Last week I spoke with a lost artist.

Although she’s a talented musician, she felt she was getting nowhere and didn’t know what next step she could take to further her career.

She’d tried social media for a bit, but it wasn’t doing what she wanted. She then started looking at becoming an educator and a string of other options, hoping she’d find the right path for her.

But no matter what she explored, she always hit a wall.

Each path had a learning curve; nothing immediately clicked and so she’d soon end up back at square one again.

She’d reached out to me to get my opinion on an expensive artist program she was considering.

She hoped it would finally solve her problems and wanted to know if I thought it was worth the $5000 price tag.

This is a tidied-up version of what I told her:

“Every path you’ve explored so far works. Social media works, education works, sync licensing works—and this program probably works.

But none of them will work if you give up on them after a couple of months. No matter what path you choose, you have to go through the many ups and downs that come with it.

​There is no option that doesn’t include the difficulty. If you want to win, you have to stop jumping from thing to thing, pick a path you could do for years and stick with it.”

The reason most musicians fail is because they don’t stick with a path long enough to see it work.

They hit a roadblock (or one too many), justify why they can’t get past it, and end up back at the starting line.

Don’t get me wrong, I get it. Musicians are often incorrectly led to believe these paths are easy, so when they’re not it feels like it wasn’t meant to be.

But none of them are easy. To get good results from any path requires serious focus, discipline, mental toughness, patience, (lots of) failure and more.

Roadblocks are built into every path—and while we’ll focus mostly on social media for the rest of this letter—prepare to hit them no matter what you do.

The difference between musicians who are successful on social media and those who aren’t is how they respond to these roadblocks.

When you hit one, you can turn and run from it, justifying why it’s not for you or why it’s too hard.

You can go back to square one, try something else and end up in the exact same position.

Or you can stay and face it, break through it (and the many others that come after it), and finally get to the next level with your music career online.

This letter will explore how to do the latter.

“It shouldn’t be this hard.”

Yes, it should—hear me out.

Everyone wants fast and easy (myself included).

We’re conditioned to think everything should be easy. And it doesn’t help that social media only shows the highlights, burying the struggle and warping our minds.

Although some people do try to communicate “this isn’t an easy path”, it’s hard for musicians to believe it when all they see is the successes of those people.

But those people are right; it’s not an easy path. And here’s why you don’t want it to be:

Imagine it was so easy to quickly get lots of attention on social media that literally everyone could do it.

If you’re worried about over—saturation now (which you shouldn’t be) imagine how bad it would be if the barrier for entry was significantly lower.

Even if your work was amazing, it’d be even more likely to buried by generic, low effort trash (because there’s so much more of that).

Paradoxically, the easy it is, the harder it actually is.

The roadblocks exist to weed people out.

Here’s what I recommend: Instead of wishing everything was easier, accept that everything is harder and decide to rise to meet the challenges.

This means that when you hit these roadblocks, you work through them.

If you do this, you’ll finally get yourself out that ‘beginner loop’ and into that next level of your online music career.

There’s something else that stops musicians from sticking to one path for a long time: You don’t know if it’s going to pay off.

You can be reassured by seeing that others have been able to do it, getting a more personal roadmap for your path, or something else…

…but you have to have a certain degree of faith that this will pay off.

That’s why I recommend you pick something you can see yourself doing for years and years—ideally something you enjoy or could learn to enjoy.

In the case of social media, this means taking approaches you can learn to enjoy (if you don’t think is possible, I urge you to reconsider your position).

Most of us want our creative work to be a central focus of our lives, and social media can make that happen. Any path can.

As long as you pay attention and work through roadblocks as they come up.

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The power to stick to one path.

Before we look at what you can do to stick around when things get hard, understand this:

Who you are currently is not the version of you that will be successful in future.

The future you—the successful version of you—will be a different person to who you are now. That person will have different beliefs and live by a different set of rules.

Staying the same as you are now will keep you in the same place.

You’ll only go as far as the current you will let you because you’re attached to this current reality.

I know it sounds dramatic because we’re talking about social media, but it applies to everything in your life.

If you want to finally stop running from these roadblocks and start making real progress on a path, you have to become the person who faces your challenges.

And that starts with awareness and responsibility.

Awareness & personal responsibility.

It doesn’t sound fun, but the first thing you need to do is become aware of your self-sabotaging behaviour and decide to take responsibility for fixing it.

If you can’t identify when, how, and why you sabotage yourself, how will you ever change?

And these roadblocks aren’t always glaringly obvious.

You can easily talk yourself out of moving forward on your path and make it sound fully reasonable—even though it’s just the fear clouding you.

Sometimes it’s like you just blackout. You suddenly realise you’re in a hole with no idea of how it happened.

Now you’re back at square one and asking yourself “damn, why is this so hard?”

I experience this with stress and time management a lot. It’s like when my days get less busy (which is what the future me wants) my current self finds a way to make life busy again.

There are two main things I do to stay on top of this (awareness-wise):

— I pay attention to when I get weird gut feelings that are telling me I shouldn’t do something even though it’s good for me. That’s usually suspicious.

—I regularly review how I’ve been acting / living to see if it aligns with the person I want to become.

It’s amazing how something as simple as this can bring self-sabotaging behaviours to light that I wouldn’t even realise—and it’s so easy to slip back into old bad habits if you don’t pay attention.

The more you become aware of how you’re hurting yourself, the harder it is to justify continuing to do it.

But awareness doesn’t solve the whole problem; now you need to take ownership of these problems and consciously create solutions.

The victim mindset is poison. It will destroy you from the inside out if you don’t attend to it.

You need to catch yourself in victim mode asap and actively work against it.

It’ll feel uncomfortable because—if you suffer from a victim mindset—that’s what’ll feel ‘normal’ and safe.

Don’t believe the lie.

The next time you hit a roadblock and start justifying why you should run from it, do this: The opposite.

Simple. If social media gets too hard and you’re thinking “they expect too much of us, this isn’t fair, I can’t do this”—realise this a roadblock and you have a choice to turn and run or push forward.

Here’s the mindset switch: “looks like there’s a high standard to meet, that’s cool—I guess it’s time to level up, I can do this”.

Again, this won’t be comfortable because you’re not used to it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And until you do this, you’ll never change.

I’m still amazed at how much the victim mindset plays a part in my life.

I’ll be diligently working against it every day, then my fiancé will call me out on some excuse I’m making, and I realise “oh, there’s still work to do”.

Don’t sleep on it.

Questions.

When you hit a roadblock and start finding reasons to turn away and run, you can ask yourself questions to help reframe the situation.

Think about the following in the context of social media or whatever major path you’re taking with your music career:

— Would the future me—the me I plan on becoming—run from this problem or turn and face it?

— If the me 5 years from me looked back at this moment, would they be proud of you or disappointed?

— What would my ‘idols’ do in this situation? Would they be proud of how I handled this? (Think in terms of attitude, not necessarily just actions)

— What would this look like if it were easy? This is one of Tim Ferriss’ “17 Questions That Changed My Life” and one of my favourites.

The first 3 are great because they call you out.

The Tim Ferris question is great because it puts you in a totally different headspace.

I use it to strip away the mess and see the situation for what it likely is: not as a complicated and hard as we’ve made it in our minds.

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Roadblock Rituals

Another thing that can help you stick to the path when things feel impossible is rituals or processes.

You can set up rituals, reminders—whatever—to get you back on track when you stray from the path or want to turn and run.

When I get stuck, I have things to turn to:

— Go to my major ‘content inspiration’ sources (accounts I love to help me generate great ideas) and get inspired.

— Watch certain videos that have messages that hit me in the sweet spot.

— Go for a walk.

— Ask my fiancé to pep me up and remind me that I can do this.

— I’ve talked about this before, but I have an alarm that goes off at 7am every morning (1-2 hours after I get up) that says: “Show me how good it can get”. If I don’t wake up in a good place, this changes that.

For me, these are almost fail—proof. At least one of these will get me re-energised to take on the many challenges to face.

This might look a little different for you and it may take a while to find what actually works.

But if you start now you’ll soon have your own little collection of things you can do to get you back on track.

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One small problem at a time.

The process of breaking huge problems down into smaller parts helps you to see these big problems for what they really are: just a series of tiny, reasonably easily solvable problems or steps to take.

We often make things out to be harder and more of a problem than they are because that’s what it feels like.

But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a call with a musician facing a big struggle who’s—by the end of the call—realised “oh, this isn’t as bad as I originally thought”.

Here’s how that works:

If a big problem is only big because it’s made up of lots of tiny problems, often all we have to do is shake something loose (a tiny problem), grab it and solve it.

A tiny problem is easy to solve. And once you solve one, all the others become just a little less difficult to solve.

Musicians who feel social media is completely overwhelming might shift their perspective if they could see that it’s really just a bunch of small processes that work together to create a big process.

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Spend more time ‘around’ success.

The more you immerse yourself in an environment of success the more it becomes normal for you.

Usually when people say this they’re saying: ‘spend time with successful people’, and while I recommend that, here I’m talking about the social media accounts you study / consume.

One of the biggest shifts for me with social media occurred when I started normalising the idea of bigger progress.

I study others who are better than me a lot.

And because I do it so much, it’s beginning to feel like massive success is not only possible, but inevitable—it’s like I’m one of them.

Your environment has a massive impact on how things go for you. And that’s no different for social media, or any area of your music career.

This does not mean you should fall into a comparison hole and start feeling like shit about yourself.

It means seek to learn from others who are seeing the kind of success you want.

Ditch complainers and people who see the world as being against them. If this is what you’re always around…guess what you’re going to internalise.

Whereas if you stay focused on positive people who take responsibility and make progress…guess what you’re going to internalise.

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Make space for exploring your curiosities.

One of the biggest (and valid) reasons people have for jumping from thing to thing is that they like other things too.

This is 100% me. Sometimes I get bored of doing the same thing and I want to explore my other curiosities.

In these cases it’s not that I’m scared of facing a roadblock on my current path—it’s that I just want to try different stuff.

This is not only OK—it’s great.

I think we should all be able to explore different things as much as possible.

Here’s the problem though: It can be hard not to confuse this with running away from our problems.

The solution (at least what I’ve found works for me): Intentionally create space / time solely for exploring other things.

The idea is to ‘pay yourself first’ (which in this context means to prioritise your main thing) and then make room for branching out and trying new things.

I make sure that my main thing (my business) is taken care of first each day.

Once that’s taken care of, I can explore other creative things if I feel like it.

This ‘pay yourself first’ approach ensures you get to mess around with stuff you’re interested in without going down a self-sabotage hole. You get the best of both worlds.

Sure, it won’t always be so straightforward—but as with everything, work on it and it’ll get easier.

Amazing things can happen when you decide to break away from what you normally do and explore new things.

You can end up finding better things. Please don’t deprive yourself of these explorations.

But—especially as a creative person—it’s so easy to let that throw you off track in a bad way.

Take care of your main path first so you can attack new things guilt free, keep yourself on track and leave room for potentially better paths.

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Ok, let’s call it!

As always I hope you found this helpful, insightful, interesting—useful in some way.

To progress in your music career means to progress as a person. Please pay attention to your own behaviours, thoughts, beliefs. I want you to win!

As always, if you need help, you can check out your options here.

Until then, you’ve got this.

All the love and stay awakened,

Alex

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