Understand Who You Are

I work a number of careers concurrently. At any given moment I’m a brand consultant, a business coach, a parent, a writer, and a folk-punk singer-songwriter and recording musician. The latter one seems like the wild card in this deck, but it’s actually closest to the core of my training for doing everything else. On top of the skills developed as a public performer, songwriting is the act of telling short, concise stories that are easy to remember. Great songs eliminate embellishment to share raw, compelling human emotions without adornment (that’s what novels are for). Great marketing messages need to be similarly straightforward – they must be truthful, unambiguous, and clear.

It takes a tonne of confidence to be a singer-songwriter. It requires unflinching belief in the value you are providing in your music - the belief that your song is absolutely worth listening to, that it is entertaining, life-changing, and/or indisputably beneficial for the listener. It’s a level of confidence that borders on arrogance - because how can one four-minute sequence of words and chords be that epic? A song can certainly become so, as every epic song out there proves, but those songs only became so once the impressions of their listeners are brought to bear upon them.

A big part of what makes a Beatles song monumental is the weight of the thousands of lives that have been enriched by that tune. “Hey Jude” is threaded into the soundtrack of thousands (if not millions) of lives, and those millions of experiences add weight and gravitas to the song itself. The song was born in the mind of one man as he was driving his car. It existed inside that car alone for a brief period before it was shared with a collective group of colleagues that were then known as “Beatles.” The team cultivated the inherent greatness within the song. They cemented its greatness onto a recording, and the rocket-fuel of their brand launched the song into the ears (and lives) of millions of people. Once shared broadly, it took on a life of its own within the context of those millions of personal experiences - but the song started its life alone, sung quietly to a steering wheel.

The initial brilliance of the core idea within every Beatles song was greatly enhanced by the circumstances they were launched into. Those conditions primed each song for success, and those conditions have grown over the years as the band’s influence has grown. Nobody would have expected the guys who recorded “Love Me Do” to produce The White Album, but their growing success fostered their inherent talents. The individuals grew into that level of skill, and the greatness of those songs also grew through the years as they threaded their way into more lives and more personal experiences.

So, back to confidence. It takes a mountain of belief for anyone to think that an original musical creation could become the soundtrack to a million lives, and it takes a truckload of vision to work through the rejection and effort required to simply present a song to new people. It takes talent for the song to be good, of course, but without hard work, talent is rarely rewarded - and it takes buckets of passion and determination to do that work without initial reward, or any guarantee of reward.

Most coaches will tell you that success is the result of hard work, and that there are no shortcuts to success - and coaches who tell you otherwise are lying. To be successful in anything, you have to be talented, you have to provide value, and you have to be confident in the value you provide. That’s why self-assessment if so essential - so you can acknowledge what’s working with your approach, while discarding what isn’t working. Arrogance is rarely appealing, but confidence is a more alluring asset - and it is best-gained by understanding who you are.

I never had the depth of confidence required to establish enduring “success” as a songwriter - if I had, you’d be listening to me rather than reading me. Perhaps if I had more confidence, I could have been as good as any other songwriter out there (unlikely), but without the added special sauce of arrogance and belief, talent will rarely come to light, let alone elevate itself into collective experiences. That’s why I don’t lose any sleep over my “lack of success” in this regard, because I recognized early on that I did not own that focus, and I understood that it would fundamentally limit widespread success. I therefore set my expectations accordingly. It’s still hard for me to conceive of any musical performance that is worthy of two hours of rapt attention in the absence of any context or a pre-existing relationship between the audience and the songs. Concerts by well-loved bands are often akin to religious ceremonies, and like churchgoers, concert-goers arrive with great expectations, pre-conceptions, and well-established beliefs that this concert “will be truly awesome.” Cover bands exist because audiences have a pre-existing relationship with those songs, and audiences approach the band’s performance with that baggage of expectations. Unknown original songwriters, by contrast, are propelling their music into a performance that is devoid of context or recognition, and the odds of connecting with an audience are significantly more unlikely in those circumstances. Recognizing this core belief allowed me to set attainable expectations, and songwriting has therefore remained a fulfilling avocation for me. My benchmarks for “success” were achievable - and have been achieved. 

Finding an audience for written words can be equally difficult, but if a writer presents non-fiction work that’s supported by evidence of its value, confidence is easier to maintain. If my ideas have proven to be repeatedly successful, it’s a lot easier to share them with conviction. I suppose the same could be said for a songwriter (if one song works for somebody, shouldn’t it work for everybody?) but it rarely works that way. The fact is that business principles are reasonably linear - the patterns are pretty consistent, as are the paths to engage with them. Songs speak to an individual on a different level, one that is usually personal and emotional. Each person’s emotions are different, and are engaged in unique ways. Nobody has cracked a universal access code to the entirety of human emotion - even The Beatles aren’t universally loved - but non-fiction writing, like the words you are reading now, are supported by those linear principles. It’s easier to know they will connect. These words are just one person’s opinion, and like assholes, everybody has an opinion, but I know from experience that the shit I’m producing is effective - which helps me to be confident in my output (sorry for the analogy, but my point is sound). 

In the absence of arrogance, confidence is essential for success in whatever you do. To be confident in your work, you must have a clear understanding of who you are. You need to understand what’s in your toolbox - which tools are available to you, and how to use them. If there are gaps in your toolset, acknowledge the gaps, assess your priorities, and fill those gaps if necessary. Understand your assets - the things that make you who you are - and use them often, and well. This is the point of “understanding your brand” - self-awareness is the key to success.