If they only knew
I saw this fantastic quote today attributed to Michelangelo:
If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all.
And: RIGHT?? People who don’t make art don’t always seem to understand just how fucking hard it can be sometimes.
How constantly vulnerable and scary the process can be of taking our insides and putting them out there for the whole world to see and, presumably, to judge.
How long it can take to get the result we’re after — on any given piece, sure, but also in terms of the amount of time it takes even to reach competency, let alone fluency, never mind mastery, in our chosen medium. We’re talking decades, sometimes. Multiples of 10,000 hours invested, just to get to a point where we feel we can express in a relatively unfettered way what’s going on in our hearts and minds.
So when people are like, “It must be so great to be living your dream!” I have to suppress the biggest eye-roll of all time, in the better interests of comity and social grace. I have been working 40-60 hours a week minimum at becoming a better engineer and producer and businessperson, for nearly 30 years — including when I had a day job. And for most of that time I have been somewhere between poor and ulcer-inducingly poor. Weird dream!
I mention this because I know a lot of people reading this are on the same road. And I just wanted to say: I see you.
I know how hard you work at your craft. I watch you saving your dollars to buy plugins on sale. I hear my mentees’ 15th and 20th mix revisions. Hell, I hear my own 15th and 20th mix revisions. I get it.
It’s a ton of work, often thankless. It does of course have considerable rewards and upsides! But it’s not what outsiders think it is. It’s not a life of playtime and leisure. It’s a discipline, nurtured over a long time horizon, oftentimes under financial duress, and typically without much if any practical support (people engaging with our work, while absolutely encouraging and valuable, is not practical support; practical support is money and mentorship etc).
And yet we persist. How could we not?
Onward — jamie
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