Sometimes I try to recall memories from my 20s: they are fuzzy, like a TV static with some random images popping up: out with friends at night, performing live with my bands, countless hours spent over the same page of the same economics book, over and over again.
When you’re young, being stuck is pretty common, especially for those who don’t have any guide or mentor. In my case I just wish it didn’t last so long.
Fast forward to the present time. To take stock of what I’ve accomplished so far I need to define what success or fulfillment mean to me: neither fame nor a high life to show off on social medias, but happiness. And for what I can see in my everyday life happiness is balance.
Someone said that while you’re trying to make your dreams come true, you shouldn’t have balance. Balance is what you achieve after getting what you want, after reaching that big goal you’ve dreamed of.
While you’re hungry chasing your dreams, you should be unbalanced towards them and solely focused on what you need to achieve them
I think this is true, although it hardly applies to the vast majority of us who have to wear different hats along their daytime: from waking up and being a husband and father, trying to be a good co-worker, coming back home to your family duties and finally sitting on your desk and chasing your dream, whatever that is (a music project, videos, a book).
I’ve been living in this situation in the last 20 years and what I’ve learned is that balance is the key for happiness, even if you’re still hungry chasing your dreams. If you, like myself, are keeping a day job as a necessary source of income for yourself and your family, you might be struggling to to find this balance.
Whenever my duties keep me away from my studio for too long I feel down and drained: there’s a quote that says “You often feel tired, not because you have done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you” (Alexander Den Heijer).
The only way to make it through is to approach my artistic journey as a marathon: writing down a plan, defining a goal and working towards it step by step.
I have to embrace the fact that these steps might be bigger, for example in weekends or when I have a few hours straight to devote to music, but most of the time these will be tiny steps.
Sometimes I’m not able to enter the studio before 10 or 11 pm: when it happens, even the smallest thing, like a few bars of a bass line or mixing a small section of a song, will be enough to call it a day.
As long as you build the habit of sitting on your desk and working on your craft every single day, even if it’s just for five or ten minutes, you make sure you’re moving forward: the goal you’ve set is nearer than it was yesterday.