(switchy-switchy here is that you only have strong feelings about thigns that matter to you)

I used to play in a band called Armchair Critic.

Allow me to be honest. I started it because I wanted to be a rock star. Plain and simple. I wanted to be on stage, being a badass, soaking in the adulation of the masses. I loved it.

I also enjoyed making music, which is a beautiful experience in its own sake.  (This is a powerful truth, but a quiet one. You have to listen very carefully if you’d like to hear it.)

Playing music with other people is another kind of magic altogether. The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, and it’s always a spiritual experience when you get it right. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” (Matthew 12:20). God isn’t something you purchase, consume or acquire- it’s something we cultivate within ourselves.

Here’s an interesting fact that anybody involved in Singaporean music will attest to: If you’re doing it for the ‘fame’, you won’t last. The little recognition you get is pitiful vis-à-vis the amount of work you have to put in.  Extrinsic motivations don’t cultivate dreams. Only passion does.

Actually, this is true even within thriving music industries- you can’t survive as a musician if you kinda want to play music. You have to want it as desperately as you’d want to breathe when you’re at the receiving end of a choke hold. There’s always someone who wants it more badly than you, and that guy will be working while you’re sleeping, while you’re wasting time with frivolous interests and worries that nourish neither you nor your dream.

(This is why you have to respect people like Avril Lavigne, Lady Gaga, and even Justin Beiber- because whatever you think of them, the only way to be sustainably successful is to work hard at what you do. We live in a merciless universe- slack off an you’re ruined.)

The guy who makes it to the top is the guy who wants it the most, because he will claw tooth and nail to make his dream become reality. If you read Outliers, you’ll notice that the most successful people in the world are the ones who dedicated stupendous amounts of time to their craft. The only way to get yourself to spend that much time on something without burning it… is to do something that you well and truly love. Something that empowers you.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that I would be able to do for the rest of my life, even if I never got any credit or recognition for it. The first thoughts that come to mind are as follows:

Thinking
Reading good books
Making sense of things
Travelling
Writing
Having Conversations
Making Music
Selling T-shirts

A lot of these ideas overlap.  Thinking helps me make sense of things, and so do music, writing and good conversations. Music and writing are both forms of conversations. Thinking is a kind of conversation too, with yourself. The t-shirts I’m selling are meant to encourage conversation.  I’ll be a traveler all my life, even if I never got to leave home ever again. Because there’s only one kind of journey in the world, and that’s the one within ourselves. Writing is a journey, so is reading, so is having conversation.

So what do you do when all of these things mirror each other, work together in an elegant sort of symbiosis? You get meta. What’s the best way for me to make sense of all this? Through writing.

It becomes self-evident. Words have always been my greatest weapons. They are the keys on my mind’s piano, the paint on my palette. If I had to invest in only one pursuit for the rest of my life, expecting that it would set me apart from everybody else, it would be my writing.

I can’t write a song with the same degree of insight that I could write a passage of text. I don’t have as deep a degree of control, I don’t have as much flair.

The main reason why I should focus on writing as the primary node in the system that will be my life’s work: I hate my own writing. I do. I’m hyper-sensitive to the effect of words, I’m incredibly self-conscious of how everything could be better, how I could change the  way something feels or sounds. (I had ended the previous sentence with “sounds or feels”, then went back and swapped it around. I am that sensitive when it comes to words.)

In comparison, I don’t hate my music. It’s not good enough to be hated. I’m indifferent to it. 98% of the time I play music, I’m not actually playing music. I’m not truly expressing myself through my instrument. There’s too much in the way. I’m merely going through the motions, hoping that others will accept the phantasm as something real.

It’s a lot easier for me to hate my writing than my music. When I write a piece of music, I don’t have enough information to visualise how it could be better. I can’t hear the superior music- until a superior musician re-interprets my music for me. (It’s a fantastic experience.) Writing, on the other hand, is a whole different ball-game. I’m constantly hyper-sensitive to how things could be different. Every time I write a word, I’m made aware of all the other words I could have used instead. All the other ways I could have chosen to say something.

On hindsight, I felt the same way about my girlfriend. When we first got to know each other, neither of us liked the other. We were hyper-sensitive to each other’s flaws. That’s part of the reason why our relationship is so fantastic.

I hate my t-shirts. The font isn’t quite right. The sizes aren’t quite right. I’m not marketing them the way I should. My business could be so much better. I can see it. Which is why it will be.

A friend is someone who knows all your flaws, but loves you anyway.

It seems fair to intuitively extend this to your passion: If you don’t hate what you do, there is no hope for you.

(PS: I shouldn’t have to state the obvious, but I think I’d better say it just in case:I use the term ‘hate’ in an unorthodox context, to challenge you to see things in a slightly different way. I don’t actually hate writing. Hate is typically an unenlightened response.)