Follow My Self-actualization Journey As A Musician

[Vigi]

Background

In my spare time, I have always liked to write melodies, mostly on guitar. I bought a cheap guitar and amp package at about the year of 2008, and some years later, an ukulele. When there was a bit of spare time, it was a nice little opportunity for me to practice and explore. On the surface, starting to study music in school seemed like a logical choice. That choice felt completely incongruent though. I could not sing, it is a hard feild to make a living in, I had a hard time understanding and relating to music theory, I felt tone-deaf during music assignments in class, I could not really play any instrument too well and I simply could not relate to the stereotypical musician lifestyle. I did not want to start doing gigs and entertaining people (which I probably could not even do). I simply wanted to sit home alone and exploring melodies, expressing deep ideas, doing a lot of contemplation and not rush anything.

Time passed on by me pursuing studies and work unrelated to music, only spending time on music on the scarce spare time. What I pursued full time felt congruent. But as time went on, I started to state the classical "What if?" question. I felt like there was a certain force of nature that I had suppressed, not giving it the attention I felt it deserved. There is nothing wrong with what I am doing full time, I like it. What is wrong is the fact that I have not been taking this force seriously enough in my spare time.

The thought above has grown over the years, resulting in me putting more and more time, effort and money into it. Instead of just playing the same old riffs over and over, I started doing some research on gear, mixing and mastering. Every now and then, I saved up money and bought a new piece of equipment or learned a new tool in the DAW (music program). Each day, making it a tiny fraction better. Taking it a fraction more serious. Year after year.

A part of me hoped that I would get tired of it, so I could let it go completely, since there was so much hard work related to it. The only thing that happened though was that it grew on me. I have been experiencing so many moments of peaceful, relaxing and calm happiness from simply creating. This feeling was something I felt completely without sharing the creation with anyone. As a matter of fact, sharing it was a frightening idea. There was a tremendous amount of resistance in doing so, which is why I decided to do so, more specifically in November of 2013.

In recent years, I have studied self help material. This has been helpful since it gave me something to relate my experiences with. For instance, it has helped me understand why I wanted to get tired of creating music. It gave me great pointers. My biggest self help investment so far is The Life Purpose Course by Leo Gura himself. Right now, I am two-thirds through the course. Before the course, I had my sense of life purpose and so far, the course has done an excellent job at confirming it. As a side note, I highly recommend it, both if you have a clue about your life purpose already or if you are completely blank. The price is crazy cheap compared to the value, assuming that you will put in the work and do exactly what he says.

Now, here I am, continuing to work on this. What I felt the most resistance to do in this moment was to start this thread and write this post. And that is why, after some days of procrastination, I decided to do it.

 

Aim of My Purpose

The aim of my purpose is to not surpress the creative force within me, as described in the background. Instead, it should be fully (definitely not partly) expressed.

Side note:

I do not state that this creative force so making create outstanding work. As a matter of fact, most of what I create is a bit weird. However, I do not like to place labels on it at all, either good or bad. All I know is that when I follow this creative force, I experience peaceful happiness and a sense of meaning. I feel great resistance to sharing the creations. From self help material such as Leo Gura's Life Purpose Course but also many books (such as Linchpin by Seth Godin and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield), I have learned that this means that I need to do it.

To face the resistance, giving it space, and doing it anyway is scary. In order for me to get a reason to do it anyway, I visualize my death bed. I try to get in touch with my thoughts from that perspective, which makes it clear what I need to do. It is also helpful to get a sense of how insignificant my life is in the context of the universe and that all I create will eventually cease to exist. This helps me enjoying the process and not take anything too seriously.

 

Aim of the Tread

In the paragraph above, I describe my resistance and how I deal with it. I believe that is a great example of something which can be relatable to a lot of people in a forum like this. Therefore, it could help other people out on their own journey, which is the main aim of this tread. Another aim of the thread was simply to overcome my resistance. A third aim is discussion and feedback. Perhaps you see weak areas in my approach, or you do not agree with something. By discussing such things, both parts can grow from it.

I do not aim to post a certain amount of times in a certain time span. I write when I got something to share, when there is something to discuss and so on. However, I will continue to be consistent in my work of my actual current life purpose as long as it is shown to be resourceful, which it has been as long as I can remember.

 

Follow My Journey

One thing I resonate extra much about Leo Gura's approach to self help and self-actualization is that he always relate it to practical action you can take, in order to achieve practical results. Therefore, when I share my journey, it is not enough to just write airy-fairy (a word he often uses  ) texts about it, like this post. I want you to know exactly what practical steps I take and what the exact results are, which you can see here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdCXigLZuVwXaXCdT-Hs1sg

This channel contains only the original music I make. In the moment I write this, I also have a cover and a lesson channel. Liking that would be too much information for now. If you want to find all my links, simply check the description of my latest video.

If you have any questions about anything, just ask me and I will answer. When I followed other people, I always had a lot of practical and philosophical questions about their work, but I usually never asked. I would like to eliminate that for this case.

 

Disclaimers

Hopefully this does not break the guidelines of advertising/promotional material. If it does, I can not argue if I get permanently banned.

Keep in mind I can not update this post with new important information in the future.

I still do not think of myself as a musician when writing this. However, it is not possible to go in depth about that in the title, hence the word "Musician" is used in the title.

[Vigi]

One thought I just came across is that all the moments that seems big on the external surface tends to be the ones that requires the least effort to me. The most obvious example in my case is the moment when I record the actual video. In the beginning I thought this was the most important moment and I therefore strived to make it perfect, doing a lot of retakes. Not doing retakes because I enjoyed it, but because I tired eliminating defects. However, all it did was creating a lot of resistance. As a result, a lot of energy was wasted. What I have come to realize is that one of the most important thing is to take effortless high value actions all the time. I used to try to find the right moment when I was high in energy and inspired when recording stuff. But I have later come to realize that I should just take action all the time, even when I'm really tired and do not really feel like recording.

The perfection comes from taking action and enjoying the overall process. Small errors in the recordings is just surface stuff. By continuously taking action the deep message comes across. In the context of the underlying deep message, the small errors becomes insignificant. By focusing on eliminating the errors and similar surface factors, the deep message gets lost. The depth is all that matters in the end. Well, I guess you can say that does not matter in the end as well, but that's another story.

I feel like this post does not perfectly describe what I think but if I just makes post like this every now and then, I think the deep message will come across. You might notice that this last sentence was another practical example of my idea by the way.