Why do you want to be successful?

A personal reflection on the relationship between the desire for success and artistry, with the aim to help other artists find why they are seeking success and what it truly means to them.

Your unique idea of what success is defines your entire drive, and therefore strategy, towards your eventual outcome. 

If you don't decide what success means to you, or if you're not in alignment (congruent with) your true idea of success, this could cause a lot of conflict and holdup in your progress and result in a success that isn't your success, and could leave you unfulfilled. 

What you seek for the future is about what came before. All of your experiences, your traumas, your positive feedback, your love or lack of it, how you made friends, how you developed independence, the self esteem you developed, ideas - all of these play into your success definition. 

You may come to find that success becomes unreachable. Many will deem this 'failure' and believe that their dream has died. This can cause depersonalisation and existential crisis. 

But on the other side of this, there can be a new horizon. More self knowledge. 

Finding your path to true success may mean pivoting on the idea of success you have known. It may also mean finding peace with and accepting a path you have walked that wasn't planned in the journey you initially set out on. 

It takes asking yourself what you really want. 

A good practice to find your baseline is by asking yourself what the minimal is that you are willing to have to live happily, truly.

If you can answer this, I believe it puts you closer to finding fulfilment. Once you have that baseline fulfilment, all further growth is just joy on joy. 

Lower your standards of success, and you will only ever get more successful. ??

Typically, artists want one of the following when they define success:

1. Freedom to make art and be creative. 
2. Fame or a sense of a need for appreciation or admiration. 
3. Money and material wealth. 
4. Power, control and ownership of the work and processes involved. 
5. A quest for knowledge and satisfaction in learning. 

To go further, we could ask for what reason we want these successes… 

Freedom - Arguably the most pure of 'successes'. A need for freedom could be a return to your child inside. 

The bohemian ideal - to live a life free of rules and free to focus on artistic and creative interpretations of the experiences of nature. 

Is this really possible though? The world has no place for bohemianism right now. The world is dying, the world is capitalised, freedom of movement is attacked and if you can't pay, you can't play. 

Also to consider, a lot of the time we're running from struggles that we will inevitably face regardless of our external circumstances, because our struggles are carried within us and must be faced and solved to free ourselves. 

As for 2, 3, 4 & 5… 

How much of the others could be driven by insecurities or a need to feel loved and needed? 

How many of these are really needed to feel happiness? 

How many of our choices are defined by our real self, or driven by our ideal self? 

Your idea of success is as much about your feedback from the past as your desires for the future. 

So, is Success Connected to a Desire to be Loved? 

My earlier journey in music led me from being creative and just wanting to make music, to realising that the social status associated with a non-successful artist is low and that if I was going to continue identifying as an artist, I'd need to find a way to be successful doing so. 

Being an artist is not enough for our modern culture, you have to be a successful and professional artist. 

(So, not only is the value of music decreasing as a whole, the required standard of music has raised. But how can this be if the beauty of art is subjective? Arguably because of globalisation and Instagram (the echo chamber) causing us all to have the same views and tastes. But that's for another article.) 

In my experience, the principle needs associated with the desire for social status are acceptance and love. 

With this in mind retrospectively, in my late adolescence I must have formed an attachment between my personal sense of success to my desire for acceptance and love, which in adulthood is obtained through romantic relationships.

As I got better at my production skills and rode the waves of momentum of being recognised as a producer, I found myself wanting to be 'the coolest guy in the room'.

I watched producer friends dress up, change their musical style and 'get all the girls'. 

Becoming a social leader, and therefore being attractive, was what society proposed as successful. 

The grunger in me would call this selling out, my anger and jealousy would call it fake and attack it, the businessman would call it product and marketing. 

It got worse as Instagram took off and alluded the entire culture was based on social status and that you would not survive without it. 

I jumped on the social status seeking bandwagon for a little while, but the romantic in me didn't like the idea of needing to 'buy' social status with materialism and find love through my material success. Love meant (means) more to me than something on the material plane. Therefore, my success could not be achieved with material wealth. 

But is romantic love ultimately what I conclude my success to be? 

An artistic couple in a camper van, drinking wine, watching sunsets, playing with a guitar and drum machine… Money, fame, work ethic and recognition don't come into that. 

But doing this all the time as a marker of success is utopian, idealistic and romanticised, as I would feel other things missing from my needs. 

Focusing on my life mission and doing the work (my sense of duty) brings me a sense of achievement. And without concluding this article prematurely, it's worth nothing here that this is important. Success has to be compounded into daily actions - it's not an end goal, it's a lifestyle. 

Is Success Connected to a Desire to be Recognised, Then? 

The byproduct of a skilful creative process is that you end up with something having been created, and more skills and experience through the process. And you want to share these things, and be recognised as the one who did it. 

Even Banksy is a brand. 

At some point, I did want to be recognised as an artist, but performance wasn't something I had time to focus on, I studied production. 

When I make music now, it's always in the back of my mind I hope the music, and me as the creator, 'go viral'. 

I know this is a feeling all creators have. And I can see this is a fairly pure success pursuit. 

I found myself seeking recognition in other ways when it was lower for production. I'd started sales roles alongside my college studies and was good at it. I was recognised as a top seller.

When I finished university, I continued a career in business development, but I started a label and wanted to be recognised as successful in the music industry as an executive. My skill set widened and now I'm confident in multiple areas of business operations. I have aligned that skill-set to the music industry. People recognise me for that. 

I see others step away from artistry to pursue music business - I wonder if they decided to do this out of a quest for recognition also?   

I started my record label because, to feel fulfilled as a person, I need to 'build and develop things, come up with innovative solutions and execute them with strategies', which is why I fit so well into the business type personality. 

So again, this choice wasn't solely led by desire for recognition or love. Now I see that to feel a sense of success, I have to feel like I am doing these things also. So part of the feeling of being successful is in doing.

Maybe I'm ready for a garden shed or workshop. 

We have to recognise our needs as basic principles before we can truly understand what success looks like to us. 

I have many characteristics that suit business better than as an artist. And some less favourable characteristics that the freedom of being an artist could have been dangerous to play with. That's not to say I feel that I'm not fit for artistry, or that I am no longer going to have a hunger and drive to make music, quite the opposite - I'm finding peace with making music without any external pressures. This means I'll likely make more music.

I'm willing to let go of being an artist as a professional and instead settle on being a hobbyist. 

That's a big shift from where I started, but without experiences you can't really know where you're going. You can only commentate on your journey in hindsight. That is fate.

Some of our fates might not reflect our original ideas of success, and that's OK. 

Is Success Obtainable?

I have a personality trait of not having a tendency to give up easily on anything. I want to give things I care about my absolute all, and unconditional devotion. 

But this doesn't always have the desired outcome. And accepting this reality is the largest part of the battle when it comes to success. 

Don't seek success; seek peace of mind. 

So, artists, particularly those starting out, before you nose dive into wanting to own your distribution supply chain and your masters ??, be credited for everything, be rich and famous, sacrifice relationships, sell your soul, exhaust yourself and all the other things society might ask of you; maybe take a step back to ask what you really want at the level of your personal needs, not just societal-defined desires. 

You can still #win and live happily without being rich and famous.

The wrong choices could put you in a position where it affects your art...

Being too ambitious could mean you end up with less happiness...

Success is seldom what society shows it to be. Grow your hair as a sign of nonconformity man, fuck it. ?? ????

Enjoy the journey. Don't believe your own bullshit, it'll all be OK in the end. 

What does success mean to you? How do you see yourself in your successful state?? ??