I had a friend who’s a musician in Nashville. He has some a job and some good gigs here and there. But he’s still working his way into the scene and up the musician ladder.
So I encouraged him to start writing a new song each day and publishing it to YouTube. It’s an opportunity to grow as a musician and to potentially grow an audience. He’s been doing an amazing job.
I knew at some point, though, the novelty of the exercise would wear off. At some point it would become an arduous task that could easily take up hours and hours of his time. So this brought me to my next piece of advice: stop spending so much time on it.
I challenged my friend to only spend one hour writing, recording, editing, and publishing.
He found himself thinking about it all day, procrastinating, and dreading the amount of time he’d have to spend to create a product he was proud of. But a small time allotment does a few things for my friend.
1. It makes his project much more manageable. If you don’t have to spend five hours of your day making this song, you’re much more likely to do it instead of skipping it—then feeling guilty after the fact.
2. It forces him to be creative and to get things done. Limitations force creative solutions. Extreme limitations force extremely creative solutions.
3. It will make him a beast in the long run. He’ll learn processes and tricks that will save him so much time. Plus his creative muscle will be strengthened, because he’s having to exercise it intensely.
It may seem irresponsible or like he’s shirking his goals, but he’s actually going to improve the whole process in the long run.
So now I ask you, what sort of deadlines do you need to set for yourself? What extreme limitations do you need to place on your projects?
