All Roads Lead Somewhere

I remember an old joke by Steven Wright - "everywhere's in walking distance...if you've got the time." This has occurred to me as being particularly relevant in so many areas of industry and creator-owned content generation, from acting to graphic design to video games, from music to writing to video production. If you can make it, there are ways to get your creations into the hands of a public that's interested in purchasing it. 

And I will admit, one of the first questions I ever had of anyone back when I was first starting out in music was, "how did you do it?" It's the first Big Question, really, but what I did not fully appreciate back then was how diverse the road to success was, even then. Sure, there were the occasional Cinderella story about being discovered while playing a dive bar in Idaho Falls or whatever, and there's always that sense of success happening "overnight", though if you've spent more than a couple of minutes reading through that person's bio, you see that all the training, preparation and hard work took years before that not-so-sudden blip appeared on our collective horizons.

Whenever I'm asked how I went about writing or recording or producing my books or music, I don't mind talking about the path I went through - for all I know, maybe some bit of my own path might help give them an idea on how to go forward in their own production. But as I've found, everyone not only has their own path, but we all have different desired destinations. What one person might define as success may not be the same as someone else's.  

The path I was introduced to early on, I've called it the Crow's Path - borrowed from an actual crow: sample everything, spit out the bad. It works for me, but your actual mileage may vary. Talk to people. Read books. Read blogs. Learn what's possible. And, above all, do something with it.  Roll up your sleeves and get cracking, me buckos. 

Look up - look out, beyond the bow, and let's catch that horizon.