FMM076- What happens when you get left behind? – Transcript

This is an automated transcription which may have some occasional errors in spelling and grammar.

Hi, I’m Keith Mills. And this is episode number 76 of the Finish More Music Podcast. And today we’re going to be answering a question I received via DM on Instagram. What do you do if you work hard on your music, but see other people accelerating ahead? What do you do if doubts start creeping in, how do you handle them?

Well, the choice you make here will dramatically affect your own chances of success, and it might be a bigger deal than you initially realize. So let’s get cracking with today’s show and we’ll uncover the answer.

This is the Finish More Music Podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music and share it with the world. My name’s Keith Mills, and every week we’ll dive into the mindset creative strategies that will help you to move further, faster along the music production journey.

Hello, and thank you for joining me for another episode of the Finish More Music Podcast. So I just want to kick this one off quickly for you out with a reminder to stick the 8th of October into your calendar, into your phone, whatever way you get reminders popping up, because we’ve got our brand new, completely new rewritten from the ground up being filmed in the next couple of weeks, free Finish More Music workshop.

So it’s a three part video series. That’s coming up. If you head over to finishmoremusic.com/waitlist and get your name down, we’ll let you know, as soon as it comes out and you’re going to want to jump on it. Cause we only put it up for a short period of time. And the reason for that is as well as you get in a three part video series that is easily the best training that I’ve ever produced.

So if you find yourself struggling, maybe not finishing any music at all, or your output is lower than you would like. You’re only finished in the odd track here and there. Perhaps struggling from perfectionism overwhelmed with all the options, the plugins, the sounds, the color sees the tutorials, all of the stuff that comes at you.

This training’s going to cut through all the noise and get straight to the point. So if it’s something you’re really passionate about and you’re really committed and you want to go all in with your music and you’re not getting the results that you want at the moment, get the 8th of October. And as I said, finishmoremusic.com/waitlist, and we’ll make sure you get an email the minute that it drops.

So you don’t miss any of it. Okay. So that’s what I’ve been up to loads and loads of writing of the video series. I’ve refined it so many times. I still want to make improvements to it. Um, but I’m running out of time. We’ve got the videographer coming in. We’re going to start mapping it out, storyboarding it.

So as you can tell, this is a. Way more than just a couple of YouTube tutorials. Are you seeing a DAW? It’s a really well produced video series. A lot goes into it takes months and months a month to produce this thing for you. And I want it to be as hard hitting as high impact for you as I can possibly make it.

And the other thing that I’ve been doing is just going over a master class. So I’m recording this podcast prior to jumping live inside of the Finish More Music community. And I’m going to be doing some really advanced training for the guys tonight. And it’s going to be on getting into the right Headspace, the mental battle that all creatives face, all creatives face until they’ve.

Got their head completely in the right space. And even then things still crop up. And we talk about it a lot in the podcast, right? Lots and lots of different things that imposter syndrome and fear of failure and rejection, all of these things, lots of pressures that come up when we’re creating. And as you climb up the ladder, you start releasing music.

A whole new load of stuff starts coming in as well. So it’s some advanced training for the guys tonight. And it inspired me to jump on this specific topic for you right now, which is kind of one piece of the puzzle. And it’s a particular piece that. I was asked about and asked if I could do a show in one of the DMS on Instagram.

So if you haven’t reached out to me yet, please do it. Absolutely love hearing about suggestions for the show, your thoughts on anything, cover your experiences. I get back to every single message it’s at. I am Keith meals on Instagram and the particular question that came through, and this was a belief from William, actually, a member of our community.

And he said, Can you please do a show where you talk about writing your music for a period of time and seeing other people who have accelerated faster than you and further than you, and how do you get in the right head space and not have that seeping into your music production and being one of those things that can get in the way and slow you down.

Now there’s a lot I could talk about on this, but one thing that. Has really jumped out at me as something that I know no holds back. A lot of people is resentment and comparison versus being inspired and curious. So let’s talk about those two things, because it’s natural, you will accelerate ahead of some people and some people will accelerate ahead of you.

And we talked about this in a finite and infinite games of the way to view these different things, things that are happening, but we can go a little bit deeper here. So if you didn’t catch that, that podcast, you’re going to want to go back and check after this episode as well. The deal is this. When we feel resentment towards other people, in any aspect of our lives, we create a self fulfilling prophecy.

So, what do I mean by that? What if you see somebody else doing well and you feel resentment towards them, then you are telling your subconscious mind that achieving this level of success is a bad thing to do because it creates a resentment. And if you resent that person, other people will resent you. If you’re successful.

So ultimately what happens is your subconscious is not going to be propelling you forward at light speed towards achieving the thing you want to achieve, because you view it as bad. It’s something to get you upset and annoyed and bitter about. And you think other people start thinking that view, if you do well.

And obviously then the slower you go, the more people accelerate ahead, the more resentment you get, and you can see how this thing spirals out of control. The flip side of that is celebrating people’s success. If you are really grateful for their success and you celebrate it and you’re like, wow, that is incredible.

Then you’re going to find yourself being inspired. And you’d be more likely to reach out to those people as well and say, Hey, you know, wow, you’ve done really well. What’s going on? What have you done? What are you doing that I’m not doing? I would love to learn from you, but how often you’re going to do that to people you feel reserved towards.

So it’s like a double whammy, right? And you’ve probably heard the amazing quote. Um, I think it’s attributed to Theodore Roosevelt comparison is the thief of joy. Sometimes comparing is, is not bad, but it is. If we’re looking at it through this lens of negativity, if we’re saying, look how far behind I am, look how far behind I am.

Maybe you started at the same time as someone, or maybe they started after you and you see that they are now achieving things that you want to achieve. They’ve taken several more steps up the ladder than you have. And if we’re comparing with this negative lens, then questions start coming up. Like, what’s wrong with me?

What am I doing wrong? Am I cut out for this? And that leads to feeling disheartened and demotivated, and second guessing the things that we’re doing, maybe like hit and hope, start jumping into other strategies and doubting the things that have been getting as success. But because someone else got more.

We’re going to stop them. We’re going to change to something else. And if you’ve ever jumped from thing to thing to thing, you’ll know that it’s just a whole succession of false starts rarely as a there’s. One of them suddenly magically be the answer. What we need is commitment, but that commitment is going to waiver.

If we’re comparing how far behind we are. And again, this is self fulfilling. So no resentment in this one, but this is self fulfilling because how well do you do when you feel disheartened, you ever been on fire, you ever made big steps forward with anything you’re doing when you’re feeling disheartened and down about it?

Of course not. It’s the absolute opposite of wow, my God. How did they do that? Think about it. If you were to look at someone and say, My God, they’ve really accelerated ahead there. That is incredible. I love to be able to do that. I wonder how they did it. I’ll reach out and ask them and maybe I’ll set myself a little challenge.

I wonder if by the end of the year or next year I can have got, as far as Dave. It doesn’t matter if I don’t do it, I’m not going to hang myself on it. And we’re going to make a demand that that has to happen. But I’m going to go all in. What if I put an extraordinary level of effort into catch up? How different does that feel to you?

Listening to me say that versus, Oh God, look, how far behind them, what have they got that I haven’t. Am I lacking in talent? Am I not good enough? All those times, I’ve procrastinated. All those things, I’m doing wrong. What a heavy weighty feeling who’s inspired to get in the studio, that person, or the person who celebrate in everybody else’s success. Now that is just straight up.

Negative comparison. Let’s bring the other word in now. Resentment nasty word. Right. Just listening to that one nasty word. Why? Because it includes bitterness. It includes annoyance. They’re very, very strong emotions. And whenever our thoughts are backed up by really strong emotions, it becomes a whole load, more powerful.

And this is when we start saying things like it’s not fair. They got a lucky break. They’ve got some kind of unfair advantage over me. They took some kind of shortcut. They collaborate with someone and it’s the other person who’s got all the talent they don’t, or their boyfriend or girlfriend knew someone at the label or someone in the club that got on the gig.

They don’t deserve it. It’s not light. It’s those kind of thoughts, really negative stuff. And if you are. Not if you’re looking at them right. With this self fulfilling idea and that, and it’s a situation of, well, if I’m not allowed a lucky break, if I’m not allowed to shortcut neither have they. And then of course what’s going to happen.

If you do have the opportunity for a lucky break or you do see that they’ve taken a specific shortcut. You’re probably not going to take that shortcut. You’re going to, you’ve told yourself that cheating is bad, so you’re going to miss a whole bunch of opportunities. But more than that, it just, it does so much to the subconscious.

It does it psychologically. Let me give you an example. Have you ever been walking down the street? You know, maybe it’s in a town center or something like that, and you’ve been with someone or maybe you’ve done this and it’s good. To be honest, if this is you. And somebody is driven by like, it’s a beautiful sunny day.

They’ve driven by in a top of the range sports car. Maybe it’s like a top of the range for Raleigh the Hood’s down and got the tunes going design shades, looking great in all their gear, got the tunes. Nice and loud car goes by and someone says, look at that deck. What a poser, what a flash get, what a knob, some other derogatory I’m saying, you know, that comes out of their mouth about the success of this individual.

What do you think that means their subconscious is going to do when they try to do something that’s going to make them successful. If you view people who have money with resentment, you view people who have nice things with resentment. Then you’re just telling yourself that having nice things and having money is a bad thing to have.

And so even if in your head, you’ll go, Oh, I’d love that pay rise. Or I’d, you know, I’d love to achieve this or set up my own business. Or if we’re talking about the world and music, I’d love to, you know, get the big gigs. I’d love to do all of these things. If you have got an issue with people who are successful and an issue with people that have money and an issue with people who have lucky breaks or who network and have ins with different people, if you have issues with that, your subconscious going to keep pushing back, and then you wonder why you procrastinate.

You wonder why you’re avoiding doing things. That’s because somewhere in there you’ve set up this belief that success is bad. And then if I’m successful, I’ll have money and that’s bad, or I might need to have networked and got a favor here and there, and that’s bad immediately handicapping yourself.

What you start telling yourself as well, is that success breeds, resentment. The other people will view you badly. So now you’re like a walking target. Well, if I do bad, a that’s not right. I don’t like it. And everyone’s gonna think I’m a Dick. Cause I think people are doing well, what a mess to get yourself in.

Right. And if you have an illusion that well, yeah, but you know, when I’ve got the Ferrari or when I’ve got the gigs or when I’ve got the releases or when I’m doing well with my music, then this will go away. That’s an illusion. That’s completely wrong. Here’s a great, just a real quick punchy line from an intelligent chap who, uh, put an article out, um, called the comparing trap, Harvard business review, Thomas DeLong.

And he said, no matter how successful we are and how many goals we achieve this trap causes us to recalibrate our accomplishments and reset the bar for how we define success. You can always have more, right? There’s always going to be someone who’s doing better. Always. And so you’ll always be carrying this around unless you make the choice to change your perspective and the best time to do it is right now.

So if anything that I’ve said there is, you know, resonated with you, you’re like, yeah, actually, you know what? Sometimes I do show resentment to people who are doing well in any walk of life, in any way whatsoever. You can now see, is going to hold you back because all different areas of life, LinkedIn together in the same.

If you find yourself looking at people and saying, Oh God, look how far behind I am. What’s up with me. I’m not good enough. That’s the other pitfall that you can go down. So all of this being said, it must be yeah. That seeing others succeed and celebrating. Their success, feeling grateful for them feeling inspired.

And importantly, and I want to add this one in being curious, that is the root to your success. And curious is great. Who doesn’t want to be curious. Doesn’t want to explore and find out new things. So give you an example of this. And it’s the culture that we have inside of the Finnish more music community, and st.

Very specific that we did that caught me by surprise. So we’re blessed. The community is full of amazing people. They all lift each other up. They all want to see each other succeed. And I think a big part of that is because a that’s the culture that we’ve always promoted, but B you do get this. In influence, right.

And inspiration from being around other people who are doing things that, and they’re doing well. So if you join a community and everybody there celebrate, celebrate each other’s success very quickly, you’re going to see how that’s working. You’re going to see everybody rising up together and you’re going to start doing the same.

It’s that same, right? You’re the average of the five. People you most spend time with. So if you are in a community where you spend time and actually you’ve got hundreds of people doing this, they’re successful habits and ways of being, and perspectives are going to rub off on you really quickly. So let’s talk about this surprise.

What happened? Well, We ran a survey anonymous survey, and we said to the members, please fill this out. We want to add a whole bunch of data to see how we can improve the community and how we can help them better to reach their version of success. And one of the questions was around what posts do they like the best?

What are their favorite? Simple as that there’s a whole bunch of different posts. Of course, that go on inside of a music, production, creativity based community, everything from the music business, through to the technical staff, the mix down the sound design. Um, all different things about the creative process, personal effectiveness, how to get into the right internal state to optimize your creativity.

We had an engineer ideas and just we stuff on the fly. Improvising nation. You name it. A whole bunch of really interesting and exciting topics, how to streamline your setup, how to make sure that when you go into the studio and you’ve got an, an idea, it flows through you second nature, instead of being completely overwhelmed and clogged up all of these call posts, go on.

Now, it didn’t come as a surprise that made the most of the creative based posts came higher up. Because that’s what we’re all about the creative process and optimizing it. But the number one was when members post about their breakthroughs. When they say, Hey, I’ve had this success, I’ve got this release or I’ve hit the top of the charts in beep or track source, whatever it might be.

I had some, all the breakthrough. That was the number one that was the post, the type of post that the people in our community like the most. And I was like, wow, that is absolutely amazing. And when I think about it, it’s kind of uncivil pricing then that this community in the last year have released over a thousand pieces of music, because if they are consumed with resentment and compute can consume with negative comparison, they’d all be losing hope, right?

They’d all be down. They’d all be getting in their own way. But because they all celebrate each other and lift each other up, they’re rising as a community. And that is how powerful this is to flip that perspective. So in summary, and in answer to that question, what do you do when other people are accelerating ahead of you?

Feel grateful for their success. Wish them more success, be genuine about it. Want to see them do well and succeed and be curious, ask, what are they doing? How are they doing it? Ask them one of the brilliant things about a community. Get to ask people. You get to say, wow, that’s incredible. How did you do that?

And they’ll say, look, I did this, this and this. And then you can try it. Be curious, be inspired and challenge yourself to be the best version of who you can be so important because it’s not a race. It’s not a competition. It’s not about, you know, who gets this far, the furthest it’s an infinite game. You can’t lose it.

The game of art, it keeps going. It keeps going. So it’s not a race. It’s not a competition. It’s about you. It’s not about other people, but you get to choose. Do you want to use other people’s success to help you grow and to accelerate your development toward your version of success? Or do you choose to resent other people doing well, to feel bitter, to feel annoyed and then hold your progress back as a result.

Sorry. There are my thoughts on resentment and my experiences and what I’ve seen inside of our community. Um, I hope you enjoyed the show. Please let me know your thoughts on this on Instagram. What do you tend to think when you see other people doing well? Do you know other people who are quite sort of bitter and annoyed about success in any way?

It’s important because the more you notice this, the more you’re aware of it, you can more, the more you can shut that stuff out. If you hear people saying it and the more you can catch yourself saying it. And so hang on a minute. Things aren’t going to work like that anymore. Cause that’s going to hold me back.

I’m going to flip my perspective and my way of being here. So hit me up with a DM at I am Keith Mills on Instagram. I’d love to hear from you and the show notes for this one, finishmoremusic.com/076. So I hope you enjoyed the show. Stay safe, happy music making, and I’ll catch you next time.

Book the 8th of October in your diary. Now I’ve been cooking up something really special for you. A brand new completely free Finish More Music workshop with one goal in mind to get you finishing more and better music. Even if you suffer from overwhelm perfectionism procrastination, sitting in front of your DAW, completely at a loss for where to start.

This is a three-part online video series with limited spaces. So jump over to finish more music.com forward slash wait list right now and secure your spot. The last workshop was a huge success. We have producers who. I’ll go to finish any of their tracks for years, literally hammering out tunes in just a few short days.

So if you have that voice in your head that keeps telling you, you’re not cut out for writing music or you’re too slow, or you’ll never make it as a music producer, this series will change everything for you. Let me show you how a few simple tweaks to the way you think and approach your music will completely transform your productivity in the studio.You all achieve a lot more than you can imagine in a very short space of time. Grab your spot now at finishmoremusic.com/waitlist. And I’ll see you in the next episode.

FMM075- Don’t Wait for Motivation… Create It – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills, and this is episode number 75 of the Finish More Music podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about building motivation. Now, one of the biggest mistakes I see a lot of struggling bedroom producers making is that they wait for motivation. They wait for that perfect mental state and perfect conditions before getting started. Now, as a result, they often put making music off, and when they do get started, it only lasts for a short period of time before they’re back to procrastinating, back to buying gear, watching tutorials, and anything else in the hope that something sparks some motivation in them to get going again. So in this episode, we’re going to discuss what the pros do, in fact, what all successful people do. They create their own motivation, and it’s something that anybody can replicate.

So, let’s get started.

This is the Finish More Music podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music, and to share it with the world. My name’s Keith Mills, and every week we’ll dive into the mindset and creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Finish More Music podcast. Thank you for joining me once again. It’s been a pretty full-on couple of weeks for me, because I’m currently in the absolute thickof writing the new Finish More Music workshop. So if you haven’t seen the one that we’ve put out previously, it’s a three-part video series, super highly-produced, we had a videographer, it’s kind of like a movie in a way that’s in three parts, but it’s really powerful training. And it’s completely free. It’s coming out on the 8th of October this year. We’re all hands on deck getting it done and super, super exciting stuff.

If you want to check it out, finishmoremusic.com/waitlist. Just stick your details in there, and we’ll let you know as soon as it comes out. It’s across three parts, incredibly powerful training. The last one that we put out was by far the best piece of training I’ve ever created, and I’m going all in to top it, like giving it everything I can. We’ve got the filming coming up really soon, so I’ve got so much to do to create this thing. It’s late nights, it’s weekends, it’s training, it’s reaching out to people to get help because it’s not what I do. I’m not somebody who writes what is effectively a movie. It’s a big script for something. It’s not just the stuff that you see on YouTube, which is super cool. We put lots of great videos out or it’s screen capture. But it’s actually me presenting, and it’s talking in depth about creativity and music production.

If that’s stuff that’s really important to you, it’s your passion, it’s something that you want to succeed at, then 8th of October, definitely stick that into your diary. Unquestionably, the last one and this one is proving to be exactly the same, they are the most creatively challenging projects I have ever been involved in. For sure. I create loads of stuff. It makes up the bulk of what I do. I’m the visionary at FMM, so I plot the course of where we’re going. It’s my vision, my creative vision of where we go. And there’s obviously the podcasts that you’re listening to right now, everything from that and music for tutorials and masterclasses that I teach inside of FMM and the creation of courses and content and you name it. This thing out of everything that I create is the big daddy.

That got me to thinking about how I’m showing up to it and what lessons I’ve got to share. There were two big things that I’m noticing about this characteristics that I’m bringing to the table that is helping me a great deal. The first one is discipline. And the second one, which isn’t a characteristic, but is really high for me at the moment is motivation. They’re two very, very different things, and I think there are things that people get a little bit back to front. It’s a big mistake I see a lot of people making. So I thought it’d be really powerful to talk about that.

First of all, I’m not going to get massively into discipline because episode number 32 was called No Discipline, No Success, and I go into it in some depth. So if you haven’t seen it yet, I strongly recommend… or seen it, heard it, I should say, I strongly recommend that you check that out.

Discipline is one of the most important characteristics that anyone can build. If you’ve listened to the show for a long time, you’ll know that that’s exactly the deal you get to create yourself. You get to design and build your life how you want it to be, and you get to build your own characteristics. Things don’t happen by accident. It’s not by magic. It’s all in your control. The creation and the building of discipline is vital because can you think of any successful person in any walk of life that isn’t highly disciplined? How are you supposed to show up and get stuff done on a regular basis and do new things and challenging things if you’re not a disciplined person? So No Discipline, No Success, episode number 32, scribble it down there if you haven’t given that one a listen, one of the most powerful podcast episodes, for sure.

So here’s how I’m going to split this up, here’s a little definition for you. Discipline is what gets you started, motivation is what keeps you going. So great note for you to take down. Discipline is what gets you started, motivation is what keeps you going. This is where I see a lot of people making mistakes, and maybe you’ve fallen into this trap as well. Certainly I have in the past, and I still do sometimes catch myself with it, and that’s waiting for motivation, waiting for the motivation to get started. Say, “Oh, I’m not feeling it today. I’ll get started tomorrow.” We put this thing in our heads that tomorrow magically I’ll be motivated to do this. The first day of the week, Monday, motivation Monday, right? “Monday, I’ll be motivated to do this.” Or, “The first of the month or the 1st of January, I’ll be motivated to do it.

“But we all experience the same thing, I’m sure, and that’s if you wait for motivation, you’re going to be waiting a very long time. Because we don’t get to say,”Tomorrow, I’ll be motivated.” It doesn’t work like that. But, we do get to create our own motivation, and here’s how this goes down. So rather than waiting for it, you can build it and create it. Discipline creates action. If you’re disciplined, then you can act. You will choose to act, let’s put it that way. A disciplined person will choose the action that’s in alignment with their vision. Action creates motivation, and motivation makes discipline easier. It makes the choice.

But is being a discipline person easier? It creates a cycle, what we commonly refer to as momentum. We talk about building momentum. It’s difficult to get started, but once we’ve got that rock, that boulder moving, it goes easier and easier and easier. So if you take action, if you make the choice, if you’re disciplined and you take action and you get into the studio, if that’s something that you’re not doing at the moment or any project that you might have in your life, but you’re really passionate about your music, you’re not doing it at the moment, if you take action, if you’re disciplined, and you get in the studio, and you continue to make that disciplined choice, then you’re naturally going to build motivation. You are the architect of your own motivation. And then, of course, you’re going to make more music. You’re going to make better music. You’re going to get to share that music and get it out into the world, get to connect with people, that positive vibe, the buzz of impacting and influencing other people. All of that, our vision in getting towards it, comes from lighting the touch paper, keeping that lit, and then it just goes a blaze. That’s a really powerful way of thinking about it. Once it catches fire, it’s then really difficult to put it out, right? Once we’re motivated, we tend to stay motivated.

But the mistake a lot of people are making is doing this the other way round. It’s, “I need to feel motivated to get started, to scrape myself up off of the sofa, to abandon the latest Netflix series, whatever it might be, or that YouTube videos or all of those things. I need the motivation. And if I don’t have it right now, then I’ll project into the future some magical time when it will happen.” As I said, like Monday, for some reason, Monday would be a good day to start. Some people are a Saturday, but mine is Monday. The first of some things seems like a day that’s good to start, as though that magically corresponds with the day that we’ll actually feel like it. As though on the first of every single month you’re brimming full of energy and motivation. Is that true? Of course not, right? Of course not.

The other thing that we tend to do, a trap, and maybe you can relate to this, is say something like, “I’ll get started on this, I’ll be motivated to do this when I’ve got all this stuff off my plate. When I’ve got rid of all these commitments, when I’ve got through this to-do list of stuff, I’ll be able to focus. Then I’ll be full of motivation to get started.” But again, if we think about it, when do you ever reach that perfect nirvana where you’ve got nothing to do, where your plate is absolutely clear? Sometimes. Sometimes it’s perhaps the answer. Occasionally we get that little break in the clouds, if you like, that little beam of sunshine that comes down that’s like, “Oh my word, I’ve got a long weekend, and I’ve literally got nothing to do. Nobody’s managed to fill this for me. Nothing’s on my plate. No emergencies come up. It’s my time.”

Now, question for you on that. When those moments crop up, how often do you feel motivated in them to take action? Does your motivation align perfectly with those moments of time or often do you let that time fritter away instead of getting started on something that’s important to you? Motivation isn’t something that just magically appears and aligns perfectly with our calendar. Sometimes you get a blast of motivation, but does it fit perfectly with the calendar? Probably not. So it’s something that we want to be able to generate, to build, to create on demand. And the way that we’re going to do that is by starting with discipline.

Here’s the thing with this idea of putting it off, and maybe this is something you’ve experienced as well. Particularly when things are important to us, we can tend to put them off. I’ve spoken about this before, it’s often this fear of failure that’s driving that. “It’s important. This is really important to me, and if I start it, I might fail. So I’ll just keep nudging it off.” Which when you think about it is madness because all the time, you’re not starting it, you’re guaranteeing that you fail at it. But nevertheless, we put something off. And when we put something off, when we say, “When I’ve got a clear schedule, then I’ll do this thing, or a Monday I’ll do it, on the first of the month,” more things tend to crop up, right, more distractions, more people vying for our time, more commitments in our life, more emergencies, more stuff on the to-do list. That tomorrow never comes, that first of the month that it was all going to be magic doesn’t happen and it becomes the first of next month. It’s that saying like, “Someday becomes never.” Is it? I’ve probably butchered that, right? But tomorrow becomes never, whatever it is. It just never actually gets done.

A dream and a passion or a big project or something that I’ve literally just defined as being important to us is the thing that never actually gets done, until such a point as maybe it becomes impossible to do it. When it comes to something like music, it can become even more difficult to get started. Because a lot of people get all the gear, and they spend loads and loads of time in the studio, and they don’t have any output. Because they’re not really getting started, because buying gear isn’t writing music. We know that. Watching tutorials isn’t writing music. Practicing tutorials isn’t writing music. It may feel like tinkering with a drum loop is improving production skills but unless it’s in the context of a continued stream of finished pieces of music, actually is that classic situation is you forget more than you learn.

That in itself then starts to create pressure because people start to think, “Well, I’ve been at this for a long time, and I’ve got no results, and now the results should be even better.” I’m comparing myself to someone who’s been doing it for years. Although the reality is by not finishing music, I haven’t actually been doing it at all. But that doesn’t stop the voice in the head putting the pressure on. Friends start asking, classic example, “You’ve been at this for months, for years, whatever it might be. Let’s have a listen to one of your tunes.” And it’s not there. The pressure mounts up, and the importance of it becomes so big that it becomes even more of an issue to get started for fear of failure.

It’s this cause, this thing that kicks it off is the belief that the perfect conditions, the perfect mental state to get started exists at some point in the future as opposed to making it happen right now. I’m going to give you a few tips and some ideas on how to make it happen. This is really true, because the script that I’m writing, this video series, for me it’s huge. It’s big. It’s a big deal. It’s important. I want to get it right, but it was overwhelming to look at it at the start. I knew it would be overwhelming, and I knew it would be difficult, and I knew it would be confusing. But I also knew, unquestionably, that if I wasn’t disciplined enough to show up today, right now, not leave it till tomorrow, today, because tomorrow never comes, right? Tomorrow I’ll have the same discussion with myself. And the next day, the same discussion. I knew that the only way to make it easier and the only way to succeed would be to be disciplined. It’s something that I’m really working hard on cultivating, because there’s always someone more disciplined, right?

So, how do I get to that level of discipline and that level of discipline? But by putting one foot in front of the other, of the other, of the other, now I’m regularly showing up, working on this, making breakthroughs. Sometimes it’s tough. Sometimes it gets in a knot. Sometimes it’s easy. But getting started and actually doing the thing is way, way easier now than it was at the beginning, because I’m motivated to get cracking. Let me break this down and really explain this because I think that the deeper a level that we understand things, the more it can become part of our being, when we really, really get it. And I’ve spoken to this before, you can listen to something and you can understand something, but it doesn’t mean you completely get it. And there’s loads of things, we’ve all experienced this where we’ve understood it, but then at some point in the future, whether someone puts it in a different way or we visit again or via the process of doing the thing, there’s that light bulb moment. We’re like, “Ah, yes, now I’ve got it.” That is when it becomes a part of who we are. Okay?

Discipline and creating motivation is vital for success. Every top producer, every prolific artist creates their own motivation, and they are all disciplined people. Because when you think about it, it’s not just the start of the thing, there are often breaks. If you’re a top producer, you’re a DJ, and you’re touring all over the world, there might be big chunks of time where it’s difficult to sit down and write music. So you need the discipline to be able to turn that back on in the windows. And it’d be the same for you. Maybe you’re someone who does get a load of music finished, maybe you’re a member of FMM, and you’re smashing out the tunes. You go away for a couple of weeks on holiday. Your other half says, “Love you to bits, love your passion for music, but let’s just leave that laptop back where it is, and let’s just have a little bit of family time, a little bit of us time.”

And then that means that when you get back into the studio, the motivation may not be there. It might be, but it might not. You might get back and feel a little bit disconnected from it all, and that’s going to require the discipline to get going. It could be anything, right? It could be weddings. It could be the birth of a child. It could be an illness. There are so many different things that create breaks in stuff and require discipline to get us started and to rebuild the motivation.

So here’s the relationship between discipline and motivation, here’s how you can think of this to really let this seep into who you are. Discipline, and again, episode 32, I go into this in detail, so double, double, double make sure that you scribble that down to check it out. Even if you’ve seen it already, I strongly recommend going back to it. But here’s the overview, discipline is doing what you want and not what you feel like. So let’s think of an example here. You’re getting healthy, losing weight, whatever it is, getting ripped for the summer, getting buff, whatever’s going on. That’s what you want to do, you predetermine that. Then normally the things we want are predetermined, like our vision. We create a vision of the future. It’s predetermined. We create our goals. We create a schedule for the week, for tomorrow, whatever it might be. And what’s in there, as much as possible, are the things that we want to do, are the things that are going to move us forward.

Feeling is instinctive, it’s in the moment. So do what you want, not what you feel like. You can’t feel, you can’t touch something tomorrow. You can’t smell something tomorrow. You can’t smell something in the future. There’s an easier way of saying, you can’t hear something in the future. You can’t hear something in the past. You remember it, but you can’t hear it. Feeling is right now. What we want to do tends to be something planned in the future. And if we’re not planning it, well, you don’t design your life, somebody else will. So super, super important to get it mapped out what you want to do. So discipline, do what you want, not what you feel like. So you are losing weight, let’s say. You’re getting healthy. In fact, let’s go with one even better than this. This is a classic example. Tomorrow is Saturday, and you have got some time to get in the studio. You’ve had a busy couple of weeks. You’ve been getting some time in every day, but there’s a big chunk tomorrow, there’s a track you want to finish, some stuff you want to learn. You’re really totally focused and want to do it.

But tonight, it’s your best friend’s birthday. Everyone’s going out, and they’re hitting the beers or thewines, whatever your weapon of choice is when you go out. You know that if you have more than a couple of drinks, you’re going to wake up a little bit jaded, bit shaky in the morning, and when you go in the studio, you ain’t going to perform, whatever your cut off is. Maybe you’re a five-beer person, which would mean you’re considerably younger than me, that’s for sure. A couple of beers, and that’s it. Tomorrow’s is not going to go as well, that’s for sure… Any more than, I should say. But when you get out, everyone’s hitting the drinks. If you’re like most people, you’re going to feel like having drinks. Rather than pacing yourself, you’re going to feel like getting involved in it all. There’ll be multiple points where discipline is needed in amongst that to do what you want and not what you feel like. I’m going to pass on this round. I’m going to have a glass of water instead. I’m going to do whatever.

They’ll meet that magical tipping point in the evening, and if you’ve done this you’ll know, where you look at everybody else, and they’re starting to get wasted. All of a sudden you’re like, “Oh man, I feel amazing. Everyone else is getting trolleyed. I feel great. I’m going to go on to bed. I’m going to sleep like a champion and wake up feeling super fresh and energized in the morning.” But until you get there, there will be moments to exercise your characteristic of discipline. Discipline, do what you want and not what you feel like.

So where does motivation come into this? Motivation is the feel like side, right? So do what you want, not what you feel like. What if what you feel like and what you want are the same thing? That’s when we’re motivated to do it, and we want to do it, right? And that’s this nirvana, the thing that people are waiting for, but you get to build. When that happens, it becomes easier and easier and easier to do it because the more you do it, the more you become motivated to do it. And so this exercising of discipline, well, you don’t even need to really exercise that much willpower and that much strength behind your discipline, because it becomes super, super easy. Back to that idea of momentum, hard to push the boulder to start with but once it starts rolling, easier. Motivation is what makes your choice to do the thing you want easier. The way to get there is to exercise discipline, as I say, I’ll give you a few different ways of doing this in a second, but to do that consistently enough, that it becomes easier.

Here’s a great word for this. The members inside of FMM, inside of the community often describe a feeling of being addicted to writing music. So right now, if you’re someone who feels quite a lot of resistance, and that’s natural, I totally get that, you go in the studio and you want to get on, but you end up just procrastinating, avoiding getting into YouTube and all of those things, there’s a resistance to writing. The flip side of that, once you become disciplined and motivated, and you follow a system is you become addicted to it. If you’ve ever tried to break a habit, you will know how difficult that is. And when you think of the word addiction, that’s like the habit of all habits, right? I know I’m smashing two words together there. But people with an addiction, well, that’s hard to break. Imagine being addicted to doing the thing that’s going to get you your version of success in life, how powerful that is.

Now, I’m going to explain this in a slightly funky way for you now, will just literally say what I’ve just said but ram the point home. We’re going from my man Newton and his first law, but it’s going to be applied to productivity. An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted on by an external force. So objects in motion tend to stay in motion. If you’re writing lots and lots of music, you’ll tend to continue writing lots and lots of music. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. If you haven’t been doing this regularly, if you haven’t built up the momentum and the motivation, then it’s going to stay there unless you exercise the discipline, which is your choice, let’s be really clear on this, and you take action. Another way of putting it, busy people stay busy. People that procrastinate keep procrastinating. I’ll say that again. Busy people stay busy. Well, let’s even change that up, productive people stay productive, procrastinators keep procrastinating.

Here’s a few steps that you can take. Maybe it’s your music. Maybe it’s another project in your life. As I always mention, everything is holistic, right? Everything you do links to everything else. If you put off a project over here, you’re likely to put your music off. If you put your music off, you’re likely to drop the ball somewhere else. Every single thing that we do affects every single thing that we do. So here’s how you can get things going. First of all, to help with the discipline if you’re finding it hard, start with the small stuff first. Here is a cracking little technique, just say to yourself, and this is like a short circuit for you, “I’m just going to do five minutes. I’m just going to go in the studio, turn the DAW on and just start making a drum loop. Five minutes, that’s it. At the end of it, I’m going to give myself a free choice, free will. I will choose, and I’m giving myself permission to choose to get back on the sofa, watching Netflix, or to choose to go down the pub or to choose to carry on. It’d be free will, I’m just going to do five minutes.” Way easier to be disciplined on something like that, right? Because that resistance to it is much lower, it’s just five minutes, just getting started.

Another great technique for you is to count down from five. Another way, this one completely shortcircuits everything for you. If you’re sitting on the sofa, hard day at work, really wanting to get in the studio. You’re just crashed on the sofa, a big comfortable sofa, you’re sinking into it, you’re like, “Ah, man, I can’t be bothered to get up right now.” But you know you really want to do it. And that will be nagging you, right? That will be like, “I really want to get up and do this.” Count down from five to zero. So countdown from five, countdown backwards. And as you start counting, do it in your head, you don’t have to be a lunatic if your family’s there. As you start counting, immediately start moving to get up from the sofa and finish the count to zero. I guarantee you’ll be out of the sofa walking towards your studio, and you won’t stop. Mad, mad way of short circuiting your mind, but it absolutely works. Make the intention to get up, start counting down, just move anything towards getting up, even just your arm. You find the rest of your body follows, and you’re up and going. That’s how you get in the studio and you get started.

The second thing is to make sure that you are following a proven system, some kind of workflow, something that definitely works so you’ve got clarity around what you are doing. Because if you’ve ever tried to do something, and you’re not sure what you’re doing or why you’re doing it, you quickly lose interest, right? If you have to make this choice to be disciplined every single day, and then you want to be motivated, you’re going to want to be interested, and you’re going to want to know what you’re doing. You want to be really zoned in on it. Clarity is absolutely huge. So if you are not following a system, if you don’t have one in your existence for music, then that is a big step in the right direction.

The third one is building a habit. Now, there are really specific ways to do this, it’s not just turning up.

There are a lot of different caveats that will reinforce a habit, and that will make sure that it really gets ingrained and it’s something that your subconscious wants to do. What you’re ultimately doing here is automating your discipline. The choice gets made for you. You go into the studio and you make music on autopilot. If you’re in there, you’re making it on autopilot, you’re following a system, which means you’re getting results, you know what you’re doing, you see progress so it becomes really enjoyable, motivation on steroids. Back to that word addiction. Back to that word addiction. Habits, amazing quote for you, “Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” Brian Tracy. Can I say that one again as well because I think it’s so impactful? “Successful people are simply those with successful habits.” If you don’t know how to do this, it’s definitely something to get on with. Again, it’s a huge focus that we have right at the beginning for people joining FMM, new members. We help them to build the habit. Because once you put this on autopilot, and you follow a system that gets you results, the motivation is sky high.

You get to engineer your own motivation. That is the beauty of it. So if right now you are someone who has been wanting to get going with your music for a while, and it’s not working out, or maybe you were going with your music and you had a break and didn’t manage to get back on the horse, so to speak, I’m hoping that this message is incredibly powerful for you. Because it isn’t a case of waiting, it’s not a case of hoping for the best. It’s a case of it being in your control. It’s your choice. It’s up to you. Discipline is what gets you started, motivation is what keeps you going. Let’s put it like this, action is your choice. Action is always within your reach. And action is what causes motivation. If you think of it like that, you become your own source of motivation. You get to build it, you get to create it.

It’s your choice in life. Super, super powerful to understand it because it’s the people who implement, the people who take action, it’s those people that reach their vision of success, who are happy, accomplished, get the validation of having their music released on the labels they always dreamed of, seeing their favorite artists play their music. Hell, if you want to be a DJ actually playing your own tracks to crowds, that stuff happens at the micro level right now of saying, “Yes, I’m in control of this. I’m going to make it happen.”

I hope you enjoyed the show. Remember, 8th of October, stick that in your diary. If you haven’t signed up to the Finish More Music waitlist, it’s finishmoremusic.com/waitlist. Super easy to remember. We will email you the moment that the free training is out. Follow me on Instagram as well if you want to see the behind the scenes. We’re going to be filming it soon, so you get to see all the mad stuff we’re up to. It’s always really exciting. Get to be a fly on the wall, peek behind the curtain, so to speak. Do let me know what you think about this episode. I’d love to hear from you. Are you someone who at the moment is struggling to get started? I’d love to hear from you. What are you going to do? What steps are you going to take? Let me know. Let’s talk it out. Instagram, hit me up with a DM, @iamkeithmills. I promise you, I will get back to you.

It’s never ceasing to amaze me how many times I get back to someone on Instagram, like, “Oh, I didn’t think you’d get back to me.” I’m like, “No, you’ve just listened to the podcast where I promise you that I would.” “Well, yeah, but… ” I absolutely promise you, I get back to every single message. So I’d love to hear from you, where you’re at, what you’re trying to achieve at the moment, what you think may be in the way of it. Let’s jam out, I’d love to hear that. The show notes for this episode finishmoremusic.com/075. Do stay safe. Take care. I hope you enjoyed the show. I’ll catch you next time.

If you’re serious about getting your music heard and climbing the ladder as a music producer, one of the skills you absolutely must master is remixes. That’s why I put together a brand new completely free ebook for you called The Art of Remixing. It features the most prolific remixes from my Finish More Music community, sharing their strategies for creating successful remix projects, ready for you to share with the world. So jump over to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and download your free copy now. You’ll learn technical setups for creating your remix, how to add your own flair whilst respecting the original artist’s track, how to create quickly to a tight deadline, how to extract melodies and harmonies, and so much more.

As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners. In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top-level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? So make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes, you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The ebook is totally free, so dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix, and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.

FMM074- Failing To Succeed – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills. And this is episode number 74 of the Finish More Music Podcast. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about failure, mistakes, getting it wrong, all things that are absolutely essential if you want to create anything original, but interestingly, all things that many people try to avoid. So in this episode, we’re going to consider why is it that some people are able to embrace failure and keep moving forward whilst others stagnate, avoid going into the studio and ultimately give up on their dreams of being a music producer.

This is the Finish More Music Podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music, and to share it with the world.

My name’s Keith Mills, and every week, we’ll dive into the mindset and creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

So I’m pretty pleased with myself because I just came up with a title for this literally moments before hitting record. So the title as you will have seen is Failing to Succeed. And why I’m so pleased about this is because it’s got a double meaning that fits perfectly with what we’re going to talk about in this episode. So I’m pretty pleased with it, but obviously as always, you be the judge. So here’s the deal. Failing to succeed can mean two things, right? It’s entirely possible to not achieve success, i.e. to fail to succeed. Simultaneously, no great success was ever achieved without failure along the way. So it’s a vital ingredient. And again, that means that we have to fail to succeed. So failing to succeed has this double meaning.

So then the question that we’re going to really be covering in this episode is what is the difference between the two? What is the difference between not succeeding and in failing in order to succeed? Why do some people continually fail and not see the success that they want with their music whilst others do fail and turn it into success? So they do get the results they want. Now, I think it’s best summed up with this really, really cool quote from Charles Kettering. And the quote is, “One fails forwards towards success. One fails forwards towards success.” Now I’m going to add my own little twist on this and really give you the main point of the whole podcast in one blast here. And I’m going to change that quote up. With reflection, one fails forwards towards success. Reflection is everything.

Now here’s the deal. The risk of failure is ever present. Whenever we’re going to try new things, we’re going to imagine new ideas. And then we’re going to take these ideas and try to make something from them. We’re going to turn them into reality. Whenever we’re going to do those things, which basically is the definition of creativity, it’s all about the use of new ideas to create new things. Whenever we’re going to do that, failure is inevitable. And another brilliant quote for you by Sir Ken Robinson. And if you haven’t checked out his TED Talks on YouTube, then you absolutely are going to want to do that. You’re absolutely going to want to do that. They’re incredible TED Talks. The first one particular about creativity. The man’s just such a great speaker. It’s kind of funny. It’s entertaining. It’s inspiring. It’s really, really great. So here’s his quote. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never create anything original.”

So it must be really clear that we must fail if we’re going to succeed. If we’re going to succeed at anything that’s big and important to us, failure is an inherent ingredient in it. And yet, so many people are terrified of making mistakes, of failing to get it right, of trying something new, of trying to create something, of trying to write a piece of music. And they’re terrified that they’ll get it wrong, that something will go wrong. And one of these sort of the big words we hear around this is perfection. So you get this perfection paralysis, so scared of not getting it right, that you don’t move forward at all. Or you can’t move forward is probably a better way of putting it. Right? People who are really, really crippled with perfectionism, just can’t move forward. They are paralyzed. And procrastination comes up a lot. When we’re fearful that we might get it wrong, we tend to avoid doing it.

And maybe you felt this with your music and entirely possible, anything creative can bring this up in people, particularly when you first start. And then what happens when you do in your mind, get it wrong, or when you do fail? Well, for a lot of people, they then obsess over the failure. So there’s a problem. Something goes wrong. There’s a mistake, there’s a failure. And that then becomes the object of their obsession and they stay on it with what is called a problem focus. Now, this is something I went into really deep, episode 49, which was all about the pandemic and which was the way that you view things that happen.

And it’s equally applied to this when we get things wrong, when we fail, when we don’t get the result that we wanted or that we expected. You can either choose to stay in a problem focus, which means you will stagnate because you’re focused on what you did wrong, or what went wrong or what the mistake was. Or you can move it to an opportunity focus, which is when we reflect and we ask questions about it and we look for a way to learn and to grow and to progress. If you stagnate, if you focus on the failure, then typically what happens is people go into a downward spiral with this.

So they get caught in this cycle where they will procrastinate and try to avoid doing the thing because they’ve been obsessing on it and because they don’t want to make any more mistakes, because it always is such a big deal. So they procrastinate. They avoid, they naturally then end up making less music. So when they do start again, they’re more likely to hit the exact same wall that they hit before. And there’s only so many times someone’s going to go around this before eventually, they give up. It’s inevitable.

And as we all know, the only real time that you can fail when you’re shooting for a big goal is when you give up. Because until then, and this is another great quote, there isn’t failure, there’s feedback, right? There’s no such thing as failure, only feedback. I think that’s the quote. But what is feedback? It’s something to reflect on. And if we fail to reflect, then it’s like Groundhog Day. It’s the same mistakes again and again and again in the studio. And maybe you can relate to this, like keep buying new gear and not using it and just ending up with an overwhelming amount of gear or an overwhelming amount of sounds and presets, or keep sitting in the studio and watching loads of tutorials instead of getting on. Or following the same workflow that isn’t working, or keep bouncing to workflow, to workflow and these things aren’t working without really stopping to consider what’s going on.

Now, inside of Finish More Music, this is something that I call the cycle of failure. So here’s how it goes down. See if you can relate to this one. You watch a load of tutorials until you find one that you’re like, “Yeah, that lights me up. This new thing, this is the answer. This is the magic bullet. Or this new plugin, or this new piece of gear, this will be the one. Producer X makes amazing music and he’s got this. If I get this, this will be the one.” So you get really lit up by this thing and really inspired and motivated. And then you get it or you try the technique, whatever it is. And very, very quickly you find it’s not really working. It’s not the solution you’d hoped it would be. And you’re hitting the same old blocks that you’ve always hit. And of course you will be because really what’s going on is it’s your creative process that isn’t right. It’s not the lack of gear. It’s not the lack of new techniques and hints and tips. It’s the creative process.

But nevertheless, we get the buzz, we get that high. Then we try it and it doesn’t work out. So we get a low from it. And that means the stepping back, the avoidance, the procrastinating, staying out of the studio for a while, possibly feeling a bit down. And then we go back to searching for the next high, looking at the plugin reviews, looking at the new stuff that’s come out on Gearslutz, the tutorials, the new bits of kit, all of that stuff. And what happens eventually we get the buzz. So get the buzz, hit the same old block, get deflated, start avoiding it, start searching for the high. It’s kind of a little bit like being a junkie on this kind of wheel. It’s Groundhog Day. It just keeps coming around and around again.

And the quote you’ve probably heard me using loads for this. I don’t know who actually said this, but it’s such a great quote. “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.” And the key to doing something different is to learn. And the key to learning is to make mistakes and to reflect on them. So I’ve got a brilliant equation for you on this one. Now this one isn’t mine. This is a gentleman called Ray Dalio, who’s a billionaire in the US, was a hedge fund manager. And his very, very simple equation is pain plus reflection equals progress. So it’s the pain of failure, of problems, of mistakes, of things going wrong, add reflection, and you’re going to progress. No, it doesn’t say failure equals progress or failure equals success. Reflection is absolutely the key.

Now to give you an idea, this is a guy who, he failed. I mean, one time spectacularly, but he failed on multiple occasions. I mean, you would, you don’t become a billionaire and a top hedge fund manager without dropping the ball on multiple occasions. But what he started to do is analyze not just the mistakes he made and the mistakes his team made, which is basically the things they got wrong, how they predicted the market incorrectly. He also started analyzing all the things that other people got wrong, all of their failures and predictions. He started going back in history, looking at all of those and learning and building a model based on everything that he learned to help him better predict the market. So he was actually not just taking his own pain. He was taking other people’s pain and reflecting on that as well and bringing all of that together to make incredible progress, to become that amazingly successful. I mean, a billionaire. That’s incredible.

I’ll give you another example of this as well. So one from the sporting world. One of my favorite tennis players, a guy called Stanislas Wawrinka, Stan The Man. Amazing tennis player, he’s won three Grand Slam tournaments. So this guy’s the real deal. And I’ve watched him… Mrs. M. used to play tennis to incredibly high level, so she’s always watching the tennis. So I watch a lot of tennis and I kind of watched this guy coming up, his career. And it was a hard slog for him. And it was amazing. It was one of those where you really see someone putting so much energy and effort in to reach their goal and keep losing, keep losing, keep losing and getting better, progressing a bit more in the tournament, a bit more, a bit more. And now he’s got three Grand Slams to his name. Now he’s got a tattoo. And here’s what it says. “Always tried, always failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better.” Always tried, always failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better.

And that totally sums up everything that I’ve seen from this guy. He put in an extraordinary level of effort. Failure is essential, utterly essential if you want to progress, but you’re only going to progress if you learn from it. So you can either choose to keep feeling the same pain, the same failures again and again, or you can choose to reflect and to grow and to move towards success. They’re the options. But the way to get the failure of course, is to put in that extraordinary level of effort. So I guess there would be another option in there, which is to sit around doing nothing. So maybe it’s choose to keep feeling the same pain and the same failure from sitting around doing nothing, or from doing the same old thing again and again when you do try, or you can reflect and grow and move towards success, welcome your failure, learn from your failure.

So what I thought I’d do to round out this episode was give you three really, really powerful techniques for you, with your music and all areas of your life to be fair, that you can use for reflection. So number one, journaling. This is such a huge game changer when you start taking this on. It is one of the first things I teach every member that comes into the Finish More Music community, how to journal. We’ve got templates on it. We have regular discussions about this in the community, the types of questions to ask, the different things to put in there, how to reflect, how to make the most from it to grow. In fact, in FMM Plus, my high level mentoring group, a number of the guys in there send me their journal every single day without failure.

So these are the people that are most invested in their music, and they’re smashing it out the park. The number of releases these guys are getting and the way they’re growing is incredible. And several of them send me their journal. Every single day, my phone goes off and it’s their journal entry for that day. That’s how committed they are. It’s a huge, huge game changer. If you’re not doing it, you’ve probably picked this up by now from what I’m saying, I can’t recommend it enough.

Number two, white space. So white space is something that I previously discussed in episode number 47 called when you need to slow down to speed up. Now this, and it takes me back a little bit, I was out in California when I recorded that podcast. I’m not sure if it’s the one that I did in the street down the road where we were in an Airbnb and, again, I think it was a Sunday evening. And some people, some other Airbnb guests had moved into the flat below where we were staying or the apartment I think it’s called out in the US. And they had a baby and it was like loads of row and stuff, so I had to go down the road and sit in the car, in the dark. It was quite murky in trying to record a podcast, sitting in the car.

But anyway, that time was amazing. And I was getting up every single morning. We were right by the beach. So I would just have a couple of minutes walk and I could walk along the beach and get into what I call my white space. So as I say, episode 47, I talk you through the whole thing and how you can do this too. But the general idea is I would walk along. I’d be listening to music or the music from my members, checking out what everyone’s up to. And I would be gently leaning into things that I wanted to reflect on. Not really turning them over in my head, like tumultuous, aggressively trying to figure out solutions or anything like that. Literally just resting my mind against them.

And that for me is white space, it’s where you’ve just got that piece of time. Any moment in your day, where you can grab a block of time and just be with yourself without interruption, without distraction, and just gently rest your mind up against something that you want to reflect on. Incredible things tend to happen. That’s when I get pretty much all of my biggest and best, most creative ideas and solutions that we need.

Then the third one… So we’ve had journaling, white space, third way to reflect, and this is huge. And these aren’t do one or the other. For me, I recommend do all three, is discussion with your peers. So, so important when you’re writing music, to be able to share experiences, to talk about things that worked in your music and to talk about mistakes and failures. These words sound so heavy now, but when we’re talking about it like this, they’re just like little blips. “Well, this happened. I got a rejection from this label. Now I got this feedback on this piece of music that I wasn’t hoping for. I’ve been in the studio and I’m not making the progress I wanted. I’m failing to get to where I wanted to get to. And I’ve been reflecting on this and I cannot figure it out. I cannot figure it out, guys. What do you think?”

Of course, with all those different perspectives, all those different angles, all those different experiences, you’re going to get way, way deeper, more varied answers and solutions and things for you to learn on in order to move forward. So three things, journaling, white space, discussion with peers. If you don’t have a peer group, if you’re not part of a community, it’s something that I’d put at the top of your list. You go faster alone, you go further together, which is absolutely what you want.

So in summary, if you want success with your music and let’s face it, you wouldn’t be listening to this show if you didn’t. So if you want success for your music, then you got to go all in. You got to put an extraordinary level of effort in. It’s not something that you can tickle with. You want to become good at getting the ideas from your head into finished pieces of music, at channeling your creativity, at getting feedback, at growing, at developing, at getting your music out to labels, bigger and bigger and more established labels. Maybe seeing your favorite DJs, playing your tracks, maybe playing them yourself. Whatever your version of success might be, in order to get it, you’re going to have to go all in.

And providing you reflect, providing you reflect, then I can guarantee that this one thing is going to be true for every goal that you set, every project you set out to achieve. You will either get the outcome you want, or you will get the lesson you need, providing you reflect. You either get the outcome you want or the lesson you need. And when you really think about that, there’s no such thing as failure anymore. And that’s how powerful reflection is. It’s a win-win for you.

So I hope you enjoyed the show. Please do hit me up on Instagram letting me know your thoughts on this episode. Are there things that you keep doing where you’re going around in circles and you need to give your head a bit of a wobble and sit down and reflect on them? I’d absolutely love to hear from you. And also, let me know as well if you’ve got different ways of reflecting? What do you do? How do you figure things out when you hit walls? When you hit these sort of perceived failures, how do you overcome them? So DM me @iamkeithmills on Instagram. I promise you I’ll read it. And I promise you I’ll get back to you as well. Thank you, if you have been hitting me up with DMs. I really do appreciate it. So show notes, www.finishmoremusic.com/074. I hope you enjoyed the show. Do stay safe and happy music-making. Until next time, take care.

If you’re serious about getting your music heard and climbing the ladder as a music producer, one of the skills you absolutely must master is remixing. That’s why I’ve put together a brand new, completely free ebook for you called The Art of Remixing. It features the most prolific remixes from my Finish More Music community, sharing their strategies for creating successful remix projects, ready for you to share with the world. So jump over to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and download your free copy now. You’ll learn technical setups for creating your remix, how to add your own flair whilst respecting the original artist’s track, how to create quickly to a tight deadline, how to extract melodies and harmonies, and so much more.

As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners. In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? So make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes, you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The ebook is totally free, so dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.

FMM073- Infinite Creativity – Transcript

Hi, I’m Keith Mills, and this is Episode Number 73 of the Finish More Music podcast. And today we’re going to be talking about the concept of finite and infinite games, and importantly how this concept will empower you to create much more freely in the studio and with a whole lot more fun. Now, I see so many producers putting themselves under unbearable levels of what is to be honest, relentless pressure in the studio and it crushes their creativity and really drags them down.

Now, unsurprisingly, this leads to avoidance and less time pursuing the one thing that really lights them up in their life, writing music. In this episode I’m going to share a perspective that cuts through this pressure with ease. It makes writing music much lighter and a more energizing experience and it will ultimately help you to get a lot more done and have a lot more fun doing it. Let’s get stuck in.

This is the Finish More Music podcast, a show for underground dance music producers who want to finish more and better music and to share it with the world. My name is Keith Mills, every week we’ll dive into the mindset creative strategies that will help you to move further and faster along your music production journey.

Hello, and thank you for joining me for another episode of the Finish More Music podcast. So we’ve got a slightly interesting and a little bit left field of a topic to explore today. And it’s the concept of finite and infinite games. This is something that I came across a while back, but it was a video that I watched recently that got me thinking about this and creativity in general and the creative process that we follow in any art field, it doesn’t just have to be music. And then to the broader, more holistic, all our life kind of vibe. Now you will know that a lot of the things that I talk about on this show are things that affect general life and not just mere creativity and not just music production.

And that’s because everything that we do affects everything else, right? If you think about it, your health affects, your relationship affects, your art affects, your work, they’re all interlinked. If you don’t take care of your health, if something goes wrong and you get some illness, God forbid, and that takes you out the game, everything else goes as well. You’re not working, you’re not creating, you’re not able to foster your relationship, take care of your family, all of those things. And we can point to any things in our life and pretty much say if we drop that plate it has usually a large knock-on effect to the other areas, the other plates in our life.

This particular concept, finite and infinite games, you can apply this to life in general. I’m going to tie into creativity. Let’s get stuck in first of all and understand what I’m even talking about here, what the concept is. Well, there are two types of game. There is a finite game, which is a small game a short period of time. Has a start and an end very clearly, has a specified outcome and there are winners and there are losers.

You could think of this as, for example, a single game of football or any sport you want if football is not your thing. This is a single match, is played over 90 minutes plus some bit of extra time. And at the end of it there is very definitely a winner or loser or potentially a draw but if we were talking about a cup final there’s going to be a winner no matter what, and there’s going to be a loser no matter what. That is a finite game.

Now, in contrast an infinite game is a game that has no end, no specified outcome, and the goal of the game is constant improvement. The goal is to be the best player that you can be. We could think of this as the game of football, not a game of football but the game of football. Because if you think about it, no one has ever said, “Football is ending in,” whatever, “2026. Football is ending in 2026 and whichever club has over their history got the most medals and the most cups and the most trophies you win the football and that’s it. We’re never playing football again.”

That is the difference. The infinite game is about the journey and about becoming the best player that you can be, and the finite game is the small, definite winner, definite loser kind of vibe. Why is this important? I’ll use football, we’ll keep going down this road before I tie it really strongly into creativity. Let’s imagine the team loses the cup final, okay? What do you imagine the coach or the manager is going to be saying in the dressing room afterwards? Because it’s their job to pick the team up. They might have another game in a week, as little as a couple of days sometimes.

If they’re looking at this through the finite game lens where, “This is a catastrophe, we are losers. We have lost, it’s all over,” it’s going to be pretty hard to pick themselves up and it might feel like that in the moment. But it’s his or her job to come into that dressing room and put this into perspective. To put this into this perspective of, “We didn’t lose at the game of football, we just lost this particular cup.”

They’re going to be saying things like, “Look, we’re going to go again.” This hurts, this stings right now and that’s normal. That’s good, it’s part of the journey of life feeling all the highs and feeling all the lows, we want the full range of emotions. We often now don’t want to be anxious don’t want this… Actually, we do. We want to feel everything, right? You are alive, you want to feel every possible emotion and feeling that is available to you. So it’s a part of the journey.

“We’re going to go again, we’re going to analyze this match. Some of the stuff that happened in this match were spectacular. We did brilliant. We hit some of the little goals and the things that we set out past completion. And Bob’s dribbling was amazing.” I could probably think of a better name for a footballer than Bob. But you know what I mean? “Mane’s dribbling was incredible. And yeah, we made a few mistakes. There were a few errors, some stuff went wrong. They were better than us in certain areas, we’re going to analyze that, we’re going to get better. We’re going to hit it on the training ground and when that next game comes around, we are going to be stronger, faster, fitter. We’re going all in.” Think about that as a message, right? Really, really powerful.

Now, likewise before the game, if this game was also treated as part of the infinite game, the journey, the be the best we can be, the message and we often hear this from coaches in again any field, boxing, whatever you name it. There’s this idea of go out there and have fun, express yourselves, give it your best shot, give it everything you’ve got. Not “If you fail at this you’re all losers, you’re all dreadful you’ve got to win this thing.” Because that just keeps the pressure on and it crushes people and it stops them from being able to perform at their best.

Now, we can totally relate this to art and creativity. I love this quote from Sarah Lewis, “Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realise there isn’t one.” There isn’t an end, right? You can’t win at the game of art. You can’t win at the game of music. You can’t put your hand up and say, “That’s it, everybody stop I’ve won. I’ve won music, no more music.” It doesn’t work like that.

And a creative, someone who thrives on creating things and bringing new and original ideas into the world knows there’s always more to learn. There’s always more to discover. They know that they’re going to score some goals. They’re going to miss some shots, they’re going to fall over their own feet, they’re going to score own goals. But the whistle never actually blows, there’s never an end to being a creative. There’s never an end to music. They play the game because they love it. They play to keep improving, to keep discovering, to keep learning new things to become the best player that they can be and to express as many ideas as they possibly can.

Here’s the main point of this before we dive on. And I think this is the takeaway to write down. This is the number one thing to hold on to. Imagine how light and how energizing it is to always show up and treat your creative process as a game, and as a game you can never lose. Think about that, a game, play, fun. Something to try out, something to toil at but nevertheless a game and a game that it’s not possible to lose.

Now, compare and contrast that. Think how different it feels to have the pressure of having to win everything in every moment. Like everything is a finite game and that’s all your tunnel visioned on. We can go back to our footballer and say, “They’d love to win every game.” Of course they would, it would be amazing, but it’s completely unrealistic and totally unhelpful to feel that they absolutely must and every footballer going on the pitch can’t possibly put a foot wrong or he’s a loser.

Losing is going to sting, is going to hurt. Nobody wants to lose for sure, everyone wants to win, absolutely. But if you view this specific loss, this specific miss, this specific mistake, whatever it might be on the football pitch, there’s just one moment, just one fleeting moment in an infinite game, in a journey and you put it into that perspective then it simply becomes an opportunity to grow and to come again stronger, it becomes a part of the journey. And this is one of the most common traits of professionals. They bounce back immediately. But not only that they’re free to express themselves right on the football pitch, to play with freedom, to stay motivated, to be driven for the next match.

Very, very important and it’s exactly the same with artists. If you treat every single track like it’s the be-all and end-all of the world, and it absolutely must be perfect, “I have to win this,” then think about the pressure, the oppression and how it stifles and crushes creativity. And that just makes it a miserable experience, that’s not fun, that’s not a game. That’s not a game you want to play put it that way, and it’s one you’re likely to avoid. If it’s all about failure, if it’s all about, “Ugh, if it’s not perfect I lose. If this doesn’t meet my expectations I lose.”

Whereas when it’s part of the entire journey and it becomes well, “That track was important to me and I hoped it was kind of turn out better than that but it didn’t and it took a bit longer than I’d have liked as well. I faffed about a bit and I got stuck over here and there was a bit of a bottleneck and I fell into that same trap again. This is not the end of the world, it’s part of my journey as a creative. And I’m going to grow from it, and I’m going to learn from it, I’m going to come back stronger to the next track.”

Same deal we see a lot with people comparing their progress to other people. It’s common that people look sideways at people who’ve started something around a similar time to them and compare their progress to the other person’s progress. But there’s two ways of doing that, right? Let’s say you start a course, maybe you’re a member of Finish More Music. You come in with a group of other individuals and at the end of the year, you look at some of them and you think, “Wow, they’re far ahead of me. I’m way behind them therefore I’ve lost. Therefore I’ve failed, therefore I’m not good enough.” Finite game mentality. How demotivating is that?

Versus, “Wow, they’re far ahead of me, that’s amazing. But look, there’s another year and another year. I’m going to give it my best shot this year, let’s see if I can catch up. That’ll be fun. What is it they’re doing? What have they learned I don’t know? If I reach out to them,” and I mean, this is one of the great things about Finish More Music is that people do reach out and the people further ahead go, “Yeah, look I’m doing this. This is what changed it all for me.”

But rather than holding this like, “Oh, I’ve lost,” be like, “Wow, how do I get to that level? How do I even overtake that? How exciting? I’m going to go into the game across this next year, this part of my journey and see what I can do, see where I can improve and we’ll see where we are at the end of it. And even then it will just be another amazing year in a part of this exciting journey that I’m on.”

Another big one for you. Any single walk of life is setting goals, so important. I talk about this loads on the podcast for you. I set goals over a 90-day period, so three months, right? I do the same with every single member of my team. In fact, our entire goal as a team is always divided into 90-day goals for across the entire year. I do this with everyone that I coach and mentor as well. We work to 90-day goals. And I emphasize so much that it’s a part of the journey and that we set the goal, but really the win more than hitting the goal, in fact way more than hitting the goal, the win is in the learning, the growth, the development, and being a very different person at the end of the 90 days to the person you were at the start.

Because if that person is stronger and better and more equipped, it doesn’t matter if we miss the goal. The goal was an arbitrary number we plucked out of thin air anyway, right? Sure it might have some intelligence, the educated guesswork behind it but nevertheless the goal is just the direction. So give an extraordinary level of effort to it. And here’s the deal. If we get halfway towards that goal and the person is like, “Oh man, I don’t think I’m going to hit it.”

Here’s where the finite infinite games thing comes in. If that’s a finite game and not hitting it means you’ve lost, what are you going to do? Give up, stop right there. Miss all of that amazing potential development that you’ve got for the other half of giving everything you’ve got towards that goal. We know the goals, the right direction, we’ve planned out. We’ve got to learn by doing. Do the thing, have the power. Missing the goal doesn’t mean that’s it, you’re finished, you’ve got to stop, you’re out of the race.

You can’t create another piece of music anymore. “Team, that’s it we’re going out of business, we didn’t hit that one goal. We’re going to stop helping everybody with their music.” This is madness, right? Instead it’s like, “Okay, probably not going to hit that goal. What can I do differently that still might give me the chance of it? What if in a parallel dimension there’s another version of me that does go on to get the goal, what the heck are they doing?”

And then you just keep trying. And even if you think you’re a week out and you’re definitely going to miss it don’t stop and throw the week away because this is a finite game it’s not, it’s part of a bigger journey. Double down. Let’s make the most of this next week, let’s kill it, let’s knock it out the park so when I set my next raft of goals, the next things I’m going to aim for in the next 90 days, I’m the best version of me that I can be showing up for those goals. It’s a really important concept and I love it because it’s around the notion of games, the notion of play.

Now, here’s a really cool story for you. This is one that a guy, Simon Sinek, I think you pronounce his name, he’s like a motivational speaker, focuses a lot on business. And he took to a story about infinite games and finite games to do with Apple and Microsoft. And basically he was at a Microsoft convention. He was speaking there and the Zune MP3 player had just come out that Microsoft had released. And he was given one as a gift by Microsoft and told, “This is a million times better than the iPod Touch.”

And sure enough he found out that it was, totally agreed with that. A little bit later a few months or so he’s talking at an Apple event and he gets in and shares a cab with an exec from Apple. And he said, “I’ve just been given the new Microsoft Zune and I’ve got to tell ya it’s a lot better than the iPod Touch.” The guy from Apple replies, “Yep, it probably is and that’s it. Yeah, maybe it is.” And that might seem like a strange reaction but Apple know that they’re in it for the long game.

Sure, the release of the Podcast on Zune may have been considered a finite game. Had a release date and who’s going to make the most sales and who’s going to produce the most effective product, but actually that’s just the release of a handheld MP3 player. And in perspective of the infinite game of what Apple are trying to achieve and their continual growth as a company, it’s just a moment in their journey. And just because that new product might be better than theirs right now, that doesn’t mean that Apple all of a sudden have to stop and they’re out of that game, they’re looking into the future. What lessons have they learned from that release? What did they learn from the marketing? What did they learn from the technology? How can they improve the next version of the iPod Touch or even they going to do something else, some other innovative, exciting product?

Microsoft on the flip side were looking at beating Apple. They were treating the whole thing as just a finite game where there is a winner and a loser. And so they were obsessing over, “Let’s make this product better than their one,” rather than, “What is the vision and the goal for the future for these products?” They were looking at it not as an infinite game of continual growth and improvement, but as this little boxed-in narrow-minded game. And by constantly reacting to Apple and constantly trying to beat them at whatever the new thing is, Microsoft across so many different areas are always trailing behind.

Interesting story. Now, I’m not getting into this PC, Mac debate here so don’t even tempt me. It’s got nothing to do with that, that’s someone else’s story not mine, but you can see how it works, right? And if you view your tracks, your label submissions, your goals as part of an infinite game, then you’re going to be able to create freely. You’ll be focused on your overall vision, you’ll give it your best. You’ll stay motivated no matter the result of that track or that label submission or that particular goal.

But if you lose sight of it being all about this wonderful journey, you lose sight of it being the infinite game, then you’re going to operate under far more extreme levels of pressure that will stifle and crush your creativity. And that’s when the risk of giving up or at least avoiding trying again if you perceive yourself to have lost at any stage. You’ll be slow. You’re effectively putting a whole bunch of unrealistic obstacles and expectations in your way. It’s a way clunkier, heavier, more labored approach at your creative journey and as I said at the top, life in general.

In summary, it’s a really simple but I think incredibly powerful mindset shift. Here’s the thing for you to try, okay? Have a go at approaching your music as a game, your next creative session as a game, your next label submission as a game, any goals you’ve set out as a game. But just to keep this simple, if you haven’t got this approach to your music, just for this week approach your creative sessions and the piece of music that you’re making as a game and importantly, a game that you cannot possibly lose. See how that feels and interestingly see how much more you get done.

Give it a try, hit me out please on Instagram DM at @iamkeithmills. I’d love to hear how you get on with this, what your thoughts are in general. I read and reply to every single comment, I’d love to hear from you so please do get in touch. Show notes are finishmoremusic.com/073. And as always, I’d love to have a review from you. Ping me a review if you haven’t yet if you’re enjoying the show, or hit me up on a DM if there’s a particular topic you’d like me to talk about.

I’ve had some amazing suggestions. If you’ve done that thank you very much. Ping them to me, I consider absolutely everything. If there’s something that you’d like me to explore, to talk about, absolutely let me know, I’m really, really open to that. That’s all for me. Stay safe, I do hope you enjoyed this episode you took some value from it. Happy music making and I’ll catch you next time.

If you’re serious about getting your music heard and climbing the ladder as a music producer, one of the skills you absolutely must master is remixing. That’s why I put together a brand new completely free eBook for you called The Art of Remixing. It features the most prolific remixes from my Finish More Music community sharing their strategies for creating successful remix projects, ready for you to share with the world.

Jump over to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and download your free copy now. You’ll learn technical setups for creating your remix, how to add your own flair whilst respecting the original artist’s track, how to create quickly to a tight deadline, how to extract melodies and harmonies and so much more. As well as taking the opportunity to get more of your creative output into the world, remixing is an amazing tool for building connections with other artists and strengthening your relationship with label owners.

In short, remixing is essential. Try to think of a top-level producer who doesn’t have a bunch of great remixes to their name. You can’t, right? Make sure you master the art of remixing so that when your opportunity comes you’re ready to take it with both hands and accelerate your growth in the music industry. The eBook is totally free so dive over now to www.finishmoremusic.com/remix and grab your copy. See you in the next episode.