When you’ve committed yourself to researching a particular field, the most important thing to remember is that its not really about who did what. Being able to recall dates and people is helpful when trying find factual data to support your case or argument, but its not the same as being aware of and understanding the long-term principles that have either been transgressed or used competently.
Take music-marketing, something I’ve gotten interested in and knew next to nothing about about 6 months ago. I’ve subscribed to lots of blogs, and some of them, the blog posts themselves are literally “link dumps” with a brief, if any, extrapolation on the content of the links. And there are many links. Hypebot.com is a great example of this.
I read as much as I can of Hypebot.com – its like an hourly updated newspaper that appeals to the micro-universe of music and marketing. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t completely overwhelmed at times. A night or two ago, I was reading through his archive because I had missed about a week of his posts. Because of this, I had a shit load of posts to catch up on.
In scrolling through them all, clicking on the links and reading through them all, I felt really uneasy and insecure – no matter how much time I spend on this stuff, I’ll never be able to know and recall everything. I’ll never be able to keep up with all this information and still get all the work done I need to get done in my life. I stopped reading and sat back in my chair. Why was I working on this then? Why am I spending time doing or worrying about something that is impossible?
Because what I was doing and worrying about was ultimately impossible. And unnecessary. In order to do what I need to do successfully, its not required that I recite facts and what particular move company x did then or whenever. I was reading this blog and others under the false and stupidly held assumption that in order to be successful, it required knowing these things and also understanding all the larger concepts. So I wised up and came to this conclusion:
Success in this career is dependent on my ability to absorb as much raw information as possible, try to follow the logic and patterns behind decisions that companies, artists, labels etc., make, and then to gradually infer some conclusions and place them in the context of what ought to operate well in the particular economic environment that I’ll be working in.
And even then success is not assured. I still have to execute all these wonderful ideas. That takes balls. It also takes, I’m slowly learning, a mild insanity and occasionally irrational belief in the purpose behind undertaking the entire operation.
Conclusion: the point is not to know everything. Because you can’t. So stop trying. However, you can learn how to think and process information, and that is what you ought to do, because then you can actively apply it to what you really love to do. Leave the details for someone else, like a lawyer.
(Also, having music that doesn’t suck and that people actually want to listen to helps a lot too)
