Quick aside before you read: Happy New Year, dear reader. Thank you for spending your time here. I am grateful for you.
For a while now, I've had a small dream of becoming a DJ.
I want to use this dream, as a way to explore a trap that I think we all fall into at some point.
First, why do I want to be a DJ?
I have a few reasons, and one of them if I'm being really honest, is because I think being called a DJÂ would be cool.
I'm kind of enamoured by the label. I'm attracted to it.
And now we come to the trap.
The label trap.
The label trap is simply this: We fall in love with the feeling of having the label, while being blind to the work of earning the label.
The truest labels are assigned to you by others.
You're not really a coach until someone else calls you their coach.
You're not really an author until someone else reads your words.
You're not really a DJ until someone else experiences your mixes.
I think the label trap is borne out of two things.
Our access to successful people and our fear of failure.
It's easy to fall in love with the dream of being a DJ, because I've experienced great DJs live and through Spotify I can easily access so many excellent mixes.
It's scary to face the truth that my first few mixes might suck. So I turn a blind eye to the work.
You see some person doing something successfully and you think, "Oh I would love to be that person doing that thing. I think I would be so good at it."
The label trap blinds us to all the work in the dark it took to get to that point.
I think the only way to navigate yourself out of the label trap is to ask the following:
Would you still want to do the work, even if it didn't earn you the label?
If we can honestly answer that question, then I think we'll be closer to finding work worth doing.
