Living with your inner critic

Everyone has a unique way of spending their time. It could be practising a new technique, digging for new music, or checking out new gears. Most of our time is determined by how we feel at a specific moment. Eliminating waste is the fundamental principle of any successful person.

Many great and successful DJs succeed because they work hard to develop a narrow but important set of skills. It’s often easy to be good at many things, but becoming great at a few key things is often more difficult in the pursuit of transforming into a headlining DJ. When focusing on a more glamorous vision, don’t get caught up working on activities outside or unrelated to your strengths. Time moves in one direction while money can fluctuate up or down.

Mediocrity is a silent killer. Not having a clear roadmap to becoming an expert in a particular set of skills doesn’t do ourselves or our dreams any good. That’s objective truth many of us fail and refuse to acknowledge about ourselves. Avoid distractions, protect your time. Find the areas where you want to become exceptional and dedicate your time towards those.

As a DJ you have many hats to wear, including networking, DJing, marketing, and perfecting your skills. All categories contribute heavily to your success, but you can’t be outstanding at all of them. Creating structures to improve your talents requires managing your time and focus. A simple way to manage your time is to create roles and schedules for different types of work – manager schedule and creator schedule.

The manager role typically organizes the studio time into short 30 to 45 minutes blocks. Spend each block dealing with a different task like promoting an event, marketing, and reviewing new gear. Always start with the hardest task first. The creator role might need to organize studio time into longer blocks of uninterrupted time.

Creator’s activities include music production, practising a new technique, custom controller maps and so on. Again, start first with the hardest thing that you’ve been putting off. Trying to find a balance between creative and non-creative time can be more art than science, but there is a fundamental concept that must be present to improve your talent and productivity  flow.

Flow is perhaps best defined as being completely involved in an activity for its own sake – being in your zone. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Living with your inner critic (doubt) is something you have to deal with and learn to manage. An effective way to overcome this is to take a 10 to 15 minutes break from the task at hand and come back when you’re ready. If you are unable to shake it off then reach out to friends who are more experienced. More times, I re finding new inspiration by listening to a new mix or creative works from other DJs. It’s like having a system reboot for optimal performance.

To be more efficient, schedule managerial activities after your creative sessions. Manager activities, as I mentioned earlier, include less intensively creative tasks like responding to emails, engaging chats, checking out new mixes from other DJs, etc.

On the production side, it’s organizing the mixer or doing small edits. These types of tasks are easier to accomplish after creativity sessions because they somehow validate what you have created. For example, after creating an 8-bar intro or an entire remix for a new song, it will be much easier to add to your music library, colour your cue points and have it ready for instant mixing.

Becoming great in any creative endeavour takes focus and self-awareness – and your time to become great is valuable and limited. Defining success and identifying the main areas in your DJing career that you need to focus on will help you stay on track. Knowing your shortcomings and reaching out for help will help you achieve the flow that you need to continue to be creative regularly.

My recommended party pace pusher for this week is Dremo featuring Naira Marley – Konjinaba.

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