ELEKTROBEAR
Self Evaluation
When tasked with the challenge of writing four blog posts aimed at reflecting on my own experiences and learning, this was the one I dreadest the most. What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? How have I addressed them, and how will I continue to? There are many things to consider, and worse things, perhaps, to reveal? I have not always been an honest person in my life, but I do believe in the value of honesty so I have decided to begin by discussing my single greatest weakness.
I was born into this world completely and utterly devoid of any natural internal drive to do things. This manifests itself best in laziness. I am without any question of a doubt, a lazy person. Without an external drive to get things done I will often simply put them aside to wait for a better day which comes maybe once every month if I‘m lucky? The fabled day of motivation, when even the easiest of tasks are swept away in a storm before we sink back into the haze of the lazy.
So! How has the undeniably lazy person come to write these blog posts, and choose a career that focuses entirely on consistently delivering the goods. There is a keyword earlier that I hope you picked up on. „External drive“ is my key to success. You see, as a young up and coming hobbyist musician there would often be days or even weeks between sessions of creation for me. When I got to it I would enjoy it immensely, but the hurdle of starting even the smallest project was more often than not too great for one as unmotivated as I was at the time.
Whenever something was actually started and in motion I would usually work tirelessly to finish it, so that I could call it done and reap the rewards. If a song is good, it wants to be finished. It festers on your mind until you get it out and into the physical world where it can pray on others instead of you. Afterwards I would usually sink back into the haze, as already established, waiting for the slightest bump in the road to get my mind moving again. Now, this is fairly non-ideal for a creator and as you can imagine I spent some time moving sideways rather than forward?
Video game music, in a way, was the answer to my troubles. On my own I am unfocused and lazy, but when coupled into a team, with deadlines and demands, I have no choice but to keep up with everyone else. I rely on outside forces, like a school project, to get things done on time. At this point, I have set up my life in such a way that I simply must succeed at the things I am doing or Bad Things Will Happen.
If you have no motivation of your own, then make some. That is my solution to my own laziness.
So now that we have looked into and considered my single greatest weakness, what then, is my greatest strength? For the sake of literary brilliance I will now make a bold claim.
My greatest strength is laziness.
That‘s right. You see, music to me is the domain of the endless. You have a blank canvas with possibilities that stretch as far as the knobs in your synthesizer let you stretch it. If you attempt to look at a charting of music genres following the explosion of electronic music, it reads like complete gibberish because the possibilities keep on expanding outward as people all across the world discover new ways to create, new sounds to play with or even reapply old traditions in brand new ways.
Where does the lazy man fit into a world like this? He works focused, and he works fast. He doesn‘t dwell on a project, doesn‘t spend too much time questioning his decisions and just barges forward taking the „good enoughs“ instead of the „perfects“ because chasing perfection takes too much time away from being a lazy person. Don‘t get me wrong though, chasing perfection is something worth doing. I just believe that it should be done on a longer term scale than wasting copious amounts of time on one small project. Over time the lessons learned from finishing multiple projects well enough will add up to you being much closer to the actual vaunted perfection than the one who spent his life on a single song. And not only that, but your large body of experience of rapidly finishing projects will have lent itself to achieving something closer to perfection much more quickly.
And besides, if something is Good Enough today, you can spend tomorrow making it Even Better.