From Office Worker to Author, Musician, and Artist in Less Than Two Years
How sharing your creative side projects can transform your life.
The last year and a half have been a time of big changes for me.
I started into 2018 working full-time as an AI researcher at a startup, focusing on the practical applications of AI to business related problems in domains such as finance and law.
Writing, music, and art were things I enjoyed almost exclusively in a passive capacity. Consuming rather than producing. While I was slightly dabbling in some of these areas, I had no plans or ambitions to take them beyond minor hobbies.
However, through a series of seemingly random coincidences I am now more or less pursuing a combination of these three things as my career(s).
All of this unfolded through the immense power and momentum that accumulates when you share your work liberally with the world. The magic that unfolds when you do this conspires to make all these unlikely and random events happen at an astonishing rate. And once you get the process started, it’s only accelerating from there.
Fully in the spirit of this, I want to use this article to share with you some of my process and story, and what it has lead to. I want to give you a detailed account of the unpredictable but wonderful path on which sharing your process and your work can take you.
This path and all its benefits are often highly unforeseeable and convoluted, with many chance encounters and discoveries nudging you along. It is certainly not a linear path. Individual steps don’t just add up, but often multiply and exponentiate each other, and even initial failures or perceived setbacks can come back as great chances later on.
In another article I recently published I touched on many related concepts.
Particularly I explained how and why to organise a “Show Your Work” event, inspired by Austin Kleon’s book of the same title, that allows yourself and other people in your company or community to talk about your creative pursuits and passion projects.
Such a Show Your Work event is a great and very actionable way to facilitate creative sharing and I highly recommend trying it for yourself.
The first part of the story I want to tell you here actually formed the basis for my presentation at the second such Show Your Work event I organised at my previous company, towards the end of 2018.
In the following I want to share with you some of the same slides that I used during that presentation, and explain the journey that is hidden behind the diagram that gradually emerges.
As alluded to above, the story takes us back to the beginning of 2018.
On January 10, 2018, I published my first ever article on Medium (or anywhere else really) titled “In Praise of Deep Work, Full Disconnectivity and Deliberate Rest”.
It was a long piece that I had written mainly for myself to figure out why at the time I felt so unproductive and uncreative — and ultimately unsatisfied — despite having a seemingly great job.
I didn’t expect it to be read much. And when I initially published it, only a handful of people, mostly friends of mine, read it. But the reactions and comments of some of them were so strong and thoughtful, my article had apparently been so meaningful to them, that I was truly overwhelmed by the responses.
I had not intended to write anything beyond this one article, but I got such a strong feedback that I was compelled to keep writing. And I did keep writing, mainly as a way to process the books I read and combine them with my own thoughts and experiences, and again share those thoughts and learnings along the way.
Also around the same time, early 2018, I started sharing more and more videos of myself on Instagram playing beats such as this one.
These were just simple videos of me messing around, lasting no longer than one minute. But more and more of my friends (and later on also strangers on Instagram) started pushing me to produce more music or asking me if they could book me for live shows.
Initially I kept saying no, explaining that making a quick beat for a short Instagram video (where I could also do as many takes as I needed before publishing) were entirely different from producing full-length tracks or performing live for an extended time in front of an audience.
But the persistence of these people asking for more — and more extensive versions — of my work pushed me at least at the back of my mind to slowly work towards these goals. And quietly, I started working on my first full length track, Dorobō, which I released roughly a year ago in May 2018.
Again, the track did not go viral (and I never expected it to), but the strong positive response from just a handful of people was enough to keep me motivated to push further into this direction.
And as you can see from the graph of viewer numbers in the slide above, around the same time as I released Dorobō, my initial article suddenly got its first wave of attention for reasons still unknown to me.
Having gained a little bit of confidence and experience in producing music, and also thanks to the inspiring work (both finished and unfinished) shared by many other artists, I finally dared to tackle another project I had wanted to work on for quite a while: combining my work on artificial intelligence with my passion for music.
Without going too much into the details of this project, some of which you can find in my article about it, the final result was NeuralFunk, a Drum & Bass track in which every single sound was generated by neural networks.
For this project I also started sharing my progress right from the very beginning via occasional snapshots and videos of my unfinished work on Instagram. And this, as well as the connections I created through previous work I had shared, helped me get two collaborators involved in the project, one designing the cover artwork and another helping me with the production itself.
Sharing early snapshots also helped me commit to the project. Announcing that I was working on it essentially made it real, and much less likely that I would abandon it unfinished.
The project was completed in October last year, and thanks in part to me writing the article about it on Medium, it did actually get quite some attention from the very beginning (at least by my standards at the time), both within the music scene, as well as the creative AI community, and was shared widely.
Through sustained writing and through my music, and even more so by combining the two and sharing liberally along the way, I had built a small community and found some early fans.
But the true magic was still waiting to happen.
After having released NeuralFunk and the article documenting its entire creation process in detail, I got more and more requests from individuals as well as companies who wanted to collaborate with me.
In addition to offers and inquiries to collaborate, I also got increasingly more invitations to speak about the project and related ideas at events. From small and intimate ones to big conferences, both of which have their own benefits, be they intimate connections and finding true fans, or larger exposure.
The more generously you share, the more opportunities present themselves to share at an even larger and more impactful scale.
(But as an aside, keep in mind that there is a difference between sharing generously and spamming. I’ve never been a fan of e.g. Medium writers advocating for publishing daily. To make good art, you have to live an interesting life, and I’d rather see the extended process of that and glimpses of a creation in the making, than a flood of “finished” but soulless and uninspired works).
Along with strangers on the internet reaching out to me about the project, my friend Nao Tokui who had previously already hinted at the fact that I would be a good fit for his company Qosmo, now became even more persistent in asking me to join. In fact he was so convincing that I decided to make the move and joined his team in February this year.
This is how I came to work full time on the creative and artistic, and particularly musical side of AI.
Getting more exposure for my music also meant that even more friends were pushing me to perform live. Finally I agreed to two of them to perform live for the very first time at their wedding party. (The party was held at a club, with one floor for techno and one for drum & bass. Definitely one of the best wedding parties I have been to so far. Thanks Appy and Nathan!)
Once I had committed, it was scary. Really scary!
I didn’t feel ready at all. Not during preparation and not when I finally did the performance. I’m used to speaking in front of large crowds and don’t get particularly stressed out by it. But that day performing my first live set in front of a handful of people, most of whom I knew, I was extremely nervous.
But as scary and stressful as it was, it was also extremely rewarding.
And more people started booking me afterwards. Now I’m performing on average at least twice a month. And while I’m still not very confident about my skills, I’m definitely much more comfortable doing it and am genuinely enjoying it.
I also realised that I had much higher expectations of my performance than anyone else. Sharing my work with people even when I thought it wasn’t ready yet showed me that my perception of what was good or presentable and what wasn’t was completely off.
Often we are our own harshest critic, and sharing early is one of the best ways of getting support from others when we ourselves don’t yet believe in what we are doing.
But the most interesting case for how the trail of bread crumbs you leave by sharing your work can lead to great things finding you is the story of how I came to write a book.
If I’d believe in synchronicity, this would be the perfect example I’d cite to support my belief.
Around the time I was finishing my work on NeuralFunk, John Fitch took a course on computational creativity on the online platform Kadenze. And someone there had shared my article outlining the project in the course’s forum, which caught John’s attention.
Having read and enjoyed the article, he looked at my profile to see what else I had been writing and found my first article “In Praise of Deep Work…”. Coincidentally, John was extremely interested in this topic himself. He was (and still is) running a podcast by the name “Time Off” focusing on how rest and leisure are crucial not only for a healthy and happy life, but are also some of the best productivity tools.
And he was also considering to write a book on the same topic.
Apparently he liked my article so much that he asked me to come on his podcast as a guest. I agreed, and that’s how we started to get to know each other.
Again around the same time, my original article (which I still think is my best piece of writing to date), got its second sudden wave of attention almost one year after I published it, with several thousand (!) views a day.
All the work I had shared elsewhere apparently made the right people discover my article and share it themselves, which lead to even more people discovering my work.
This was around the time when I gave my presentation at our second Show Your Work event. Here the final slide from that.
In that presentation I talked about the story I just shared with you (although me joining Qosmo and various other things that came directly out of NeuralFunk I still captured by “X” without going into details), and said that who knows what would come out of speaking on the podcast and the sustained interest in my articles. Hence the question marks.
Only time could tell. And it did…
At the time, John had also started working on Committed, a platform helping readers to get more out of the books they read by having them commit to certain practical exercises for one week and (again fully in line with the idea behind this article) share their results with a small group, a “committee”.
The regular updates John shared about Committed got me excited about it (notice a theme there?), and I asked to be part of one group.
During my first week, the book we committed to was “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Having written our own eulogy on the previous day, on day four the exercise was to write down all the actions, tasks and projects we were currently considering in the near to mid future, and divide them into four quadrants of “Do” (urgent and important), “Plan” (not urgent but important), “Delegate” (urgent but not important), and “Eliminate” (neither urgent nor important).
This (as well as writing your own eulogy) is a great exercise in general and I highly recommend doing it regularly.
At that particular time it was especially interesting for me since I was going through a transition with my job and other things and had already eliminated or delegated a lot of things. The exercise allowed me to visualise just how successful I had been in doing this, with almost nothing left to eliminate.
My finished exercise which I had to share with the group was the following:
Besides just sharing this photo of our result, we also had to record and share a voice message walking the group through what we had learned. In this voice message I was joking about how it clearly speaks of my priorities that “Commit to a serious relationship” was nestled in to the “Plan” section right between “Make sourdough bread” and “Write a book”.
“In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen — really seen.”
— Brené Brown
This little coincidence of me in passing mentioning “write a book” once again caught John’s attention. A few days later I found an email from him in my inbox with the title “A proposal for you”.
This is how we started working together on writing the book Time Off.
The question marks branching off from the podcast and article in the slide above are (at least partially) filled in now. But I’m sure this will spawn many more questions marks as we work on the book (and other projects), sharing our process along the way, as well as the final book itself.
I’m excited to see what they will get replaced with. I’m sure it will be both completely unpredictable, as well as extremely exciting.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, my sourdough bread turned out amazing. The relationship part on the other hand is still a bit work in progress… But I’m sure I’ll get to that too eventually.
The story above is actually only a small part of the whole story. There are yet other branches to the diagram that I have omitted for brevity or because I can’t talk about them publicly yet.
There are definitely many more exciting things to come, some already known to me and in the making, many others that I can’t even dream of yet.
I really hope that my story has inspired you to start (or accelerate) your own creative journey.
So go out there and make great art! Then share it with the world and watch as the magic unfolds.