10 Things a Decade Taught Me

Ten years, one album, a lot of money that was mine. Here is what I would hand to someone starting now.

1. Announce the date before you are ready

Ten years of no deadline, and the thing that finally worked was saying 07.27.27 out loud where people could hear it. A date somebody else is holding you to works completely differently from one you hold yourself to. I should have done this in year three.

2. Nobody is coming to discover you

There is no scout. Especially not in San Antonio, and probably not wherever you are either. Once you genuinely accept that, you stop performing for an audience that does not exist and start building for the one that does.

3. Finishing is a separate skill from making

They are not the same muscle. Plenty of people can write a great verse and cannot close a project. Finishing is learned by failing to finish, repeatedly, until you notice the pattern.

4. You will outgrow your own songs, and that is not a crisis

Getting better means your old work stops fitting. Painful, and also proof the decade did something. More on this trap here.

5. Pay people

Every feature on this record gets $300 in hand for showing up. It is in the published budget. I have been the person doing somebody a favour, and the favour economy mostly benefits whoever has the most leverage.

6. Keep the books open

I published the entire budget, down to $77 of prosthetic materials. Probably bad marketing. But I have spent a decade on the wrong side of vague numbers, and I would rather be the version that shows the receipts.

7. The stall is normal

In barbecue there is a stretch where the temperature stops rising for hours even though everything is working. Panic and you ruin it. Years four through seven were my stall. I thought it meant quit. It meant wait.

8. Age is a headwind, not a wall

Hip hop skews young and that is real. But "harder" and "too late" are different words, and people swap them to let themselves off the hook. Longer version here.

9. Make the stupid thing

I named a coffee Good Ass Mother Fucking Coffee and built a browser game about defending wildflowers from lawnmowers. Neither was strategy. Both are now real, and people engage with them far more than with anything I did sensibly.

10. Being worse at stopping beats being better than everyone

Most people who started when I did are gone. Not dramatically — nobody quits with an announcement. They just stopped opening the session. I do not think I had more talent. I was worse at stopping. Ten years in, that turns out to have been the whole trick.