Have you ever felt frustrated in your creative efforts? What causes you to be exasperated? Has frustration ever stopped you from moving forward in your art?

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I explore why we become frustrated, turning weaknesses into strengths, and how past pains can stop us from moving towards joy.

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Podcast Highlights:

00:14 – My upcoming book, Flashes of Elation

00:28 – My first book, The New Music Industry

00:38 – Flashes of Elation: Creativity from a variety of different angles

00:51 – Pre-orders

01:06 – This reading is from the upcoming book in its unfinished form

01:20 – Frustration

01:54 – Moving a website to a new domain name

02:52 – My first business, Academe Design

03:16 – Web design in the early 2000s

04:42 – We don’t become frustrated about things we don’t care about

05:33 – Turning weaknesses into strength

06:13 – The war of art

06:35 – Pain and joy

Transcription:

So, as you know by now, we’ve been looking at my upcoming book Flashes of Elation.

My first book was called The New Music Industry, and in it, I looked at the current shape of the industry and what it means to be a musician in this age.

In my upcoming book, Flashes of Elation, I’m going to be looking at creativity from a variety of different angles and covering different topics, such as inspiration, motivation, jobs, spirituality, and so on.

Pre-orders for the book close on June 30, 2017. If you don’t claim the pre-order, you will miss out on some great bonuses.

Today we’re going to get into a segment of the book called frustration. Just know in advance that this isn’t necessarily the finished product, but it will give you an idea of what this chapter will be like. So, let’s get into frustration.

Frustration

As I sit down to write this chapter, I am positively frustrated. And that’s probably the best time to write it, because I’m normally a very easygoing, carefree guy. I wouldn’t say that I never experience frustration anymore, but I don’t feel it as often as I used to.

Why do I feel frustrated right now? I feel like half of my day has been wasted, and that’s never a nice feeling. I like to make the most of the time that I have. I like to tick items off of my to-do list so I can move onto the next thing.  I like being able to complete more than I set out to in a day. I guess I might be a bit of an overachiever.

Today, I’ve been trying to move one of my websites over to a new domain name. This is a fairly routine procedure in my industry, and not something that should be taking hours to complete (except for the downloading and uploading of files). I’m not even trying to move the site from one host to another, which should make it all the more routine.

But there are a couple of problems – one is that this particular site is hosted with a different webhost than my other sites. Most backend dashboards are practically the same across the many hosts that exist, but this one, for whatever reason, confuses the hell out of me.

Another is that I’ve used the host’s live chat support four or five times in the last couple of days to try to get my issues worked out. As soon as I figure out one problem, another seems to crop up. Perhaps tired from having to talk to me (some crazy guy), a couple of my chat sessions were “unexpectedly” terminated before any resolution was reached.

Frustration is an outgrowth of things not going the way we thought or hoped they would.

Frustration is an outgrowth of things not going the way we thought or hoped they would.Click To Tweet

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I once had a business called Academe Design. I can’t think of a period in my life in which I was more frustrated than during the 9 years I was running it.

I would work on graphics and get frustrated. I would work on websites and get frustrated. And keep in mind that this is what we did professionally – it’s what people hired us to do. It’s something I knew a lot about,