The Journey of Knowing Yourself is a Marathon, not a Sprint
Back in 2016, I was enjoying my first taste of a soft rebirth. Here I was, leaving a job I hated for a new, more interesting one. F1 was finally going to be broadcast again. It was a good time.
The (then) new job was for a company that encouraged reading a lot. And so I did. I started reading everything I could. At first, it was mostly business and marketing books, but slowly and surely I also started reading books about human psychology and how we function. I guess a more broad term for these books is personal development.
I am not really a fan of that term, but that’s what they were.
Anyhow, I did this for a few months. I think I broke some records, at least personal ones, with regards to the number of books I had actually read.
And that was the first time I actually voiced my concern about forever working for someone else. I had glimpses of this 45 days into my first job, but this was the first time I actually voiced this. Internally, at the moment.
But as time flew by and the number of books I read grew, I slowly realized that whatever techniques I was trying to implement were not meant for my day-to-day job. They were meant for…something else.
I realized I liked writing about stuff. Mostly F1 and Dragon Ball, on an old blog that is now private and that I’ll probably delete someday after I extract everything from the articles I still have there.
The progression from that was to start writing tutorials about programming. And then combine them with music tutorials. Timeline-wise, this started happening towards the end of 2016. That’s when I built the first version of my website. That’s when I also started writing programming tutorials.
The idea of writing music-related books came to me one morning in 2014. I actually started and finished a book back then…which is still yet to be released, because, you know, I want to make it the best version it can be.
I only revisited music tutorials in 2017 or 2018 I think, somewhere during that time.
That’s when I realized I kinda want to only write music tutorials, so I moved everything to a WordPress website and started churning out music tutorial after music tutorial. Once again, I pivoted, for like the 3rd time now.
However, something still felt not right. I then did a mistake that everyone who wants to work on their own does. I started doing stuff I thought people wanted rather than stuff I’m good at that will have an audience (once I learn enough about marketing).
I started doing programming tutorials again and rebuilt my website, again, so that it supports me writing content on both those things. I did that for a while, but I still didn’t feel it…like at all.
This was back in 2019, what with the site rebuilding and stuff. 2019 was also the first time I decided to go jobless. I despised everything about programming jobs. Programming itself is fine, don’t get me wrong, but the jobs are…ick.
The end of 2019 though…saw the biggest breakthrough I had. I was hanging around the Syn Gates guitar school and out of some sheer unexplainable desire, I started fiddling with VSTs (digital instruments).
I think I sat at my computer, unmoved, for about 3 hours. I basically became the immovable entity. I wanted to understand those concepts so badly. There was nothing stopping me from wanting to learn that. I entered a flow state without even knowing. Everything made sense.
It was then that I decided to drop the programming bit completely from my “working on my own“ plans. It would remain only a job, not something to focus on in my own time.
It was then I knew I wanted to make music. I mean, I always wanted to do that, but I was kinda afraid. I still am, but to a lesser degree now, since I also released my music.
One pandemic later, here I am, finally understanding what I want to do. I want to make music. I want to teach people how to make music. I want to write stuff, both music and non-music related. These are the things I want to do. It took me 5 years to get to this point.
And this is the point. Knowing yourself, learning who you are…takes an incredible amount of time and dedication. I sometimes rage at myself for not doing this sooner. But much like wizards, epiphanies are never late, nor are they early…they arrive just when they are required to.
The idea is to keep at it. You may need to throw a lot of things at the wall until something sticks. And when something sticks…you’ll know it.
