You’ll Want to Quit. That’s Part of the Path.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Creative Life with me, your host, Jim Kroft. So in this week's episode, I want to dive into the difficult subject of giving up because if there's one thing I've learnt since setting out in the arts twenty years ago, it's that along the way there are many times when you have to stare in the face exactly what you always believed you'd overcome. These are critical moments on our path and they're supremely difficult to navigate. So I hope that by sharing some of my experiences and what's kept me going in those moments when everything's been falling apart, you can find some alternative perspectives, tools, and hopefully a little renewed courage for your own journey. Before we dive in, I just want to say thank you to all of you who've been following the podcast over the last, well, forty two episodes.
Speaker 1:You'll have noticed that I've renamed it from the Jim Kroft podcast to the creative life. Now what can I say? It just felt right. With so much content in the world today, not to mention the tsunami of AI generated material, it feels more important than ever to be clear about what you're actually talking about. And with so much competition for attention, I wanted a broader umbrella, something that gives people an instant sense of what this is and invites them in.
Speaker 1:My creative life spans this podcast, my solo career as a musician under the name Jim Croft, my freelance work as a filmmaker, a YouTube channel, and a newsletter on Substack also called The Creative Life. And I just wanted to bring it all under one roof, a place to explore the relentless need to create, the ongoing mystery of creative process, and how self expression keeps us human. So on that note, welcome to The Creative Life. And if you do enjoy this episode, please take a moment to rate and review. It just helps so much as an indie podcast.
Speaker 1:I'm your host, Jim. Thank you all so much for being here. And if you're ready, let's dive in. Intro. The threshold every artist faces.
Speaker 1:Every artist at some point feels like giving up. And the truth is you don't face it just once. You face it again and again and again. Sometimes it's the world telling you and sometimes it's your own voice. This episode is for every creative professional standing at the threshold wondering whether to quit or to kick the door down again on your own terms.
Speaker 1:What I wanna walk with you through is this. First, why the question of giving up is baked into the creative path. Second, what comes after you move through it? And third, why the experience of nearly giving up is the very thing that brings you closest to not just the artist you could become, but the person you could be too. And I say all this because I've been there.
Speaker 1:Twelve years ago, I finally signed my dream label, EMI. And three days after my record hit the shelves, Universal bought them. And surprise, surprise, they kept Radiohead and the Beatles and dropped yours truly here the very next day. So for me, it felt like the end. I'd spent ten years climbing to the top only to be pushed off the cliff the moment I reached its apex.
Speaker 1:But it turned out for me to be my beginning. Everything that makes up the story of my life began in the free fall that followed itself. So if you feel on a precipice of whatever you're doing right now, this episode's for you because this right here might just be the most important moment you ever face. Let me begin with the first threshold, the moment every artist faces at some point, being asked to give up. For me, its latest incarnation happened at the start of last year.
Speaker 1:I was sitting here in my Mahalla, in my wonderful space, wondering if my musical life was over, and I felt tormented. I didn't understand why either. What I've come to realize is this, that as an artist you will be asked to give up many times and it's not just a rite of passage, it's something cyclical and sometimes it's not just the world telling you, it's it's you and that's the hardest voice that you have to reckon with. So you spend years developing your craft and you feel something burning out of you like a flare out of the dark and you know you're getting closer and then silence, no response, just the void And that's where the reckoning happens because a creative life isn't linear, it's a roller coaster. And for me, in that moment, I felt like I'd loop all the way back to the beginning.
Speaker 1:But something unexpected came through. I realized I had to do it again for me. I had to get to these songs and even with that horrible feeling of desolation I had about the future and even if it made no sense and even if walking away looked like the smarter move, I had to do it. And what I've learned is this, your power as an artist is commensurate with meeting the demon at the threshold. That's where the exchange happens.
Speaker 1:What you most fear becomes the place your strength begins. But you have to walk through that gateway first. Part two, fight for the joy. So once you pass through this threshold, something else can emerge and that's the joy. So for me, it's like with a song fight for you, which I wrote halfway through the album.
Speaker 1:I was heading into my creative space in between other jobs and I made it through the block, the doubt, the question of whether to put my music aside. What I was writing at this point felt raw and by the time I wrote this track, Fight For You, my fingers were beginning to move and the electric guitar beginning to howl and I wanted to write something that was fast and grooving, something to wrench out my frustration, something to turn it into joy. So I picked up the guitar, looped out a riff and something came through and it was felt a bit daft at the time but I liked it. I was finding my rock and roll again and I didn't care if it made sense. Is it a love song?
Speaker 1:A war cry? A message to myself? I don't know. I'm not even sure at this point but what I do know is this is this. When you're deep in the cave, when it's just you and your doubts, sometimes the only thing that breaks through is this radical joy.
Speaker 1:That's what Nietzsche sort of meant when he said you need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star. So I can't wait to release the rest of the songs shown to you. Each one is a sort of color that I found while sort of pulling the bricks out of the wall of writer's block. And I think that returning to myself is the reason I've called the album chromatic zero because in zero, in absence, in the void, you find every part of yourself. But here's the thing, you don't get to choose the colors.
Speaker 1:In the end, you have to take in the whole spectrum. Part three, when you let go of results. And here's another reason artists feel like giving up, the pressure to prove themselves in the face of impossible odds. You're told to chase numbers, build momentum, hit an ever moving mark. But this year, I've tried to do something different.
Speaker 1:No campaign, no crescendo to an epic release. Instead, I've decided to release one song a month, not for the algorithm or for some sense of validation, but to stay in the pulse of my own life. And what I found is this, the months come round fast, much faster than you might think. But the pace has helped me let go of this modern fixation on results. Yes.
Speaker 1:People sometimes tell me I should be doing more radio press, getting on the road, play this, whatever. And I hear it from friends and even my girlfriend too. But sometimes, the reason you make something has nothing to do with ambition or the world. Sometimes there's a reason beyond the world. For me there's a version of this life where these songs never existed, they were never written, where I did give up but those songs were pounding my chest long before I could reach them.
Speaker 1:And now that I have, I just want to honor them, not sort of squeeze them out into a metric game. And what I realized is that once you free yourself from the need of all of that validation, you give yourself back to the joy of the work itself. And if you keep that, that's how you keep going for the long term. I know that these songs will find their way and it's not about hope, it's about a faith and in a world shouting for attention. It sort of feels quite cool at this point in my life to be the surf dude at the back trusting that the wave will come in.
Speaker 1:Part four, are you in the project or just keeping up? So then there's the fatigue, the one that we probably don't talk about enough. We talk about failure but this is something else, the pace. You start with unrealistic drive, desperate to prove something but soon enough you realize you you can't even keep up with yourself. And I've been not just like releasing a song a month, I've been trying to film a music video each month too.
Speaker 1:So with another song, we squeezed the shoot out days after a client job. So day one was for the client. Day two, we blasted out. Actually, was two turbocharged videos in one very long day. I've mostly kept this frantic rhythm though that last minute panic is always nearby.
Speaker 1:Like, some of the videos flow, some I've had to kinda bludgeon into being. And it does make me wonder sometimes, am I in this project or just forever chasing after it? But maybe that's the point. Maybe keeping up is what keeps you close to the work, not hovering above it, not trying to control it, but wrestling with it, being shaped by it. So far, it's sharpened me new skills, new collaborators, even tools I swore I'd never use, like experimenting with AI for some of the films.
Speaker 1:And what I've come to understand is this, if you choose a rhythm just beyond your comfort zone and stay true to the vow that you made to your work, you grow into a version of yourself that you didn't even know was there. And maybe, just maybe, the experience of nearly giving up becomes the very thing that transform you, and that is what I'm finding. Conclusion, don't cut off the hydra's head. Creative life is like a hydra. You slay one thing and three more heads grow back.
Speaker 1:Writer's block, doubt, deadlines, ambition, apathy, fear. Maybe your path isn't about conquering the hydra. Maybe it's about learning to befriend it. So that's what I've come to understand this year, not to master the monster but to stay in conversation with it. That conversation began in a 10,000 square meter warehouse alone in Berlin last winter and I'm still here, I'm still in it.
Speaker 1:The hydra hasn't devoured me but it has nudged me forward with its flaming eyes peering into me. And what I've realized is this, that there will be many points where you feel like giving up along the road. Of course there are because you're reaching towards the best version of yourself, trying to live up to the whisper of the godhead, trying to touch the energy that made the universe itself. That's going to hurt sometimes and you'll feel miniscule before it. But the paradox is this, it's in those moments that something new begins, you discover your strength is far greater than you ever imagined and that maybe you had to be brought to this edge again and again because it's only by walking through the threshold that your strength can be coaxed out of you.
Speaker 1:So wherever this finds you, even if you feel you're at the end of the road not knowing where to go, let me say this, this point right now is not your end, it's your beginning. Keep going And remember, tomorrow is a new day. And while there's blood pumping through your veins, this isn't a time for giving up. It's a time for going on.
