I live in Arizona, in the South West, U.S. I was drawing a married couple at an event and we got on the subject of music. I told them how much I loved it! How music was initially my college major and how I pursued being a “pop star”. She got excited!
She started suggesting ways I could still follow my dream. She brought up The Voice, American Idol, and America’s Got Talent. She mentioned ways I could go viral. It was adorable! Keep in mind when I was in college the Internet was barely a thing and singers weren’t uploading videos to YouTube and TikTok every five minutes.
I told her thank you and that I appreciated the support. But I figured I should stop her because I was a bit of a lost cause. In the few years I pursued music I learned what I already knew about being an artist. I told her, “I learned what it took to be a great musician and I wasn’t willing to pay the price.”
That’s why I was cool with shifting gears and changing majors. Happy about it, really. To me it was like going to a bench press at the gym and loading it up with 400 pounds of plates. I’d LOVE to be able to bench press 400 pounds but if I tried it today I’d become VERY familiar with the inside of an E.R. at a hospital.
That’s why I sometimes laugh when people preach about monetizing doing what you love. I LOVE music. As much as I love art but I never studied it until college. I think I wrote good lyrics but I was mediocre with the music part. On the other hand I love art AND I was already good at it because I drew since birth. Really. My mom told I came out the womb and snatched the nurses #2 pencil and I started scribbling.
Ok, maybe that’s not true.
But my point is this.
All success has a price. When it came to art I knew the price I had to pay to be good at it and I chose to focus on art instead instead of music. By the time I was 18 I had thousands of hours clocked in as an artist. By the end of my first college music theory class, do you wanna know how many hours of music I had? One.
Find out the price you need to pay and do the work. And you’ll find a way to love it.
Adam