Never Give Up
This marks the first week since I started consciously realizing my 1600 day plan to reach fame and fortune. To be more specific, I have still little over 50 days to finalize the plan, before I start fully executing it in my daily life with full focus from the day one. Why 1600 days? Originally I came up with that ballpark figure when I started constructing phases of my progress based on Fibonacci series turned into hours or days and a golden ratio to divide different aspects of my efforts ranging from a being to persona to social influence.
I did this, because I was curious to see if there would be any correlation between the objectively perceived beauty and harmony and the effort needed to achieve happiness or sense of satisfaction when you pursue your goals. If there is any it is likely to be highly vague, but in everything we do can be found some form of rhythm.
More practical reason was that I used “10,000-Hour Rule“, (a nod to Life Is Unwritten article reminding to write about this) in calculating that if I put on the average 6 hours per day to the core activities of Produce, Practice and Perform, two hours each with an extra 15 minutes added as a cushion to get to exactly 10,000 hours in 1600 days. So far I have used way more than 10 000 hours to produce music (Over 100 hours and 1000 tunes/songs/im promptu pieces I intend to release in some time near future at once). The fact that “deadline” of this project happens to be on my specific birthday when I adjusted the starting date slightly was just a lucky coincidence.
I have always been fascinated about harmonies and patterns like that and I will get into that subject later. Between making music and plotting my vision and figuring out Life, the Universe and Everything, I have been trying to come up with the formula of success and more balanced happier life through highly abstract concepts as well as through experimenting with various life cycles. In some ways I have used my whole life so far as part of a performance that is just now starting to emerge into daylight. Creative process can be very draining sometimes, but extraordinary ambitions require extraordinary life choices.
I guess, to counterbalance my extreme productivity when I am inspired I have been the laziest person on many other matters, have created artificial obstacles with stupid life choices, mostly financially and have been a master of procrastination. Yet here I am, sitting on top of a bottomless content goldmine. You can appear to be lazy, yet be productive. I will throw the old fictional anecdote about Michelangelo and the progress of Statue of David in some other post if I feel like it. Now I will just summarize that nothing good comes easy. You have to deliver.
On a related note, if you are interested in beauty, harmony and how nature is composed of and systemizes itself as fractals, I can highly recommend book Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty by Clifford A. Pickover. I have not still yet read it thoroughly, but skimmed through about ten years ago in about ten minutes and thought I get this and went ahead and composed a full length experimental album in two weeks inspired by those thoughts with many of my song titles coming from the said book. For the curious – no – none of them are the title or anything obvious. Though you can try and if anybody comes even close to guessing keywords I might post those exact songs on YouTube.
All of the above just demonstrates the layers of thinking I dig into intuitively without strenuous effort. Much like this text I am writing almost as fast I can write while not restricting my thoughts. I come up with ideas quickly, especially with music and I have composed the best beats for my best songs in less than five minutes, constructed the hook in fifteen and used 15 hours to fine tune a single bass line to get it just right and then practiced 150 hours to be able to perform in a way that seems almost too easy. And it has taken 15,000 hours to get to the level one can compose said hit in fifteen minutes.
Here is another one of my personal secrets to success: I have practiced last ten years consciously as much for my interviews and public TV appearances as I have for my show, even though my real learning to become a performer starts in the following weeks and months from the scratch and I have had only one interview about ten years ago on a website by a music promotion company and an small indie record label I had couple songs released as well. Anyways, I have done all this practice for media because I have consciously molded my personality and the way to express myself into something that captures the attention wherever I am with any audience I have to face.
To elaborate last thought a bit, and if someone can either verify or disprove this with a source I am grateful, but I think it was Woody Allen who quoted that “The best improvisers practice the most”. To me expressing in addition to singing and vocalizing, in just speech in a powerful, casual yet poetic way the best public speakers do with an authority or how the motivational speakers, a breed I have a peculiar hit-and-run love/hate kind of relationship, do with a passion, is no different than a great DJ mixing music. (By the way that video is pretty much the only one I have watched from Jim Rohn - that kind of a relationship).
These subjects will be touched in depth in the future and I will let readers tap into unfiltered genius in the form of the most inspired moments and revealing correspondence with my mentor who found my music, talents and a passion over ten years ago, and other people abroad who have had a privilege to witness all this and at the same time had to endure thousands of emails, chat-sessions and the kitchen sink or a dozen I have been throwing out of the blue in a curve ball whenever I felt like it, during my constant pursue of evolving as an artist in the last 14 odd years and accelerating. Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition! But you be the judge, I just do. Evolution is the key.
My mentor, promoter and future manager keeps repeating that my latest songs are always my best, and it is true. Yet two of my first songs I have ever composed in my life after doing music on a computer only three months got aired. So there is that too, I was just so much ahead of my time and the whole electronic music movement was just beginning to influence pop and mainstream culture as a heavyweight, and to be honest those songs of mine back then were not exactly Billboard material (watch out for new #1), but certainly something else. But the definition of pop music is literally popular music, thus if something very niche breaks new ground and becomes highly successful it turns into mainstream music the more listeners it gets. Difference between sub cultures and pop culture fluctuates constantly and is all very relative.
Change did not happen instantly and in a way it did. It just takes a lot of time and patience to get rid of those characteristic that are no longer part of you and when it is the hardest then is the time to put your will power to the test and let the bygones be bygones.
I have been repeating these mantras the last seven years: “I will reprogram the thinking mass“, “I will change pop culture forever“ and “I will become the most influential and the most successful artist alive“, and slowly all of that has crept into my psyche, to the way I carry myself to the smallest details I communicate so much I do all that without thinking while visualizing in the back of my head vividly where I want to be and how I want to be heard. I can reveal this about the change I went through in that the psychological private hell in the last few years was really twisted, almost sick, also physically, still very sane and it had very little effect on how I behaved with other people or my living environment. It was mostly me battling with my will power and some obsessive behavior and bad habits I slowly steered away from.
And in the middle of all that turmoil I have stayed adamantly in the course, never doubting myself the slightest. The delusions turned into reality bit by bit, slowly coming to light from the shadows of my mind with an unstoppable urge to be understood and heard by the audience I know is out there to be found and united. When you are born with the feeling that you will reach greatness and you cannot keep fighting your calling, nothing gets you down. Show must go on!
I am all-or-nothing type of a person in everything. For me there has never been a middle ground. My tastes are very simple, I want the best and the brightest and will not settle for mediocrity ever whether it is my own work, lifestyle, style in general or technology, yet I have experienced sometimes on my own account very ascetic, almost hermit lifestyle, despite being at home in the center of attention, and have been able to adapt into any environment with my imagination as the only friend. When you create and are in the zone, super focused in what you do, rest of the world ceases to exist momentarily and you do not care where you are, because you know you will move on once the time is ripe and you are ready.
Right now I have somewhat scarce resources at my disposal, financially and otherwise, but good enough foundation to be able to breath easy and to expand my freedom to get to the next level. I am still weighting how much I should reveal about my daily life and how interesting it is to the readers and is it something that help me to succeed or become just a distraction. I guess the most interesting part about this journey is the journey itself. For now though I will stay on more abstract side of things, while writing about the real progress in a hopefully steady pace.
Time will show what people are most interested in and what I think is most relevant. Basically I do what I want and say what I want, but I do listen and hopefully can continue to reach my fans in a real way even after Entertainment Weekly and The Rolling Stone have had their say in changing my lifestyle upside down.
Illumination Forest (2012)
About this week. It has been quiet. I have been walking about two hours per day and thinking about my life plan for the next four years. If there is one activity that has helped me the most to get focused and at peace it has been walking. There was a time in my life I walked everyday for about 2-6 hours where I lived. But that activity comes and goes. About two months ago when I realized that I was going through my daily life in a repeat, nesting in discomfort with almost chronic fatigue and not getting anywhere, physically or otherwise, I just decided and walked little over 20 miles like it was nothing with couple breaks in between. I just went and did it to clear my thoughts and get back to the basics and to that state of mind where I feel nothing can stop me. I used to be there my whole young adult life, but momentary lost my mojo without realizing it for the longest time.
In the last couple of days I have also defined my vision, my mission, my dreams and my goals in more detail and wrote down how I want to be remembered by each of my constituents. These thoughts started seriously formulating about three years ago and have been boiling last spring and got into in full gear during last two months. I will reveal this much – I have defined my constituents in the order of magnitude of people involved from the largest to smallest as Civilization, Culture, Fans, Community, Peers, Colleagues, [undisclosed], Friends, Kinship and most importantly Self. Then I answered this simple question for each of these audiences separately – How I want to be remembered?
These are the fundamental questions I want to answer in my personal life plan. What is my vision I want to fulfill as an artist and as an individual? In another words, what will be my legacy to this civilization? What are the dreams I want to realize that help me to get closer to my vision? What are my goals I want to and need to achieve in order to get to my dreams? Goals are divided into steps and these into beats. to which I have not defined exact time frames.
A great feat though, from my personal perspective I see done in 4-7 years cycles with grand vision taking up to 30 years in total to really come into fruition. This is just one figure I came up and could be something different. A big goal could take up two years to finish while smaller can be set to some arbitrary limit like 70 days while a beat can be three days or 72 hours. These relatively based repeating milestones give us a rudimentary way of measuring and slicing up progress to smaller pieces you can focus one at the time.
- Just Another Superstar
PS. I am writing most of these longer posts on the same day they are published, and in one sitting to keep the thoughts fresh. On Sundays you should expect this kind of essays on a wide range of subjects. but mostly about creative process, pop culture and what kind of work and attention to detail it takes behind the scenes to become the best at what you do and how to turn your passion into business along the way.
Whenever I feel like it you can expect an occasional brief account of my current progress in some form of what has happened, where I am at and where am I heading now in my quest to fame and fortune.
During the week, perhaps on the Mondays to mark the beginning I will post Blast from the Past, with excerpts from material I have done in the last decade or so and at some point I might expand this to videos I have been capturing last five years, that at start just show my unique composing process with wide variety of software. which all has enabled me to produce over 100 hours of music since 1998.
Finally, on Fridays or Saturdays I might put together a playlist of mostly music, but also other influences I have found fascinating along the way with my take on pop culture and current events if there is something I feel like commenting on.
That’s all folks for now, have fun!
