For me, in order to stay motivated, it is essential to have moments of success baked into my process of creation. How I feel ‘successful’ in my creative pursuits, in ways micro to macro, has evolved over the years, clarifying into a set of general truths that I keep in the back of my brain as I go about my business.
I mean ‘micro’ as in successes achieved throughout the process, and I mean ‘macro’ as in the Big Dream, the End Goal. My most important kind of ‘micro’ success is for me to consistently feel that what I’m making is valuable and worthwhile. The way I measure that is based on my own experience and the experience of my creative role models; what they’ve shared in interviews and such.
I measure the worth of my pursuit by declaring this to myself and checking my gut to see if it’s true: Only I could have thought to make this in the way that I have gone about making it. What I absolutely do not mean by that is that my project has reached a pinnacle of technical mastery. Rather, it is that I feel I was true to my own impulses and inspirations, following them to a point that is uniquely clear to me. Making the art I want to see.
Now, I am also a person who is compelled to create by seeing other works and wanting to replicate what I like about them. It is another motto of mine to be shameless about this. As Toro y Moi says in Freelance: “Imitation always gets a bad rep, man.” Nothing wrong with ‘copying’ if it gets you started. But no matter how many times I’ve wanted to be Bob Dylan or Julian Casablancas, no matter how many times I’ve gotten down on myself for falling short of writing songs ‘as good’ as theirs, I have learned that the truest way to being like the people I admire is to be the most myself as I can possibly be, because that’s why they themselves became successful, by leaning into their selves. Bob Dylan wanted to be Woody Guthrie, but he was successful because he followed Bob Dylan’s desires.
A reference I return to often: After Kendrick had that line in ELEMENT., “There’s a difference between black artists and wack artists,” he was asked in pretty much every interview afterwards what a ‘wack artist’ is. When Rolling Stone asked, he said, “A wack artist uses other people’s music for their approval. We’re talking about someone that is scared to make their own voice, chases somebody else’s success and their thing, but runs away from their own thing.” So there you go. (I was able to get past Rolling Stone’s paywall for this interview by going incognito, if you want to check it out and belong to the majority of people too smart to pay for the fucking Rolling Stone.)
That’s the most important ‘micro’ success I try to be cognizant of, though there are many. My vision of ‘macro’ success, The Dream, is more straightforward, but no less important to have in-focus, even if it can torture as much as it motivates.
The general Dream is that writing and songwriting pays my rent one day, that much is simple. But the more personal Dream, the selfish Dream, the one that’s always more embarrassing to admit, is that I want attention and validation for my effort on a largish scale. I want to be asked about my obsessions and sensitivities and for my answers to be presented as interesting and meaningful. I want my works to mean as much to someone as so many artist’s works mean to me.
But I work in satisfaction with the ‘micro,’ as one must to keep going.
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