Photo credit - Cody Mcivor
Work / life / balance. We’ll be the first to admit this industry can be a tough one to juggle. Sometimes it feels like if you’re not pulling double duty, you’re falling behind. Other times it feels like you’re literally bending over backwards to make shit happen. But we were never promised easy right ? The big picture view of a successful life is always going to be painted by pulling double duty or triple duty or balancing a sword on your chin while dancing and saying the alphabet backwards.
It’s more complicated than we think.
In the music industry it’s easy to measure ‘success’. That’s what metrics are for. We get to look at ourselves and other artists and managers and labels and use all the available numbers to quickly gauge how much of a ‘success’ somebody is.
Except that only measures one small part of how well we’re doing. There’s a whole bunch of stuff hiding under the numbers that says a lot more about our success than ticket sales or chart position.
Striking that balance between the things that look good to the outside world, and the things that feel good when you come home after work, is what’s really gonna define our level of happiness.
Trust us when we say when you prioritize the right things, the rest of it gets [a little] easier. Relationships matter. The time invested in them matters. The time invested in ourselves outside of our career matters. Prioritize your personal life, and your professional life will be better supported. Prioritize your health and you’ll have energy to pour into your craft. Prioritize other people, and you’ll have a reason to be proud even when things don’t go your way. Hint: “the grind” has more to do with sharpening than suffering.
Sharpen the emotional tools and the artistic ones get sharper too.
Investing in the parts of your life that don’t show up in your artist bio is actually a big time investment in your career. You need to balance the thing you do, with the people you do it for. It’s never gonna be easy, it’s hard to hit a target doing 3 things at once. But focusing on the balance instead of the bullseye means even if you miss, you’ll have a life that makes you happy.
That sounds like success to us.
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