Defining and Measuring Success

Defining Success

How you define success is incredibly important. It is the difference in feeling successful or like a piece of shit, regardless of the results. If you define success as getting a lot of likes on instagram and enjoying every second of your life you're gonna feel pretty damn unsuccessful a lot of the time. But if you define success as pursuing your true goals and making progress towards them, it's pretty obvious how you become successful.

It all comes down to the definition, your definition. If you have a subconscious belief that people who watch tv for 2 hours a day are not successful, then anytime you watch tv for 2 hours a day you won't feel successful. Or if you decide that successful people work out for 10 minutes a day, read a book for 10 minutes, and meditate for 10 minutes, you'll feel like a successful person when you do those things.

The hard thing about success if figuring out where our true metrics for success lie. Sometimes we are unaware of our true beliefs deep down and thus we find ourselves feeling like shit and we don't know why. This is often because we were going against our true values and weren't aware of it. For example for me, deep down I believe that I should make beats for at least an hour a day if I'm going to be successful. And that that hour should be done within a few hours of me waking up. So anytime I find myself at like 11am (waking up at 5) and I've only made beats for like 20 minutes or not even at all, I feel pretty damn unsuccesful even if I've been doing some banga ass work somewhere else. I could've been making a million dollars and curing cancer, but then I'd still feel unsuccessful because deep down I have defined part of my success as making beats in the morning.

Measuring Success

The way you measure your success is an important factor. What you define as success will massively impact your beatmaking life. For example if you base your success on what other people are telling you, you success will be all over the place and quite fragile. Someone will tell you your beat is insane and you'll be on top of the world, then another will say it's shit and you'll feel like a massive failure. Anyways, here's how you should measure success.

Success = Overall enjoyment of your beatmaking experience

The more you enjoy your own beatmaking experience, the more successful you are. It doesn't matter whether you have 10 followers or 100,000 followers, a truly successful beatmaker is one who enjoys what he does, who is fulfilled by his work.

Things you should not base your success on:

• Feedback from others

  • Take and appreciate the good feedback, learn from the bad

  • Don't dwell on it whether it's extremely positive or just

    • If someone thinks your beat is "holy fuck insane" - great, feels good, but that's just their opinion. Someone else will listen to the same beat and say "isn't shit"

• Likes, followers (Getting likes and followers is it's own game, it usually has nothing to do with your beats)

• The quality of the beats you're making

  • Your judgement and opinions of your own beats change often, you could take the exact same beat and one day you may think it's the best shit you've ever heard and another day it sounds like complete shit to you

  • Although you should look back on your beats and see how much progress you've made. This you'll see. It won't just be an opinion, you will be able to listen and think, "wow that was a month ago, if I made this today I would do this this and this, I've made it quite a long way"