motivating yourself/cynicism etc

I think I may have to make a similar resolution to start being more tenacious with my ideas and ambitions. I get a good idea or I get it into my head one day that I'd like to do something but as soon as I've had this idea I start thinking about the obstacles and difficulties (e.g. "not enough money/resources/money", "don't know enough about what I want to do in order to implement it").

So yeh, rather than sitting down and working out and researching what I need to do and how to do it I just shove the idea to the back of my mind along with the other slowly fading "good ideas" I seem to get.

But the other day I had a wicked idea - totally foolproof and original and it's something I know I can and will be able to do given a little time. I just have to remember not to dwindle on these things and stop automatically going on ILX every time I hit a wall.

Don't know if this has anything to do with what you were talking about Ro.

That's what I mean by principles, personal investment, feeling there are some personal rules of your own you wouldn't want to break. Isn't it true that the most successful people just don't have these rules? They seem to be able to do what they want. I actually didn't want to make this specifically a writing thread cos maybe it's more generally applicable an issue for others.

Perhaps I'd be more successful working in an environment where I could point myself towards success and not give a shit about anything else, there are so many of these. I might even enjoy it.

Success for me would be getting regular paid writing work, but I'm not going to pretend to like stuff to do that, and that seems to be a persistent nagging requirement. Even beyond being given the usual shitty interviews which are just ads for some guy I don't even like, there's the simple fact that if I liked different music to the music I do like I would be ten times more successful than I am now.

I actually think, and this might sound arrogant, that I could create an alias and write about rock records which I don't even like and I'd come to be seen as a better rock writer than plenty of people who do like the records.

But this thread isn't so much "how should I achieve my goals", I think I recognise that negativity is my biggest problem and am wondering how people cope with that. How do you focus more on your own game and ignore others, even when at every juncture this seems difficult.

I mean, I pick up the things I write for and if something is crap beside what I've written it annoys me, if they subedit my stuff and change a sentence it drives me mental, and often ruins the enjoyment of getting the thing printed in the first place. perhaps it's particularly bad subediting!

anyway as I said, it's not specifically music writing I want to talk about, the problem is my motivation and attitude. If I start to scapegoat the business or the other people I'll just spend another 2 years doing relatively nothing.

This is probably something of a horizon you need to cross! I'm not really talking about being pragmatic even, just willing to accept that yours is not the one true faith.

It's not so much a one true faith thing, I can disagree with something and think it's good, but sometimes it isn't even a matter of opinion, it just seems like bad writing, and you wonder does anyone who reads magazines even notice the difference.

xpost

iia. work for a year at one "thing" and look back: you'll think jeez i got nowhere = i suck
iib. work for ten years at one "thing" and look back: you'll think WOW look at all that = i rule

iiia. victory in the head = ethos
iiib. victory in the room = tactics
iiic. victory in the world = strategy

iva. don't treat yr topics or yr tactics or even yr strategy w.reverence, in fact you get more fun being flexible and/or contrarian-playful on all three, so as to be able to sidestep boredom, disgust, frustration etc to live as you prefer
ivb. ethos seems like the smallest but learning to trust it (ie when you can trust yr own) is the BIG THING
ivc. structure of a life = like structure of an article; all the darts you send up have to come down
ivd. i got the idea for ivc from a roadrunner cartoon; iia&b wz said to me once by a guy i went to college with; at the time he wz editor of a trade mag for management consultants (which is like astrology for CEOs)

x. the first time you do something you don't think you'll like, you may learn stuff you didn't know about yrself
y. the tenth time you do stuff you KNOW you don't like you are wasting time
z. the 20th time ditto ditto ditto you are stuck in a groove (and not in a good way)

my personal line on bad editing = entropy rules the universe anyway, by the law of randomness the mutation will sometimes be an improvement you can't see (haha also i became a professional proof editor and sub editor)

my personal line on bad bedfellows: if the review next to mine is v.rub then MINE LOOKS BETTER THAN IT MAY ACTUALLY BE!!

arriving at ILM allowed me to talk in real time to ppl who had read and liked stuff i had written in like 1983!! ie more than twenty years before!! 100,000 ppl were buying NME weekly back then (so 300,000 readin it, by the fake law of circulation vs readership all mags like to invoke), but what wz so exciting was that ONE NON-ROCKWRITER PERSON (in fact it was duane) had read it WELL and remembered it. OK that dart spent a LONG time in the air but the pay-off of its landin back on my head wz - well, it made up for all the times i wrote something and no one seemed to have even noticed.

OK another time someone came up to me at something and said "are you mark s? that piece you wrote on sonic youth CHANGED MY LIFE!!" - urk i still wake up trembling over this: what did i write, and how much better wd his life have been had he never read it :(

aged 23-30 i wz often intensely angry and depressed abt how rubbish the media i had idolised as a teen wz to work for: i wz lucky, bcz there were others who felt the same and noticed me and used me when they wanted to do something abt this (=r.cook at the wire, basically)

i just today (it's true!) ran into one of the nme high-flyers of those bygone days: actually a good stylist, but a guy w.no discernible ethics at all - he has reasonably good access to grown-up (non-rock) papers and mags, to write these days, but despite his semi-meteoric flight at the time, he's got no ideas these days what he wants to do (well he's just abt to publish a book - "it's about me!" - but no idea what to do after that)

i'm sure he earns a LOT more than i do, but i'd *way* rather have had my life than his

(this is all a bit of a victorian self-improvement lecture - apologies for that: my mum's advice to me, when i went off to college, wz "do whatever you like, so long as yr happy"; this kinda expands into ivb for me: BOREDOM IS YOUR BEST FRIEND, eg the one that is pointin out yr major halitosis when all other so-called friends are sayin nothin except behind yr back)