I struggle with motivation and time management issues, as well as following through on projects that I get started on and then just end up leaving on the back burner. They’re my biggest personal roadblock, I think. I’m also pretty sure that I’m not supposed to focus on them, per se, but I’m intrigued by it more because I see it all as a vague, collective, dramatic arch nemesis than I do an actual obstruction to personal development.
Maybe I’m not taking the issue seriously enough. I had a recently-misplaced binder full of over a decade’s worth of half finished songs attesting to my proclivity towards starting things and not finishing them.
Sometimes, I really do give a task my best effort, but I still come up just shy of completing it in a manner I would consider to be successful. That almost happened yesterday. In my last update, I was discussing the challenges I faced with trying to make a simple lyric video; just black slides with white words transitioning to the pace of background music. Shouldn’t be that hard. It wasn’t until almost 3 am before I finally had a product I could upload to youtube. Here it is if anyone’s interested, by the way:
No fancy embedded video player or other sophisticated multimedia content to view here. You’ll have to check it out for yourself.
I’ve been writing my own songs for over half the time that I’ve been alive for now, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that that talent now best epitomizes my vice when it comes to motivation and willingness to follow through. At this point in my life, I know that the song in the video linked above could, and in fact should, sound many times better than it actually does, and I don’t just mean in the production value (though perhaps I should have procured the resources to boost that aspect of recording and producing a long time ago as well). I know my voice, and I know when I half ass things. This was one of those times.
To further add to the example, the visual aspect of the lyric video is also crap, and I know it, but I’d never made one before and I kept running into unexpected snags at every turn. I’m trying to level with myself as to whether that’s just me making excuses, or if that was legitimately the truth of the matter. I’m biased in favour of the latter. In any case, the point was that, after two days of toying around with different approaches on and off, I almost didn’t complete the project, and had I not, in all likelihood, I would have lost interest by now. It would have become just one more effort never getting finished, published and shared on a long list of many.
I figured enough was enough. Just do it. If it’s hard, complicated, troublesome, then figure it out. There’s FAQs and troubleshooting guides and help forums everywhere these days. There’s no reason why I should accept failure at this point.
So, with any luck, and now after having learned a thing or two to help expedite future endeavors, the world may yet see more musical output from yours truly. Might not sound like much to get excited about now, but if the trend continues, it’ll amount to something worth while someday. [edit: I want that hope back]
Elyen Alive 