Struggling with music: The dark side of hard work

This is about a musical journey that hasn't gone the way I expected for over twenty years.

You see it all over the internet, people telling you how to make it, how to go from zero to 10,000 fans, how to get good at production Ableton and Logic and how you should plan your music release to Spotify.

There's hours and hours of this content, giving away all these tips and strategies. If you're anything like me you've absorbed this stuff religiously, but you still struggle as an artist, your music still sucks and nobody ever listens to you.

I have to be honest with you, I feel like the truth is never shared that the vast majority of people will fail miserably at pursuing music. And I'm no exception.

Let me give you some background. I'm nearly 40 years old. When I was 16, I started getting into music production. By the time I was 18, I was trying to write songs and started taking music seriously.

I've worked very hard. I've put in thousands of hours. Yet, I've struggled mightily.

At the time of writing this, I have 19 followers on Instagram and 4 subscribers on YouTube. My most successful release to date (under a different artist name) has ~350 plays on Spotify, and I've been doing music for almost 25 years.

Here's a few things I'd like to share about what I've learned.

First of all, this notion that all you have to do is work hard and follow your dreams is bullshit.

Let's compare it to pro sports. In the NBA there are 300-400 slots on team rosters.

Out of the tens of millions people who play basketball every day, only 300 to 400 do it on the highest professional level in the USA. That's something like .003% of all basketball players.

Obviously, we hear about the superstar basketball players, but we don't think about the millions of other players who don't make it. We don't talk about them, we don't hear their stories, and most importantly we don't understand why they truly failed.

Comparing it to music I'd say the outlook is equally grim. Unlike in basketball there isn't a fixed amount of slots of success, but there is an ultra hyper-competitive market for people's attention with an extremely low barrier to entry.

Like in basketball, we hear all about the music stars and the success stories, but we don't hear much about the millions of people who are floundering with their musical ambitions.

In order to sell you the pipe dream, the gurus need a simple way to get you to ignore the fact that, just like in pro sports, you have less than a 1% shot of making it professionally as an artist or producer.

To help gloss over this they reduce the notion of failure to a rudimentary equation about hard work and blame you for your lack of success by insisting all that matters is the hard work you put in, not probability or prodigious talent.

The narrative is just work harder and harder and harder to follow your dreams and if you fail it's your fault. Get off your lazy ass and hustle, they'll tell you.

For the gurus, they profit off this because the more people still in the chase the more people watching their videos, buying their ebooks and signing up for their coaching lessons.

From my experience, the hard work narrative is actually not true for many people. Most musicians I know personally work really hard but can't get off the ground for any number of other reasons.

In my case, failure has largely been due to mental health issues, not anything to do with work ethic.

You see, I have probably put in tens of thousands of hours of hard, grueling work into my music over the course of 20+ years.

I've written and produced hundreds of songs (and gave up on even hundreds of more).

I've done years of professional vocal, guitar and piano training. I even had a stint at Berklee Online for two years (and spent $20,000 to get a certificate degree) to study music formally.

I've watched every tutorial and read every book imaginable on music production, mixing and mastering.

On top of that I've gone to all the big music producer conferences, networked, created music videos, shared music on social media and spent money on ads and promotions.

The reason I'm not successful isn't because I didn't work hard.

In fact, hard work has had the opposite effect for me (and perhaps for many millions of other too) because it fed my ego driven, validation seeking mindset that believed attention and accomplishment was all that mattered.

Due to my mental health issues (derived from a really terrible childhood), I needed something to tell me I was great, so I was seeking approval from the world.

More specifically, I wanted to use success in the music industry to get that approval. Like a hamster running in the wheel, I was working very hard, but I wasn't going anywhere.

For me hard work turned into a perfectionist muzzle in the darkest kind of way. I was unable to authentically share and connect any part of my truth to the world.

I had a brutally shattered self-esteem and would protect it at all cost by sabotaging every creative endeavor in some form or fashion. This would severely restrict how good my music was and also how much I was able to get it out in the world.

I think a lot more people than you may think are like me. I have interacted with many talented musicians with tons of potential who have suffered from mental health issues and crippling perfectionism.

I truly believe the issue of why most people fail at a musical pursuit is so much deeper and complicated than a simple narrative around hard work.

The hard work narrative discounts how much impact mental health may have on music creators and producers (especially perfectionist, type-A individuals) in achieving their goals.

As I've gotten into my late 30s, outside my prime years to make it in the music industry, I've become much healthier and have gone on a path of healing.

I started dealing with my issues as the biggest priority in my life instead of chasing musical dreams and I have been on an intense therapeutic path for the past seven to ten years.

I've stripped down the walls and leaned into radically accepting this crazy unknown world inside of me. I've walked the hardest roads and went to the most uncomfortable places to battle my demons.

Finally, after all that, my creative musical voice is coming into the world at the tender age of 37. The funny thing about this is I had to stop working hard to get on the right path and for my voice to be heard.

Here's some (non-) advice if you're struggling with music... don't blame yourself. How hard you have worked, or are willing to work is a small part of this crazy journey to be "successful" in whatever your musical goals are.

Find real truth in this world, build new questions and formulate your own answers. You're in the best position to do that, not someone else.

Ultimately, most advice is often very limited and narrow anyway. There's no way something as complex as the struggle for human expression and connection can be simplified into a basic construct that applies equally for everyone.

Remember most stories aren't told for the 99.9% of people who don't make it, so you don't have much exposure to the real and very common reasons why people actually struggle and fail. You may assume they didn't work hard enough, but that's probably not the case for many.

The unintended consequence of believing the limited narrative around hard work is that for some people it can lead you down the wrong dark and winding road.

If you're anything like me (a severe perfectionist, with deep-seated mental health issues) it might be the exact opposite of what you should actually do, which in my case meant stop working so damn hard.

For me, the work harder mantra, was like being a raging alcoholic and getting told to go to a bar and to drink more and more and more until I blacked out.

The truth is I've had to stop running, chasing, kicking, scratching and clawing for every ounce of approval. I had to remove myself from the hamster wheel pursuit of validation.

I did this through years of grueling, deep authentic healing, and now I'm finally moving.