Growing Pains in the Age of Saturation

How’s that for a title?!

Today The Prophet told me:

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Amen. Now, in context.

I’ve struggled mightily this year to effectively break through the noise. There are something like 9 BILLION songs on Spotify alone, so even the 50 we’re doing this year amounts to less than .000000006% of the music catalogue on the app. That’d be pretty hard to find without strong marketing (and a sizable advertising budget, I’m learning).

Even though those odds make chances of success highly unlikely, the game doesn’t come without disappointment. There’s been a little light inside of me that dims momentarily every time I check the streaming stats.

The good thing is, it doesn’t last too long these days. The pain that comes with these relative failures subsides when I shift my perspective a bit. If I consider this year a learning experience, and year ONE in hopefully a long, fruitful journey, these are tribulations I have to go through in order to understand how to be more effective when we try again.

If I take it one step further, I can find some joy and wonder in the fact that I’m trying something I’ve always wanted to do, and I’m following my heart’s desire, like The Prophet implores me to do. I’m usually not all the way there, but I try.

I do have to say, reading Gibran reminds me so much of the Rumi poems I’ve read. The language is so similar and a lot of the lessons contain the mysticism of the Sufis. Which is why it blew my mind to find out that The Prophet was first published in 1923! Rumi dates back to the 13th century. There is a timelessness to Gibran’s lessons that I appreciate, and I’d like to believe that these beliefs can be applied to the modern world. We’ll see how it turns out.

-J.P.