It is foolish to think you will miraculously produce great work from a small sample of your offerings.
Soon your work will be supported by a congo line of raving fans.
Right?
Wrong!
To produce the ‘Hits’ you have to produce many ‘Misses’.
To get noticed in your niche, you have to be prepared to produce work prodigiously. There are no shortcuts in mining the fields because you don’t know where the diamonds are.
To demonstrate, let’s look at some of the greatest performers.
Rembrandt is said to have created 600 paintings, 440 etchings and over 2,000 drawings.
Andre Agassi played in 339 tennis tournaments throughout his career. He lost his first 3 Grand Slam Finals and ended his career with 8 Grand Slam victories from 15 Finals.
Bob Dylan has to date recorded 39 studio albums and over 500 songs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016. While he had albums reach No.1, the Beatles kept his ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ from No.1 in 1965. In fact, he never had a No.1 hit song in his heyday.
What Rembrandt, Agassi and Dylan all have in common is that they were/are prodigious artists in their craft.
To create the Hits, they were prepared to endure the misses.
To be truly great takes talent, time, self-belief and a massive work ethic.
There is no such thing as an overnight success they say!
Rembrandt must have painted in his sleep to produce so much art. His best is the best. He is considered amongst the greatest painters of all time in company with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Van Gogh and Picasso.
Andre Agassi is one of the most famous and popular tennis players in history. However, in his incredibly honest autobiography Open, he confesses that he hated tennis throughout his entire 16-year pro career. His father introduced an oppressive training regime when Andre was just 3. Initially a bad boy, Andre overcame crippling injuries and mental demons to become a fan favourite as the equal 9th greatest male winner of Grand Slams.
Bob Dylan (aka Robert Zimmerman) is regarded as one of the greatest musicians and storytellers of modern time. Having never had a No.1 song, last year at 79 years of age he finally broke through hitting No.1 on the Billboard Charts with Murder Most Foul. Murder Most Foul is a 17-minute song about the assassination of JFK and is the last track of his most recent album.
We may never reach the dizzying heights of a Rembrandt, Agassi or Dylan.
But if we produce work prodigiously, we can create our own Hits while accepting the inevitable misses.
If the greats can accept this reality, surely we can.
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