once you see that your career progress is not generating the same amount of positive results as you wished or as required. And this is the exact reason why you should be aware of the advantages and the features that your platform as an artist possesses and be fully capable of taking advantage of them in the process of developing and popularizing your activity and improving the results that you are producing. You are in a position to influence people’s perceptions about who you are and make them appreciate and seek the exact product that you are offering. You can shape and form your audience’s expectations toward your career and plant the requirements in their minds that prompt them to think about your activity by constructing a stable appearance and behavior as an artist, emphasizing on certain aspects of your profession and your strongest traits as a brand. Adding value to a specific characteristic of your activity and bringing attention to it will make the people around you to add value to it as well. It is all a matter of perspective. If you want to be a winner and be perceived as such, you have to first perceive yourself as one and act accordingly.
At some point, you should be well-aware of how your talent, work, and appearance reflect on the people around you and consider the significance that your activity has. An artist should embrace the influence that they have and be culpable for their actions and the fact that they are not representing just themselves, but a whole community, the business sphere, and all of the respective participants in them. Aim to be respectable. You have voice that can form a generation. Potentially, you can have the platform to encourage and endorse your views and opinions to other people. This is a fantastic opportunity that should be treated very carefully, however. As an influencer, you should be aware of the concept that your actions do not only have effect on your life but reflect on other people as well, as your talent and productivity can have strong effect on the people who choose to be immersed into your art to a level where it can modify and shape certain characteristic features in them, especially in terms of the participants in the music community who possess specific personality traits and are capable of understanding and fully appreciating the abundant potential that music as an art form possesses. Therefore, every musician should know that it is very hard for a standard listener to distinguish the artist from the personality; hence, in many cases, what you do as a person would reflect on your professional career and the vice versa—your career choices would be associated with your personal life. Fundamentally, you sacrifice your own well-being, comfort, and happiness in order to provide them to the people across the world who need a positive influence and support in their respective lives. Appreciate what you do. Love it. Crave it. Always cherish, appreciate, and value the gift that you have been blessed with. You should understand that being in the position of possessing capabilities to use your personal qualities and emotions in the process of creating something in a conventional form that other people can perceive and relate to is a talent that can bring an enormous amount of joy, satisfaction, and pleasure, which are completely unknown and unfamiliar for the majority of the people in the world. The sort of emotions that an artist is able to experience and subsist is amazingly remarkable and unique; therefore, a musician should always aim to recognize the absolute aptitude that an artist has been fortunate enough to possess. Regardless of what you think, what other people tell you, or whatever you achieve eventually, your experience and activity in the music field will be the source of the best, most joyful, and rewarding emotions and times, which you will ever encounter in your life and the only time when you, as a person, will feel absolutely complete, useful, and in harmony with yourself. Wherever you are in life, only music and being able to enjoy the visceral satisfaction that it can give you would be able to bring you the absolutely maximum, sustainable, and long-term happiness that you desire and need in order to feel complete.
Always be yourself and do not be afraid to stay true to your talents, your own style, and way of thinking and doing things. Never forget why you started in the first place. This will help you to stay humble and keep your eyes on the prize. Always respect, cherish, and appreciate the opportunities that your career is providing you with and aim to see the forest through the trees because everything that you are going through and experiencing due to your involvement in the music culture is for a reason. Stay true to your personality and be honest about who you are, because there is nothing worse than people and professionals who are trying to present themselves as the total opposites of their true identity. Let yourself and your character dictate who you are as an artist and what your role is. Do not worry about what other people are thinking or doing; just do what you feel is your true calling and not what you think other people’s opinions on the matter are. Do something you love, invest yourself in it, and you will find the satisfaction of committing yourself to your true and genuine purpose, as this would mark the discovery of your existential success, which is the accomplishment that must always guide you through your life.