There is no right path – adamtcroft.com

Thanks for showing up here today. Since you did, I’m going to (as politely as I can) hit you in the face with a shovel of knowledge that you already know.

I’ve had quite a few people come to me recently with the same question — “how do I get started in an audio career?”. I’ve also seen variations of the same question in online channels — “how do I do thing X? I’ve found tutorials with thing Y or Z, but they’re not quite thing X. What do I do?!”

To be completely transparent, I’ve struggled with the same issue.

These might not at all seem like the same question — but at the risk of pigeon-holing my audience and making some of you angry, I’m going to argue that they are.

I believe the core of these questions is all the same. The question behind the question rests somewhere between “someone please help show me the way” and “would someone please make this easy and hand it to me”. People tend to be shunned if the question is framed more as the latter than the former — but in the end, the question is still kind of the same.

Creative means you create

Create as defined by Merriam-Webster means to bring into existence.

That’s probably the most important sentence I’m going to write in this blog, but I’ll explain why…

When you create, there is no path.

You’re in a seemingly horrible position at this point because you’re using your imagination to dream, but what you’ve dreamed doesn’t exist yet and you don’t know how to get there.

For some of you, this is a technical issue. You know don’t know how to get your mix how you can hear it in your head. Maybe you don’t know how to code a simple audio engine.

For others, this is a dose of real life. “If only…” you think, “I could have the audio career I see this person having. I’d have money and love my day job. But how do I get someone to hire me?”

So you use Google. You ask on Twitter, email, and Slack. Getting information is good, and you get some good information. But there’s no real spelled-out roadmap.

That’s because your being confronted with doing your job — creating.

The challenge

You have two real challenges here that you must overcome.

Changing your mindset. Don’t expect there to be a path for you, much less someone to show you the way.
Getting to work.

Before starting this blog I had no idea what I wanted to write about. I have a belief that topics to write about are endless. Not all topics are created equal — but I’m rarely ever at a complete loss for words, and so I should be able to write even if the quality is horrible.

But I still needed to create something from nothing. Nobody is going to tell me how to write or what to write about at the end of the day but me.

I can Google all day long, but precise roadmap to get your eyes with my words doesn’t exist. Someone else can tell me or instruct me how they did it, even make it into a formula — but I still must work at some point.

When I started my career I was taught various technical things about audio and attained in-depth knowledge. I was told how to network in various ways. But I was never given a step-by-step training program that worked. I went out and I failed until I created something worthwhile.

It’s scary, right? A little daunting.

Except that it’s not. Because you’re a creator. You craft things. It’s what you want to do… isn’t it? Or what you’ve been doing?

You can. It may not turn out exactly as you planned (rarely does), but you can. You just have to start — literally anywhere — and never stop, always be gracious for the help that you get, but never ever expect it to come without literally making something from nothing.