If I can do it, so can you!

Once again yesterday I found my self in a middle of a conversation about what I do. When you tell people you release a song a week and have been doing so for the last 62 weeks, they think you are mad, and when you tell them you also post 12 blog posts every week, they think you are bonkers 😀 And suddenly you feel like they are trying to put you on some kind of pedestal. I am learning to take compliments and even enjoy them, but I don’t feel comfortable about the idea that people view me (or even worse, think I view my self) somehow better than them. So with the risk of you thinking less of me, I’ll lay out some of the not so pretty stuff here, just to explain that just because I am organised when it comes to some aspects of my work, I am not in any way better (or worse) than anybody else.

The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning I reach out for my phone, I have routine of things I check while I’m still in bed (Email, social media, stats), trying to find the energy to get up. This is a bad habit! I should wait until I am up, have my breakfast in peace before I do this. And trust me, there is nothing there that can’t wait until after my breakfast. We waste time on social media. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great promotional tool for musicians, and it is a great way to keep connected with friends and family, but it should not be the first thing we check after waking up.

Most days I sit down to write a blog post after my breakfast. someday the inspiration comes easier, some days I need to look for it harder. This can be total waste of few hours. I have been telling my self I should try to write more, so I could be ahead of my schedule a bit. Ideally I’d like to be a week ahead in my posting. This would leave me much more time to check and double-check my posts. But still I end up writing them in the last-minute.

Last week my mom came to visit me 🙂 She does not make the trip often, so it was a special time for me. I decided to write most of the weeks posts in advance so that I could leave as much time to spend with my mom. I never got around writing those posts and ended up churning them early in the morning before I met her for breakfast.

Also the night before her last day here, I felt extremely unmotivated. I felt like I just wanted to spend the following day in bed… This was not because I might have been getting tired of having her here, just the opposite. I loved every minute having her here. It was because I knew the inevitable goodbyes where getting closer.

My latest album is way late, and I should have sent it into the distributor three weeks ago… I was struggling with the cover. I even had few friends of mine to send me some great cover ideas, but letting go of the creative side of things is sometimes hard for me.

For the first two months of this year I have been working hard, but at the same time neglecting my fitness. So now I need to take drastic actions to get back in to shape. To stay in shape is reasonably easy, and requires only a little bit of effort every day, but when you neglect it you need to work hard to get back in shape…

Also I am a scatter brain 😀 I try to do ten things at the same time, and barely get one of them done. This is why I had to organise my work extremely well. If I did not, I would get nothing done… I set my self strict schedules, for songs and blog posts, but only because if I did not have these deadlines, I would never get anything done.

But at the same time, I have released 62 songs in the past 62 weeks 🙂 I have written and posted 361 blog posts, this one being 362, since the beginning of last year. I still take care of both my personal and Sliotar’s websites and social media sites. I book Sliotar’s summer tour and all the other shows outside our regular concerts in the Porterhouse. And on top of this I try my best to help other musicians as much as I can.

My parents drilled in to me when I was growing up to do the best I can. That advice still resonates in me and I work hard to do just that. But that does not make me any better person than anybody else. It might look impressive on the outside, but I am the same self-doubting emotional wreck as most of us on the inside 😀 So please don’t look at me wishing you could get as much done as I do, but let what I do inspire you to do great things as well. If I can do it, so can you!

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE