About four months ago I was excited to announce my Bandcamp subscription service.
Creative freedom and autonomy, here we come! Why hadn’t I done this earlier. I hate being tied to The Man and streaming algorithms. I just want to make folk music about my feelings!
But on the day of the announcement, nothing happened.
Well, not totally.
My wife subscribed.
We share a bank account, so technically we were already losing money by paying the transaction fees to take money out of our account just to put it back in.
A day went by.
Then my mom and dad subscribed.
I think I’ve made a mistake. This is embarrassing
Then my sister subscribed, which, yes, I’ll admit was a little encouraging. But then my other two sisters politely declined.
Now I know I’ve made a mistake.
Before I could shut the whole thing down out of complete humiliation, something happened. No, my brother didn’t subscribe; I don’t have a brother. But that was a good guess.
Dale in Colorado subscribed.
A day later, Alex in Minnesota.
A day after that Theo, then Alice.
The whole thing snowballed into an avalanche and we’re now up to one million subscribers!—is a sentence I would love to write here. But that wouldn’t be the truth.
The truth is, life is a grind. The things you want most are often met with resistance. Each step seems like a test of how bad you want something. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean fate isn’t on your side. It think it just means it’s a good time to check in. Does what you want align with your values and beliefs?
What do I want? Creative freedom and autonomy. Why? So I can write songs about things on my heart whether they’re commercially viable or not. I think that’s partly what I was put on earth to do.
And I guess the point of this blog post is not to tell you to subscribe to my Bandcamp service (although, yes, please do if you can, here’s the link), but to encourage you in your own situation. Because I bet there’s something you’ve been trying to accomplish. Maybe you want to start a book club or sign up for a pottery class. Or maybe it’s as big as a career change. You’re probably hitting resistance. Use this email as a reminder to ask yourself how bad you want it. Enough to take the next step?
Then take it. Send that email, have that conversation, create that Etsy account. Whatever it is, just take the next step.
And know I’ll be over here doing the same.
Love,
Aaron