It’s literally a month away. I don’t know what to do. It’s insane. And I don’t really have much to add to that. I’m not a good enough writer to properly articulate all my feelings about bringing a miniature human into the world. I’d love to meet the writer who is. So instead I’ll go on a tangent about something totally unrelated in the hopes that it’ll help people because 1) It’s my blog and I do what I want on here, and 2) I haven’t written in a long time and I feel like my lone New Year’s resolution (writing consistently) is already slipping away. With that said….
Keep plugging away. Whatever your goals are, whatever you’re aspiring to do, just…keep going. Most breakthroughs are a formula of years of hard, mundane work augmented with just a bit of luck. You never know how or when the luck is going to come, so all you can do is control what you can control (the years of hard, mundane work).
You know what brought this subject to mind? Plies. Of all people. I’m normally against listening to his music, since he’s actually an intelligent human being and his music represents a caricature that is harmful to my race for a ton a reasons and he did it for money and blah blah blah. That last sentence was pretty irrelevant to my point. For all intents and purposes, his career was dead in the water. He spent the last few years floundering around, releasing mixtape after mixtape to little response. He released a song called “Ritz Carlton” three months ago. In the video, he raps, “ran off on the plug twice,” and does a little jogging dance (which was already done by Shawty Lo 8 years ago!). Seven million youtube views, countless memes and common professional and collegiate athlete imitations later, he’s back. People are asking about his music again. He even changed the name of the song to “Ran Off On The Plug Twice” to capitalize on his success (very smart on his part). I found myself looking for more of his recent songs, something that I couldn’t imagine doing even six months ago. All of this came from a three second clip of an otherwise inconsequential line from an otherwise inconsequential song.
In my opinion, there’s no way that this sudden resurgence happens without the hours upon hours of making music and writing and finding new sounds and playing with new production. In short, he grinded and plugged away when it might’ve been easier to concede that his time as a popular rapper had passed him by and it was time to find a new line of work. His breakthrough doesn’t happen without the work that he did on his previous songs and mixtapes that didn’t sell nearly as well. And I never imagined writing this without even a fraction of sarcasm, but we can really learn from Plies. You never know. All you can control is the work that you put into your craft, whatever that may be. It could take months or even years to have your breakthrough (or in Plies’ case, his grand reintroduction). I’m sure there were many times where doubt crept into his mind, but it didn’t stop him from making music and refining his craft. He basically put himself in a position to be a lucky break away, and that’s exactly what happened.
I’m pretty sure if someone asked Plies if his previously unsuccessful releases and seemingly fruitless effort was worth this specific moment, he’d say yes without hesitation. We should all work towards that same moment, even if it seems like it’s miles away. Just…keep going. It’s always worth it. Always.
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